Meta: Flying Its Flag for Moving Fast and Breaking Things
December 3, 2025
Another dinobaby original. If there is what passes for art, you bet your bippy, that I used smart software. I am a grandpa but not a Grandma Moses.
Meta, a sporty outfit, is the subject of an interesting story in “Press Gazette,” an online publication. The article “News Publishers File Criminal Complaint against Mark Zuckerberg Over Scam Ads” asserts:
A group of news publishers have filed a police complaint against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over scam Facebook ads which steal the identities of journalists. Such promotions have been widespread on the Meta platform and include adverts which purport to be authored by trusted names in the media.
Thanks, MidJourney. Good enough, the gold standard for art today.
I can anticipate the outputs from some Meta adherents; for example, “We are really, really sorry.” or “We have specific rules against fraudulent behavior and we will take action to address this allegation.” Or, “Please, contact our legal representative in Sweden.”
The write up does not speculate as I just did in the preceding paragraph. The article takes a different approach, reporting:
According to Utgivarna: “These ads exploit media companies and journalists, cause both financial and psychological harm to innocent people, while Meta earns large sums by publishing the fraudulent content.” According to internal company documents, reported by Reuters, Meta earns around $16bn per year from fraudulent advertising. Press Gazette has repeatedly highlighted the use of well-known UK and US journalists to promote scam investment groups on Facebook. These include so-called pig-butchering schemes, whereby scammers win the trust of victims over weeks or months before persuading them to hand over money. [Emphasis added by Beyond Search]
On November 22, 2025, Time Magazine ran this allegedly accurate story “Court Filings Allege Meta Downplayed Risks to Children and Misled the Public.” In that article, the estimable social media company found itself in the news. That write up states:
Sex trafficking on Meta platforms was both difficult to report and widely tolerated, according to a court filing unsealed Friday. In a plaintiffs’ brief filed as part of a major lawsuit against four social media companies, Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that when she joined Meta in 2020 she was shocked to learn that the company had a “17x” strike policy for accounts that reportedly engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex.”
I find it interesting that Meta is referenced in legal issues involving two particularly troublesome problems in many countries around the world. The one two punch is sex trafficking and pig butchering. I — probably incorrectly — interpret these two allegations as kiddie crime and theft. But I am a dinobaby, and I am not savvy to the ways of the BAIT (big AI tech)-type companies. Getting labeled as a party of sex trafficking and pig butchering is quite interesting to me. Happy holidays to Meta’s PR and legal professionals. You may be busy and 100 percent billable over the holidays and into the new year.
Several observations may be warranted:
- There are some frisky BAIT outfits in Silicon Valley. Meta may well be competing for the title as the Most Frisky Firm (MFF). I wonder what the prize is?
- Meta was annoyed with a “tell all” book written by a former employee. Meta’s push back seemed a bit of a tell to me. Perhaps some of the information hit too close to the leadership of Meta? Now we have sex and fraud allegations. So…
- How will Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp innovate in ad sales once Meta’s AI technology is fully deployed? Will AI, for example, block ad sales that are questionable? AI does make errors, which might be a useful angle for Meta going forward.
Net net: Perhaps some journalist with experience in online crime will take a closer look at Meta. I smell smoke. I am curious about the fire.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2025
Open Source Now for Rich Peeps
December 3, 2025
Once upon a time, open source was the realm of startups in a niche market. Nolan Lawson wrote about “The Fate Of ‘Small’ Open Source” on his blog Read The Tea Leaves. He explains that more developers are using AI in their work and it’s step ahead of how coding used to be in the past. He observed a societal change that has been happening since the invention of the Internet: “I do think it’s a future where we prize instant answers over teaching and understanding.”
Old-fashioned research is now an art that few decide to master except in some circumstances. However, that doesn’t help the open source libraries that built the foundation of modern AI and most systems. Lawson waxes poetic about the ending of an era and what’s the point of doing something new in an old language. He uses a lot of big words and tech speak that most people won’t understand, but I did decipher that he’s upset that big corporations and AI chatbots are taking away the work.
He remains hopeful though:
“So if there’s a conclusion to this meandering blog post (excuse my squishy human brain; I didn’t use an LLM to write this), it’s just that: yes, LLMs have made some kinds of open source obsolete, but there’s still plenty of open source left to write. I’m excited to see what kinds of novel and unexpected things you all come up with.”
