Big Tech is at it again with Artificial General Intelligence

The social media era started with Facebook. It was gaining so much traction that alternatives like Orkut and something else that Google tried to create to rival Facebook at the time were boasting of a decent-sized active user base. It peaked with Instagram, Snapchat, and other visually appealing apps that came along, especially when people figured out ways to make money on these platforms, a lot of money. With money comes influence, and with influence comes the need to control everything.

Let's not get conspiratorial here. There are many other sources to read such conspiracy theories, some are not even theories anymore. Let's just say there is evidence out there to suggest these products that big tech dish out and lure us into are not exactly for the best of our well-being. They serve to make their owners rich at the consumers' expense.

The Rise & Fall of Social Media

Facebook, Instagram, and many other platforms barely even do the things that they advertise themselves to be. Facebook is no longer the means to connect people, maybe businesses, but not people. Instagram was a photo app, but it has turned into another marketing tool for influencers to sell us stuff.

To achieve maximum productivity, the users on social media platforms rely on AI a lot, essentially transforming the platforms into spam-collecting, bot-filled, dystopian internet.

Listen to actual journalists and their reporting on Facebook -

I enjoy the reporting done by 404media and some of the shocking revelations they put out in their podcast and newsletter regularly.

The point is the platforms promised to do one thing and surely once they made in-roads into our lives and sucked all the personal & private information, they sold us out to the highest bidder. The surprising part is they got away with it and they continue to come up with new ways to swindle our information.

Wait for Meta's new product that will replace our friends altogether.

If we want to take away anything from our experience with social media, it should be one thing and that is - Do not trust the big tech corporations with their words but follow their actions.

Artificial General Intelligence as a replacement for Humans

The next big thing after GenAI and AI Agents from the existential threatening group of big tech world is the promise of replacing humans with AGI.

AGI means Artificial General Intelligence.

If you are reading this and feel like didn't we have already gone through this before million times, you are not alone. I am tired reading about grandiosity of AI and the condescending tune the creators of so called AI models have for human intelligence.

It started with replacing artists, creators, musicians, movie makers, and obviously, engineers. None of them seems to get the irony in it that the very people they are threatening to replace are the ones who created all these materials that are used to train AI. Does data privacy even matter anymore?

It feels like we have been here before. The fear mongering is done to bring the price down of skilled people and experts so the investors can fill their pockets to the brim. Pick up any history book talking about renaissance and we see a pattern here. What's worse is that we fall for it every time.

Back to the topic, AGI, the new buzzword word is supposed to replace the human workforce and drive profits up even more without the need to pay for the pesky human resources. If you read about it, a firm called Klarna was the first to pick up on the challenge. You can read about it here and how it is fairing now -

Is anyone surprised reading such news anymore?

Another of the big tech promises fails to deliver, yet the ones that are working well are seldom advertised.

How to Take Control Back?

Every time the AI companies come up with some new product, I like to see the release notes and/or whitepaper to understand the underlying training data and limitations. All these AI firms use the internet as their private playground while charging us to use the technology trained on the materials that people created over time.

When adopting any AI product, figure out the use cases beforehand and try to stick to them. The models can perform a wide range of tasks, but the more specialized they are in executing a specific task, the better the results.

The use of commercial models only results in big tech companies using the data you provide to improve the model, while charging people more for the next version, which is a better version of the model.

I will part with this post by sharing a brilliant chat between Ed Zitron and Karen Hao on the intentions of AI companies with AGI -

Until Next Time!