alt Hacker NewsNot that I care in particular
But claiming that google lost it's "moral compass" just now is a claim only rich people can make because they retire, not quit.
Google is literally the largest, most organized, tracking and profiling company in the world. Which they tend to grow even larger with the rise of LLMs.
Turning a blind eye of that for the opportunity or whatever, and than claim that _just now_ they lost their moral compass, is being a hypocrite.
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I tend to agree. My first reaction to this post was to check the date, because I would have assumed this had been published around 2014.
Google's moral compass was gone long before this man even joined. That doesn't make them particularly evil, but they have joined the ranks of ordinary, publicly traded corporations.
I mean, this guy is probably not a bleeding heart, but he had a certain line and wouldn't cross it. I'm not sure the potshots are really warranted. We all realize they were not bleeding heart do-gooders, but saying you're OK with that but not with certain uses of AI in warfare doesn't strike me as incoherent.
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Right. I have respect for Rene, but going by the "HN quitting manifestos" like this, Google has lost its moral compass at least 50 times at various points in the last 20 years.
The company is constantly changing, but also hasn't changed all that much. It always talked the talk and was eager to tell others how to behave, but was almost never willing to give up any real revenue to do the right thing. The usual justification was that if Google doesn't do it, someone else will (and that someone else is obviously not as moral as Googlers are).
If you're old enough, you might remember that they vocally opposed privacy-violating, disruptive display ads. That was their whole schtick. But that was before they realized there's a lot of money to be made by acquiring Doubleclick.