This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They won't be charging me, because I don't buy shit from Amazon, and don't use their spy platform.
Well so far my Google Smart speakers have two functions:
Don't think I'll miss that if they decide to charge for it.
My Google homes have gotten progressively worse over the years. Half the time it will say it's setting a timer but nope, no timer. Recently I'll tell it to play music and it will reply that I don't have any devices with that feature.... they're all Google homes or Chromecast which absolutely play music. Really like the hardware but the software is utter shit
They also removed the ability to link third-party list applications so now saying "Add X to shopping list" just sends it into some nether realm where the item is never to be seen ever again.
I hate when it's playing music and I tell it to shut the fuck up, then it decides to turn off every actively going alarm in the house instead of turning off the goddamn music playing on the one it literally responded in. This happens most mornings.
Running AI may be currently expensive, but the hardware will continue to improve and get cheaper. If they institute a subscription fee and people actually pay for it, they'll never remove that fee even after it becomes super cheap to run.
As someone at a company still using free AI credits in their commercial products and hasn't figured out how he's going to price the shit when the credits are up.... this AI market looks a lot like Uber subsidies..
We're seeing this all over the tech and tech adjacent space. Can't grow forever at a loss, especially not with increased interest rates and a potential economic downturn.
My guess, if you want to have decent services we're going to end up needing to pick few (or a suite of the basics) to pay for on a monthly basic and cut out all the "free" stuff that is/will get enshittified.
in my eyes they put themselves in an awkward position by garnering a reputation of always collecting more user data than justified, and at this point i assume they do the same with paid products as it's an industry norm. however I'm not ok with it and will never pay when the product doesn't respect privacy. the saying used to be "if you don't pay, you're the product", but it is increasingly shifting to: you're the product and also you have to pay so that our shareholders can experience more infinite growth
I don't understand this. Hasn't Intel or Nvidia (or someone else) been making claims about their next CPUs having AI functionality built-in?
Na, once ml inference and training chips are purpose built it'll be built into devices. AI models are the mainframes of today
They're already trying this, sort of.
They know charging for total access will cause a riot, so instead they're enshitifying the whole experience and holding access to the current non-shit experience hostage with monthly fees.
I think at this point with so many tech giants introducing ads to their services and increasing subscription prices, I think we can expect some kind of subscription fee to access assistants with the AI/LLM capability. It would make sense to offer a 'basic' version of these services for free since people have already invested in the hardware, but wouldn't be surprised if these companies suddenly block us from using the smart functionality suddenly unless you pay.
