I agree with your opinion that all this companies are illegally abusing the content freely available on the internet to train this models.
What annoyed me in the article, is that they are talking about “what jobs AI will steal” and immediately gave it abilities that it does not currently have (and I’ve seen it a lot of this on fear mongering type of articles). It reminded me on all the articles “truck drivers will be out of job in 3 months”.
It does not find content on the Internet (Gemini, copilot, … Is trying to give it that functionality, with hilarious results). It does not act in any way.
If you want to put it in simple terms, the current AI is a tool that reads a lot of content, and when you ask it something it gives you an answer trying to recall something and forming a coherent answer (hence all the hallucinations). It is extremely good at forming coherent answers, quite bad at giving correct answers and absolutely incapable of haveing other types of functionality (though they are trying hard to create new multi-agent tools that on paper are capable of independently searching for information, or using other tools to get the answer it needs, but it still fails a lot of times).
Good points. There have been tests on self driving trucks, but not much more. My opinion is that the tools are not mature enough, and the industry is not willing to risk putting trucks on the road that may get stuck in the middle of the trip, because there is a roadblock and it cannot circumvent it, or that it goes on big detours because it somehow sees non-existing roadblocks.
Also there is still a problem of liability. If a truck fails to give way to an ambulance or a firefighter truck, or if it gets in an accident, who is responsible? The manufacturer in theory, unless they waive responsibility to the owner of the truck, and in that case what company would risk their face and money on a technology that has not proven itself?
All in all, at the moment I see a lot of reasons to doubt the technology, and few reasons to embrace it, unless it becomes trustworthy enough that it is economically viable.
Ps. Putting trucks on a fixed route, in a convoy, feels a lot like re-inventing the train haha