Google is a quarter million person company (if you count full time, temps, vendors and contractors).
Google Cloud is basically an entirely different company than Search or Maps. Cloud will happily sell you $10m in compute a year and a value add $400k of security consulting.
There's many other people but most of them are independent. It is glaringly obvious now most of the media outlets are afraid to ask the tough questions.
That said, MPU has been pretty solidly crazy with their LLM critiques lately (did you know it uses all the drinking water?!?!?). There are plenty of sane, grounded-in-reality critiques. Why not focus on those?
I'm not a particularly big Gary Marcus fan, but I'm even less of a fan of the term "always".
I browsed back looking for posts of his that most obviously made predictions, and "GPT-5… now arriving Gate 8, Gate 9, Gate 10" make a few very clear predictions and was absolutely correct [0] about them.
This was in June 2024, and Marcus claims two major predictions:
- "As of today, I am more confident than ever that GPT-5 won’t land this year."
- "Gary Marcus is still betting that GPT-5 will continue to hallucinate and make a bunch of wacky errors, whenever it finally drops."
It would be over a year from his posting that article that GPT-5 would finally land, and his overall prediction that the result would be lack-luster was also spot on.
Again, I don't particularly care one way or another about Gary Marcus, but flat out dismissing his writing doesn't really hold up.
No, you're not steel manning. You're just justifying unilateral regime change.
None of that matters.
There was no declaration of war powers from Congress, this entire operation is a flagrant violation of US and international law.
And, to point 1, this operation was carried out by a US President who attempted to violently overthrow the US government to avoid ceding power, which really puts a damper on point 1 I think.
- Median bank account balances in the U.S. range from $5,400 for those under 35
- ... $13,400 for ages 65–74
So yeah, in range.
Does it require saving? Yes. But most Americans go on vacation each year. Give up the cost of a few years of vacations and you have this one.
I want to stress "not out of reach" doesn't mean easy. It explicitly doesn't mean one doesn't have to reach. I'd have said something very different if I meant most Americans could easily go on that trip. I specifically mean if it's something they really wanted to do, enough to save over a few years (or more) then that's something that could be accomplished.
Google Cloud is basically an entirely different company than Search or Maps. Cloud will happily sell you $10m in compute a year and a value add $400k of security consulting.
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