My squishy brain comprehends that the future is as bleak as the present but it’s all relative and how we decide to make it.
Whitney Grace, December 3, 2025
AI-Yai-Yai: Two Wizards Unload on What VCs and Consultants Ignore
December 2, 2025
Another dinobaby original. If there is what passes for art, you bet your bippy, that I used smart software. I am a grandpa but not a Grandma Moses.
I read “Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun and the End of Just Add GPUs.” The write up is unlikely to find too many accelerationists printing out the write up and handing it out to their pals at Philz Coffee. What does this indigestion maker way? Let’s take a quick look.
The write up says:
Ilya Sutskever – co-founder of OpenAI and now head of Safe Superintelligence Inc. – argued that the industry is moving from an “age of scaling” to an “age of research”. At the same time, Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta, has been loudly insisting that LLMs are not the future of AI at all and that we need a completely different path based on “world models” and architectures like JEPA. [Beyond Search note because the author of the article was apparently making assumptions about what readers know. JEPA is short hand for Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture. The idea is to find a recipe to all machines learn about the world in a way a human does.]
I like to try to make things simple. Simple things are easier for me to remember. This passage means: Dead end. New approaches needed. Your interpretation may be different. I want to point out that my experience with LLMs in the past few months have left me with a sense that a “No Outlet” sign is ahead.
Thanks, Venice.ai. The signs are pointing in weird directions, but close enough for horse shoes.
Let’s take a look at another passage in the cited article.
“The real bottleneck [is] generalization. For Sutskever, the biggest unsolved problem is generalization. Humans can:
learn a new concept from a handful of examples
transfer knowledge between domains
keep learning continuously without forgetting everything
Models, by comparison, still need:
huge amounts of data
careful evals (sic) to avoid weird corner-case failures
extensive guardrails and fine-tuning
Even the best systems today generalize much worse than people. Fixing that is not a matter of another 10,000 GPUs; it needs new theory and new training methods.”
I assume “generalization” to AI wizards has this freight of meaning. For me, this is a big word way of saying, “Current AI models don’t work or perform like humans.” I do like the clarity of “needs new theory and training methods.” The “old” way of training has not made too many pals among those who hold copyright in my opinion. The article calls this “new recipes.”
Yann LeCun points out:
LLMs, as we know them, are not the path to real intelligence.
Yann LeCun likes world models. These have these attributes:
- “learn by watching the world (especially video)
- build an internal representation of objects, space and time
- can predict what will happen next in that world, not just what word comes next”
What’s the fix? You can navigate to the cited article and read the punch line to the experts’ views of today’s AI.
Several observations are warranted:
- Lots of money is now committed to what strikes these experts as dead ends
- The move fast and break things believers are in a spot where they may be going too fast to stop when the “Dead End” sign comes into view
- The likelihood of AI companies demonstrating that they can wish, think, and believe they have the next big thing and are operating with a willing suspension of disbelief.
I wonder if they positions presented in this article provide some insight into Google’s building dedicated AI data centers for big buck, security conscious clients like NATO and Pavel Durov’s decision to build the SETI-type of system he has announced.
Stephen E Arnold, December 2, 2025
Palantir Channels Moses, Blue Chip Consulting Baloney, and PR
December 2, 2025
Another dinobaby original. If there is what passes for art, you bet your bippy, that I used smart software. I am a grandpa but not a Grandma Moses.
Palantir Technologies is a company in search of an identity. You may know the company latched on to the Lord of the Rings as a touchstone. The Palantir team adopted the “seeing stone.” The idea was that its technology could do magical things. There are several hundred companies with comparable technology. Datawalk has suggested that its system is the equivalent of Palantir’s. Is this true? I don’t know, but when one company is used by another company to make sales, it suggests that Palantir has done something of note.
I am thinking about Palantir because I did a small job for i2 Ltd. when Mike Hunter still was engaged with the firm. Shortly after this interesting work, I learned that Palantir was engaged in litigation with i2 Ltd. The allegations included Palantir’s setting up a straw man company to license the i2 Ltd.’s Analyst Notebook software development kit. i2 was the ur-intelware. Many of the companies marketing link analysis, analytics focused on making sense of call logs, and other arcana of little interest to most people are relatives of i2. Some acknowledge this bloodline. Others, particularly young intelware company employees working trade shows, just look confused if I mention i2 Ltd. Time is like sandpaper. Facts get smoothed, rounded, or worn to invisibility.
