can we legally treat ai companies like parents of children? if a child drives a car into a storefront, the parent is responsible for the damage, and at some point you might even criminally charge the parent if there was gross negligence
The law already works like that. You can’t write some computer code and automation, set it loose, and then go “oops the computer did it.” It’s not a defense. While it may be hard to nail down which specific engineers to lock up, the corporation as a whole absolutely can be charged criminally.
As Mitt Romney once said “corporations are people.”
Hate to say it but I don't think you're right on the legalities even in the children's case. In the US anyway, in most jurisdictions [1], if the child's act was not malicious, then parental responsibility is not automatic, but is contingent on the result being foreseeable [2] by the parents.
[1] Hawaii and Louisiana are strange in this regard. Some other states have a version of this but severely cap the amounts.
[2] "foreseeable" here standing in for a broad set of legal standards that roughly map to negligence/gross negligence/recklessness on the part of the parent
"I don't think you're right on the legalities even in the children's case" almost certainly true :) I guess I'm wondering why we aren't seeing legal action for these events yet? are these not foreseeable?
I remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"
Is Gemini really that bad? I mean, I would always prefer anthropic for agentic coding, and apparently openai has the math thing cornered, but if I'm using ai like a search engine gemini does that just fine. That may be all they were actually aiming for whatever else they say.
Gemini works amazingly well, and is better suited for most use cases. When most people speak of it negatively (especially here), it's just with the task of coding, which is a small subset of what google should be training its AI for.
It's vision capabilities are still top notch, and it seems pretty natural that most everyday human users are going to want strong vision over strong language/coding.
One of the most corrosive effects of being large and old (and Google is old by this point) is institutional inertia and individual internal optimization.
The former caused by the latter.
And the latter a problem once you begin to get executives and leaders who have mostly worked inside the company, because then they subconsciously prefer the Company Way(tm) to alternatives.
And Google has some previously-optimal, now-detrimental company ways.
From my understanding (I may be wrong) what is happening now is that frontier labs are doubling down on doing RLHF on their models using the user interaction with their own tools e.g. Anthropic making their models better at producing code with claude code. Perhaps the top Google researchers do not see this kind of narrow focus as a path to more generally beneficial AI technology.
It is pretty surprising if you see this as “pretty much everyone has figured out the way to success on any field”. Our way of seeing life is really bizzare
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