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.

@mxchara @joshbuddy @gbargoud @jonny

They can discuss "the benefits and harms" of LLMs and big tech separately but it is disengenous to do so.

To me, it's about intent and about scale.

Big tech created the technology. Big tech went out of their way to fire the people who brought to any ethical concerns while doing it.

LLMs would not exist right now in the way they exist without their hyper-capitalist, anti-human, above the law, surveillance mindset.

It doesn't matter nearly as much what outsiders, anarchists, and open or free software advocates do because the horrible businesses that made it possible are still in the middle of killing the planet, putting profits over morality, rushing to embrace authoritarian fascism, and powering autonomous people killing machines for the government.

When you say "LLM" or "AI" or "generative AI" 97% of people think about ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google. They don't think about people training or running their own models on their own hardware. They didn't think about open weights.

You can't separate the two right now, not while the bubble is stealing water, polluting the air, consolidating power, and excusing mass layoffs. We are being put in our place and LLMs are the engine.