We have an illustration output by MidJourney. It shows a person dressed in a wardrobe that is out of step with traditional business attired. The machine-generated figure is trying to convince potential customers that the peculiarly garbed speaker can be trusted. The sign would have been viewed as good marketing centuries ago. Today it is just peculiar, possibly desperate on some level.
I read “Palantir Uses the ‘5 Whys’ Approach to Problem Solving — Here’s How It Works.” What struck me about the article is that Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp is recycling business school truisms as the insights that have powered the company to record government contracts. Toyota was one of the first company’s to focus on asking “why questions.” That firm tried to approach selling automobiles in a way different from the American auto giants. US firms were the world leaders when Toyota was cranking out cheap vehicles. The company pushed songs, communal exercise, and ideas different from the chrome trim crowd in Detroit; for example, humility, something called genchi genbutsu or go and see first hand, employee responsibility regardless of paygrade, continuous improvement (usually not adding chrome trim), and thinking beyond quarterly results. To an America, Mr. Toyoda’s ideas were nutso.
The write up reports:
Karp is a firm believer in the Five Whys, a simple system that aims to uncover the root cause of an issue that may not be immediately apparent. The process is straightforward. When an issue arises, someone asks, “Why?” Whatever the answer may be, they ask “why?” again and again until they have done so five times. “We have found is that those who are willing to chase the causal thread, and really follow it where it leads, can often unravel the knots that hold organizations back” …
The article adds this bit of color:
Palantir’s culture is almost as iconoclastic as its leader.
We have the Lord of the Rings, we have a Japanese auto company’s business method, and we have the CEO as an iconoclast.
Let’s think about this type of PR. Obviously Palantir and its formal and informal “leadership” want to be more than an outfit known for ending up in court as a result of a less-than-intelligent end run about an outfit whose primary market was law enforcement and intelligence professionals. Palantir is in the money or at least money from government contract, and it rarely mentions its long march to today’s apparent success. The firm was founded in May 2003. After a couple of years, Palantir landed its first customer: The US Central Intelligence Agency.
The company ingested about $3 billion in venture funding and reported its first profitable quarter in 2022. That’s 19 years, one interesting legal dust up, and numerous attempts to establish long-term relationships with its “customers.” Palantir did some work for do-good outfits. It tried its hand at commercial projects. But the firm remained anchored to government agencies in the US and the UK.
But something was lacking. The article is part of a content marketing campaign to make the firm’s CEO a luminary among technology leaders. Thus, we have the myth building block like the five why’s. These are not exactly intellectual home runs. The method is not proprietary. The method breaks down in many engagements. People don’t know why something happened. Consultants or forward deployed engineers scurry around trying to figure out what’s going. At some blue chip consulting firms, trotting out Toyota’s precepts as a way to deal with social media cyber security threats might result in the client saying, “No, thanks. We need a less superficial approach.”
I am not going to get a T shirt that says, “The knots that hold organizations back.” I favor
From my point of view, there are a couple of differences between the Toyota and it why era and Palantir today; for instance, Toyota was into measured, mostly disciplined process improvement. Palantir is more like the “move fast, break things” Silicon Valley outfit. Toyota was reasonably transparent about its processes. I did see the lights out factory near the Tokyo airport which was off limits to Kentucky people like. Palantir is in my mind associated with faux secrecy, legal paperwork, and those i2-related sealed documents.
Net net: Palantir’s myth making PR campaign is underway. I have no doubt it will work for many people. Good for them.
Stephen E Arnold, December x, 2025
China Smart US Dumb: An AI Content Marketing Push?
December 1, 2025
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I have been monitoring the China Smart, US Dumb campaign for some time. Most of the methods are below the radar; for example, YouTube videos featuring industrious people who seem to be similar to the owner of the Chinese restaurant not far from my office or posts on social media that remind me of the number of Chinese patents achieved each year. Sometimes influencers tout the wonders of a China-developed electric vehicle. None of these sticks out like a semi mainstream media push.
