| In 1999 I worked at Yahoo! It was great the stock was flying, I worked on really cool tech writing C++ code. Then one day I went to a social dinner and a high schooler got up and made a speech and at one point said “I googled it”. Right then and there I know the gig was up. So far I have not heard anyone say I GPT’d it, but Google is running very dangerously close to the edge here. For one thing the founders have checked out, never a good sign. Something that also bugs people is GOOG wants to follow you everywhere, when you sign in to many websites that little blurb asking for your google account comes from a google server (<script src="https://accounts.google.com/gsi/client" async defer>). I was responsible for servers that ran 100m page views a day at Yahoo! One day I was approached by this smarmy little guy who asked if he could pull logs from the machines. Alarm bells. Who the heck was this and what was he doing with the logs. I knew of course he worked for Filo and so I had to give over the data. This was the start of the spying on the customers. Google is a master of this, and it really irks a lot of their customers. Another red flag. Alternates like duck duck go and brave have made some inroads. Their percentages are quite low still. There have been layoffs in the name of cost cutting. Googlers have had some very public employee dissatisfaction meetings (my name for them). Employee compensation problems, problems with businesses the company is etc. One last thing, Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion April 1, 1999 (seriously!). “ Apollo Global Management acquired a 90% stake in Verizon Media, which included Yahoo and AOL, for $5 billion. Verizon retained a 10% stake in the new company, which was rebranded as Yahoo upon the deal's completion.” The deal was finalized Sept 1, 2021 according to chatGPT. |
Probably just my limited perspective, but I am also noticing, it's vastly men who use ChatGPT daily on anything from random questions, to health queries or personal growth. Not sure why, but somehow, I don't know a single female who would use it much, beyond super basic queries. Meanwhile guys of all kinds of backgrounds, nerds or not, technical or not, young or old, doesn't matter ... if there is a heavy user, it's a guy. But as I say, just limited perspective, I don't know big enough number of people for substantial sample size. Just recently I see the stark contrasts more and more, even very smart, nerdy and highly curious women I know, are not interested in ChatGPT.