as Dr. Bender says upthread, the Rethinking Search paper just says this explicitly, also AMP, etc. I only mildly edited their figure here

The shift to "search journeys" is just another way of referring to "whole life immersive surveillance" where the intention is to slowly train you to expect more and more of your personal information to be visibly injected into search results as a surface for "personalization" and eventually move towards "zero-query search" where advertisements-i-mean-helpful-information are proactively volunteered to you.

this language appears in full form as early as 2018 and was chilling even then:

The zero-query search paradigm can be expressed with the slogan “the query is the user.” In practice, the context of the user is used to infer information needs. (Entity Oriented Search)

There IS NO LLM USE not associated with the project to seize all information as a product. That is the WHOLE gamble being made that is driving all those billions into getting as many people as possible dependent on the most preposterously expensive and inefficient model of computing ever devised. It is only worth it if the upside is owning the whole economy.

Every step you take towards building LLMs into your daily habits and work ratchets the spring tighter on the mousetrap until, surprise! It clamps shut while your whole ass is wrapped around the cheese. Don't make me laugh with local models nonsense, if you think that those don't get deprecated the moment they pose the slightest whiff of a threat to the profit model - meta isn't releasing weights to be nice, it's to capture labor and control the tooling space. Don't be a sucker.

@joshbuddy @jonny

Also almost every time I see local models mentioned it's someone using them to derail a conversation about the harms of LLMs. Makes them a very useful tool for those big companies to keep doing all the damage they want and then just have someone say "but local models" when the companies' extremely antisocial policies are hilighted.

@gbargoud @jonny So many of these conversations seem conceptually mushy to me. The benefits and harms of LLMs can be discussed separately from the benefits and harms of big tech.

Feels like the harms of big tech are very obvious and keenly felt whereas I'm still uncertain about the harms of LLMs specifically. They seem to make specifically crime easier and contribute to skills atrophying.

I'm trying to get clear on this stuff myself, it's not easy.

@jackperkins yeah, that's the problem with this "big tech" label, what does that even mean? I'm using it as shorthand for big tech companies that are using their technology to harm consumers and extract value out of them. Like Amazon, Google, Meta.

Arguably Mistral is not "big tech". Arguably DeepSeek doesn't fall until this either.

I just helped my partner run a campaign against big tech here in Denmark, and charting a course around this question of what is and isn't "bad" in tech .. yeah, its complicated. She got a lot of criticism for recommending Signal for instance, but in thinking about the harms of big tech, I kind of keep coming back to the book Surveillance Capitalism. Had lots of flaws but useful in thinking about how these companies extract value in really sinister ways.

@joshbuddy i understand that mistrail and deepseek are not yet google/ms/apple scale of dominance but do their products costs billions to produce? if so they will need these positions in the end to recoupe their investments. giving away the result of this investment as a free trial doesnt mean its open or public, in the way something like the linux kernel arguably is despite significant investment (tho orders of magnitude smaller than LLM)

maybe in 5-15 years some clever computer science will reveal ways to make these things in your bedroom, and which point i will no longer be concerned with enclosure or social control. but until then its a bit silly to make a split between how something is produced and the people who are producing it. lets talk about what actually exists!