Thanks, Venice.ai, not exactly the hutong I had in mind but close enough for chicken kung pao in Kentucky.
However, that background “China Smart, US Dumb” messaging may be cranking up. I don’t know for sure, but this NBC News (not the Miss Now news) report caught my attention. Here’s the title:
The subtitle is snappier than Girl Fixes Generator, but you judge for yourself:
AI Startups Are Seeing Record Valuations, But Many Are Building on a Foundation of Cheap, Free-to-Download Chinese AI Models.
The write up states:
Surveying the state of America’s artificial intelligence landscape earlier this year, Misha Laskin was concerned. Laskin, a theoretical physicist and machine learning engineer who helped create some of Google’s most powerful AI models, saw a growing embrace among American AI companies of free, customizable and increasingly powerful “open” AI models.
We have a Xoogler who is concerned. What troubles the wizardly Misha Laskin? NBC News intones in a Stone Phillips’ tone:
Over the past year, a growing share of America’s hottest AI startups have turned to open Chinese AI models that increasingly rival, and sometimes replace, expensive U.S. systems as the foundation for American AI products.
Ever cautious, NBC News asserts:
The growing embrace could pose a problem for the U.S. AI industry. Investors have staked tens of billions on OpenAI and Anthropic, wagering that leading American artificial intelligence companies will dominate the world’s AI market. But the increasing use of free Chinese models by American companies raises questions about how exceptional those models actually are — and whether America’s pursuit of closed models might be misguided altogether.
Bingo! The theme is China smart and the US “misguided.” And not just misguided, but “misguided altogether.”
NBC News slams the point home with more force that the generator repairing Asian female closes the generator’s housing:
in the past year, Chinese companies like Deepseek and Alibaba have made huge technological advancements. Their open-source products now closely approach or even match the performance of leading closed American models in many domains, according to metrics tracked by Artificial Analysis, an independent AI benchmarking company.
I know from personal conversations that most of the people with whom I interreact don’t care. Most just accept the belief that the US is chugging along. Not doing great. Not doing terribly. Just moving along. Therefore, I don’t expect you, gentle reader, to think much of this NBC News report.
That’s why the China Smart, US Dumb messaging is effective. But this single example raises the question, “What’s the next major messaging outlet to cover this story?”
Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2025
AI ASICs: China May Have Plans for AI Software and AI Hardware
December 1, 2025
Another dinobaby original. If there is what passes for art, you bet your bippy, that I used smart software. I am a grandpa but not a Grandma Moses.
I try to avoid wild and crazy generalizations, but I want to step back from the US-centric AI craziness and ask a question, “Why is the solution to anticipated AI growth more data centers?” Data centers seem like a trivial part of the broader AI challenge to some of the venture firms, BAIT (big AI technology) companies, and some online pundits. Building a data center is a cheap building filled with racks of computers, some specialized gizmos, a connection to the local power company, and a handful of network engineers. Bingo. You are good to go.
But what happens if the compute is provided by Application-Specific Integrated Circuits or ASICs? When ASICs became available for crypto currency mining, the individual or small-scale miner was no longer attractive. What happened is that large, industrialized crypto mining farms pushed out the individual miners or mom-and-pop data centers.
The Ghana ASIC roll out appears to have overwhelmed the person taking orders. Demand for cheap AI compute is strong. Is that person in the blue suit from Nvidia? Thanks, MidJourney. Good enough, the mark of excellence today.
Amazon, Google, and probably other BAIT outfits want to design their own AI chips. The problem is similar to moving silos of corn to a processing plant with a couple of pick up trucks. Capacity at chip fabrication facilities is constrained. Big chip ideas today may not be possible on the time scale set by the team designing NFL arena size data centers in Rhode Island- or Mississippi-type locations.
A Chinese startup founded by a former Google engineer claims to have created a new ultra-efficient and relatively low cost AI chip using older manufacturing techniques. Meanwhile, Google itself is now reportedly considering whether to make its own specialized AI chips available to buy. Together, these chips could represent the start of a new processing paradigm which could do for the AI industry what ASICs did for bitcoin mining.
What those ASICs did for crypto mining was shift calculations from individuals to large, centralized data centers. Yep, centralization is definitely better. Big is a positive as well.
