What? The only reason their companies make so much money is BECAUSE they make their predictions about AI replacing every job soon.
A couple months ago it seemed is was their ONLY job.
Neither company is remotely close to making a profit yet. To the extent people at those companies make money, it is unrealized capital appreciation driven by successively higher valuations during successive funding rounds.
In short, financially they are still running on hype. Quite a lot of operations are being paid out of capital, not revenues. So they have to keep selling a dream to keep raising capital. Next stop: IPO.
You sound like someone who has never been poor. Or whose family has never been poor. Easy to have “spine” when you can depend on someone else for money.
What are you trying to say with this? This is absurd.
The outrage has nothing to do with Mullvad itself supporting people with certain opinions or not.
The problem I and many others have, is that if the founder takes our money and gives it to causes that I (edit: or rather we) find reprehensible, we don't want to give them our money anymore. Simple as that.
I will not try to stop you from using Mullvad by any other means than my arguments. Hopefully you understand now where we are coming from and agree. If not, just do your thing.
You’re absurd. There have been many moral outrages about companies simply having some undesirables as customers/users, like Twitter and Cloudflare, where the companies are shunned and accused of “supporting” said customers/users.
> the founder takes our money and gives it
No, you give your money to Mullvad, who uses it to pay expenses, including salaries to people who do work for Mullvad, and profits to shareholders. It has then long stopped being “your” money, and you can’t reasonably be upset at what happens after that, unless you want to apply the same reasoning I demonstrated, at which point you have a lot of boycotts to adhere to.
No I cannot. When my money is being used to sow hatred and division in the world, I will take my money elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the list of unusable services is growing by the day. But to me standing up for what I believe in is more important than the convenience of using a good service.
There have been many shitstorms, but whenever I looked at the actual tweets or sources, there was not much actual evidence. More often it showed the founder being a poor communicator, but not right-wing.
I don't see it as a nationalist world view around tech in Europe. There is certainly a push for "sovereignty", but that mostly means sovereign from the US. But European countries are actively working together on this.
> Got it, so every country should focus on having a mediocre-at-best AI strategy by refusing to work together? Surely this will create a better future instead of pooling resources.
Yeah, why is Anthropic making their own mediocre models, if they could just pool their resources with OpenAI, that makes no sense.
I'd say, you are looking at this from the angle of a nerd. For you Elon or Sam are not (primarily) nerds because you know nerdier nerds (what you called very high-profile nerds).
But for the general public Elon and Sam are very much the definition of a nerd. They have never heard of any of the high-profile nerds you know.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
