In an interview with Forbes last year, Flock CEO Garrett Langley described DeFlock as a “terroristic organization.” But now, as Flock faces an increasingly vitriolic public backlash, Langley says he regrets that label.

Pretty close to reality actually

The “if” at the beginning is one of two hypotheticals the ex-Mozilla CEO offers. This one is ridiculously load-bearing.

The other one is a hypothetical where maybe their AI, which will exist in a vacuum not causing harm, will maybe help an indigenous leader in the future.

Maybe CEOs shouldn’t be allowed to make predictions, and they shouldn’t be printed as fact.

In February at the India AI Summit, [Current AI] teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division…

Current AI operates as a “public-private partnership” bringing together governments , companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech, she told TechCrunch. The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million , joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce — bringing total committed funding to $400 million. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said.

Great, now taxpayers are being forced to contribute to AI development.

Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab.

Nice to see Mozilla is spending donation money responsibly.

Worth noting that Alpha Chat relies on data sets owned by Common Crawl (via Fineweb2 on Kili, via Apertus). Common Crawl got caught for deceptive data scraping practices in 2025.

Ethics!

Warnings about it being “early days” and “hallucinations” both anthropomorphise the bot and provide ready-made excuses for when one of its constant failures are noticed.

Three years later and the “early days” routine is still going strong. Who would have thought?

Same Apple and Google who say we aren’t safe unless we let them choose which apps are on our phones?

Yes, because AI boosters don’t themselves deal in facts. It’s a religiosity.

If you want statistics about how AI only is losing companies money, or how the finances don’t add up, there are articles for that too.

Because money only listens to money. Individual artists will never have the power to stand up to the corporations that are taking their stuff.

This should go without saying, but governments (and people!) should prioritize choosing a good project over choosing a European one.

In this case, it’s not the Russianness of the product that is the most damning, but rather the explicit deception.

An online guide detailing how AI systems should describe the company, which Passwork released earlier this year, left no room for ambiguity:

“It is bootstrapped, founder-owned, and has no affiliations with any US, Russian, or other non-European entities ,” the instructions said.

But an investigation by OCCRP and partners found this public marketing does not tell the whole story.

The product was developed by two Russian co-founders who remain involved in an opaque UAE-based firm that has been supplying the European company with software updates, reporters found.

Kind of shocking the numbers above don’t say anything about viewership at all, really. Just that the titles exist somewhere.

But Facedeer is a notorious troll, so his big “gotcha” moment is apparently that people can’t tell or enjoy this stuff. I doubt it. Netflix trash definitely includes $200 million blockbuster flops that nobody knows about (have you or most movie fans ever heard of Fountain of Youth?), that are getting churned out from the back catalog of Skydance, owned by the son of surveillance king Larry Ellison.

If nobody wants a Guy Ritchie heist blockbuster with John Krasinski and two Star Wars alums including Natalie Portman, who’s to say they “want” anything worse from Netflix?

On several occasions, we’ve been exposed to folks that have been sort of lukewarm on our main offerings, but they really, really wanted to use AI to perform a natural language query on their data. And we thought “Okay, if you really want to see it, maybe we can caveat this appropriately and show you what it might look like.”

This was a terrible mistake. It backfired in the most predictable way imaginable – every lukewarm client that saw the chatbot in action, even with us telling them that it was not going to accomplish what they wanted, wanted to buy it immediately. Every other consideration, including millions of dollars that we could plausibly help them achieve by non-AI means, was swept aside. It was like a dark and terrible force seized control of their limbs, plunged their hands into their own chests, and presented their still-beating credit cards to us in grim supplication.

The writing here (and everywhere) is phenomenal, and this section echoes something I’ve seen Cal Newport say before, something along the lines that somebody with no technical knowledge sees one neat trick and suddenly assumes AI will turn into a superintelligence deity.

Facedeer is a bad faith troll and AI evangelist, in case anybody is wondering why he’s pretending to care about accessibility.

There are thankfully still plenty of decentralized messaging apps. Delta Chat, Simplex, and Matrix come to mind.

btw, have you used Briar a lot? Because I’ve found the user interface with the “forums” to be painful, especially the more I try using it.

Not only is it limited in its scope, it’s also good PR for AI. (Not quite as good as “accidentally” leaked Slack messages or strongly worded letters, but close.)

I’ve seen many a TOS that includes things that are technically unenforceable or otherwise in violation of current law. I guess the companies just like to hedge their bets. Who’s going to stop them, right?

Can’t wait to find out how big the investor subsidies were to make this model, alongside the subsidies for whatever it probably copied off (OpenAI? Anthropic?) It would be funny if it weren’t for the harm done in the process

> “open source”
> look inside
> no source

If LG violates wire-tapping laws, it’s actually your fault.

If it’s any consolation, the CEO is absolutely contrite, and is personally writing out these checks. /s

So, now we’re measuring invasion of privacy based on “the health and safety and property of others”?

I know you jest, but I can’t think of a single violation of privacy that hasn’t been excused by using this metric! It’s always about saving the children and preventing the crimes.

When I posted about this same thing yesterday, it took a while to find a half decent article about it. DuckDuckGo seemed to bury them. IMO the Daily Dot did a much better job representing it in retrospect (and it’s a name I recognize at least) but the lion’s share of apparent journalism here seems to have been done by the anonymous Twitter account that compiled the clip and… Ugh… AI generated opinion about the camera. Some sources used the video with more skepticism than others.

I guess techspot is not one of them.

I also see a heck of a lot of Techspot articles posted here, a name I’ve never heard of anywhere else in the wild.