The write up adds:
The Chinese startup is Zhonghao Xinying. Its Ghana chip is claimed to offer 1.5 times the performance of Nvidia’s A100 AI GPU while reducing power consumption by 75%. And it does that courtesy of a domestic Chinese chip manufacturing process that the company says is "an order of magnitude lower than that of leading overseas GPU chips." By "an order or magnitude lower," the assumption is that means well behind in technological terms given China’s home-grown chip manufacturing is probably a couple of generations behind the best that TSMC in Taiwan can offer and behind even what the likes of Intel and Samsung can offer, too.
The idea is that if these chips become widely available, they won’t be very good. Probably like the first Chinese BYD electric vehicles. But after some iterative engineering, the Chinese chips are likely to improve. If these improvements coincide with the turn on of the massive data centers the BAIT outfits are building, there might be rethinking required by the Silicon Valley wizards.
Several observations will be offered but these are probably not warranted by anyone other than myself:
- China might subsidize its home grown chips. The Googler is not the only person in the Middle Kingdom trying to find a way around the US approach to smart software. Cheap wins or is disruptive until neutralized in some way.
- New data centers based on the Chinese chips might find customers interested in stepping away from dependence on a technology that most AI companies are using for “me too”, imitative AI services. Competition is good, says Silicon Valley, until it impinges on our business. At that point, touch-to-predict actions come into play.
- Nvidia and other AI-centric companies might find themselves trapped in AI strategies that are comparable to a large US aircraft carrier. These ships are impressive, but it takes time to slow them down, turn them, and steam in a new direction. If Chinese AI ASICs hit the market and improve rapidly, the captains of the US-flagged Transformer vessels will have their hands full and financial officers clamoring for the leaderships’ attention.
Net net: Ponder this question: What is Ghana gonna do?
Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2025
Can the Chrome Drone Deorbit Comet?
November 28, 2025
Perplexity developed Comet, an intuitive AI-powered Internet browser. Analytic Insight has a rundown on Comet in the article: “Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas Claims Comet AI Browser Could ‘Kill’ Android System.” Perplexity designed Comet for more complex tasks such as booking flights, shopping, and answering then executing simple prompts. The new browser is now being released for Android OS.
Until recently Comet was an exclusive, invite-only browser for the desktop version. It is now available for download. Comet is taking the same approach for an Android release. Perplexity hopes to overtake Android as the top mobile OS or so CEO Aravind Srinivas plans.
Another question is if Comet could overtake Chrome as the favored AI browser:
“The launch of Comet AI browser coincides with the onset of a new conflict between AI browsers. Not long ago, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Atlas, while Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome are upgrading their platforms with top-of-the-line AI tools. Additionally, Perplexity previously received attention for a $34.5 billion proposal to acquire Google Chrome, a bold move indicating its aspirations.
Comet, like many contemporary browsers, is built on the open-source Chromium framework provided by Google, which is also the backbone for Chrome, Edge, and other major browsers. With Comet’s mobile rollout and Srinivas’s bold claim, Perplexity is obviously betting entirely on an AI-first future, one that will see a convergence of the browser and the operating system.”
Comet is built on Chromium. Chrome is too. Comet is a decent web browser, but it doesn’t have the power of Alphabet behind it. Chrome will dominate the AI-browser race because it has money to launch a swarm of digital drones at this frail craft.
Whitney Grace, November 28, 2025
What Can a Monopoly Type Outfit Do? Move Fast and Break Things Not Yet Broken
November 26, 2025
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This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
CNBC published “Google Must Double AI Compute Every 6 Months to Meet Demand, AI Infrastructure Boss Tells Employees.”
How does the math work out? Big numbers result as well as big power demands, pressure on suppliers, and an incentive to enter hyper-hype mode for marketing I think.
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
The write up states:
Google ’s AI infrastructure boss [maybe a fellow named Amin Vahdat, the leadership responsible for Machine Learning, Systems and Cloud AI?] told employees that the company has to double its compute capacity every six months in order to meet demand for artificial intelligence services.
Whose demand exactly? Commercial enterprises, Google’s other leadership, or people looking for a restaurant in an unfamiliar town?
The write up notes:
Hyperscaler peers Microsoft, Amazon and Meta also boosted their capex guidance, and the four companies now expect to collectively spend more than $380 billion this year.
Faced with this robust demand, what differentiates the Google for other monopoly-type companies? CNBC delivers a bang up answer to my question:
Google’s “job is of course to build this infrastructure but it’s not to outspend the competition, necessarily,” Vahdat said. “We’re going to spend a lot,” he said, adding that the real goal is to provide infrastructure that is far “more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what’s available anywhere else.” In addition to infrastructure buildouts, Vahdat said Google bolsters capacity with more efficient models and through its custom silicon. Last week, Google announced the public launch of its seventh generation Tensor Processing Unit called Ironwood, which the company says is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first Cloud TPU from 2018. Vahdat said the company has a big advantage with DeepMind, which has research on what AI models can look like in future years.
I see spend the same as a competitor but, because Google is Googley, the company will deliver better reliability, faster, and more easily made bigger AI than the non-Googley competition. Google is focused on efficiency. To me, Google bets that its engineering and programming expertise will give it an unbeatable advantage. The VP of Machine Learning, Systems and Cloud AI does not mention the fact that Google has its magical advertising system and about 85 percent of the global Web search market via its assorted search-centric services. Plus one must not overlook the fact that the Google is vertically integrated: Chips, data centers, data, smart people, money, and smart software.
The write up points out that Google knows there are risks with its strategy. But FOMO is more important than worrying about costs and technology. But what about users? Sure, okay, eyeballs, but I think Google means humanoids who have time to use Google whilst riding in Waymos and hanging out waiting for a job offer to arrive on an Android phone. Google doesn’t need to worry. Plus it can just bump up its investments until competitors are left dying in the desert known as Death Vall-AI.
After kicking beaten to the draw in the PR battle with Microsoft, the Google thinks it can win the AI jackpot. But what if it fails? No matter. The AI folks at the Google know that the automated advertising system that collects money at numerous touch points is for now churning away 24×7. Googzilla may just win because it is sitting on the cash machine of cash machines. Even counterfeiters in Peru and Vietnam cannot match Google’s money spinning capability.
Is it game over? Will regulators spring into action? Will Google win the race to software smarter than humans? Sure. Even if it part of the push to own the next big thing is puffery, the Google is definitely confident that it will prevail just like Superman and the truth, justice, and American way has. The only hitch in the git along may be having captured enough electrical service to keep the lights on and the power flowing. Lots of power.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2025
Telegram, Did You Know about the Kiddie Pix Pyramid Scheme?
November 25, 2025
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Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
The Independent, a newspaper in the UK, published “Leader of South Korea’s Biggest Telegram Sex Abuse Ring Gets Life Sentence.” The subtitle is a snappy one: “Seoul Court Says Kim Nok Wan Committed Crimes of Extreme Brutality.” Note: I will refer to this convicted person as Mr. Wan. The reason is that he will spend time in solitary confinement. In my experience individuals involved in kiddie crimes are at bottom of the totem pole among convicted people. If the prison director wants to keep him alive, he will be kept away from the general population. Even though most South Koreans are polite, it is highly likely that he will face a less than friendly greeting when he visits the TV room or exercise area. Therefore, my designation of Mr. Wan reflects the pallor his skin will evidence.
Now to the story:
The main idea is that Mr. Wan signed up for Telegram. He relied on Telegram’s Group and Channel function. He organized a social community dubbed the Vigilantes, a word unlikely to trigger kiddie pix filters. Then he “coerced victims, nearly 150 of them minors, into producing explicit material through blackmail and then distribute the content in online chat rooms.”
Telegram’s leader sets an example for others who want to break rules and be worshiped. Thanks, Venice.ai. Too bad you ignored my request for no facial hair. Good enough, the standard for excellence today I believe.
Mr. Wan’s innovation weas to set up what the Independent called “a pyramid hierarchy.” Think of an Herbal Life- or the OneCoin-type operation. He incorporated an interesting twist. According to the Independent:
He also sent a video of a victim to their father through an accomplice and threatened to release it at their workplace.
Let’s shift from the clever Mr. Wan to Telegram and its public and private Groups and Channels. The French arrested Pavel Durov in August 2024. The French judiciary identified a dozen crimes he allegedly committed. He awaits trial for these alleged crimes. Since that arrest, Telegram has, based on our monitoring of Telegram, blocked more aggressively a number of users and Groups for violating Telegram’s rules and regulations such as they are. However, Mr. Wan appears to have slipped through despite Telegram’s filtering methods.
Several observations:
- Will Mr. Durov implement content moderation procedures to block, prevent, and remove content like Mr. Wan’s?
- Will South Korea take a firm stance toward Telegram’s use in the country?
- Will Mr. Durov cave in to Iran’s demands so that Telegram is once again available in that country?
- Did Telegram know about Mr. Wan’s activities on the estimable Telegram platform?
Mr. Wan exploited Telegram. Perhaps more forceful actions should be taken by other countries against services which provide a greenhouse for certain types of online activity to flourish? Mr. Durov is a tech bro, and he has been pictured carrying a real (not metaphorical) goat to suggest that he is the greatest of all time.
That perception appears to be at odds with the risk his platform poses to children in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2025
Why the BAIT Outfits Are Drag Netting for Users
November 25, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Have you wondered why the BAIT (big AI tech) companies are pumping cash into what looks to many like a cash bonfire? Here’s one answer, and I think it is a reasonably good one. Navigate to “Best Case: We’re in a Bubble. Worst Case: The People Profiting Most Know Exactly What They’re Doing.” I want to highlight several passages and then often my usually-ignored observations.
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough, but I am not sure how many AI execs wear old-fashioned camping gear.
I noted this statement:
The best case scenario is that AI is just not as valuable as those who invest in it, make it, and sell it believe.
My reaction to this bubble argument is that the BAIT outfits realized after Microsoft said, “AI in Windows” that a monopoly-type outfit was making a move. Was AI the next oil or railroad play? Then Google did its really professional and carefully-planned Code Red or Yellow whatever, the hair-on-fire moment arrived. Now almost three years later, the hot air from the flaming coifs are equaled by the fumes of incinerating bank notes.
The write up offers this comment:
My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. The larger the use case, the larger the expense. Most of the larger use cases that I have observed — where AI is leveraged to automate entire workflows, or capture end to end operational data, or replace an entire function — the outlay of work is equal to or greater than the savings. The time we think we’ll save by using AI tends to be spent on doing something else with AI.
The experiences of my team and I support this statement. However, when I go back to the early days of online in the 1970s, the benefits of moving from print research to digital (online) research were fungible. They were quantifiable. Online is where AI lives. As a result, the technology is not global. It is a subset of functions. The more specific the problem, the more likely it is that smart software can help with a segment of the work. The idea that cobbled together methods based on built-in guesses will be wonderful is just plain crazy. Once one thinks of AI as a utility, then it is easier to identify a use case where careful application of the technology will deliver a benefit. I think of AI as a slightly more sophisticated spell checker for writing at the 8th grade level.
The essay points out:
The last ten years have practically been defined by filter bubbles, alternative facts, and weaponized social media — without AI. AI can do all of that better, faster, and with more precision. With a culture-wide degradation of trust in our major global networks, it leaves us vulnerable to lies of all kinds from all kinds of sources and no standard by which to vet the things we see, hear, or read.
Yep, this is a useful way to explain that flows of online information tear down social structures. What’s not referenced, however, is that rebuilding will take a long time. Think about smashing your mom’s favorite Knick- knack. Were you capable of making it as good as new? Sure, a few specialists might be able to do a good job, but the time and cost means that once something is destroyed, that something is gone. The rebuild is at best a close approximation. That’s why people who want to go back to social structures in the 1950s are chasing a fairy tale.
The essay notes:
When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a century of national energy policy suddenly gets turned on its head and nuclear reactors are back in style, you have a sudden imbalance of power that looks like a cancer spreading within a national body.
My view is that the BAIT outfits want to control, dominate, and cash in. Hey, if you have cancer and one company has the alleged cure, are you going to take the drug or just die?
Several observations are warranted:
- BAIT outfits want to be the winner and be the only alpha dog. Ruthless behavior will be the norm for these firms.
- AI is the next big thing. The idea is that if one wishes it, thinks it, or invests in it, AI will be. My hunch is that the present methodologies are on the path to becoming the equivalent of a dial up modem.
- The social consequences of the AI utility added to social media are either ignored or not understood. AI is the catalyst needed to turn one substance into an explosion.
Net net: Good essay. I think the downsides referenced in the essay understate the scope of the challenge.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2025
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