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The UAE recently announced that it had partnered with OpenAI to make ChatGPT Plus free for all of its citizens.Genius. That's all I can say. A massive PR win for all involved, and assuming that there's even a mild improvement in productivity as a consequence, it'll pay for itself. $20/m? Chump change for petrostates.I didn't expect it from a Gulf State. While they're chomping at the camel-bit to find a smart place to park their dwindling oil revenues, and have invested in building data centers and chip fabs while doing their best to demonstrate that they're technophilic and forward-thinking, this is still a big moveTo quote a tweet I saw:>this is another reason why technology alone isn’t enough. the best technology doesn’t win. gemini is better but google would require 9 committee meetings, 5875 lawyers, & 7 years to do something like this.. & then a junior PR person would have a problem with it so it all gets killed.>for people who care about cultural & societal change through product building & distribution, there are profound lessons to be learned here.Now that the precedent has been made, I expect other countries to make a move eventually. Even the AI providers are keen, look at them waiving charges for college students in the States. Google in particular is finally wide awake, and wants to regain lost market and mindshare, which is an existential threat to OpenAI. We'll see if {infinite money} can win over existing attention and nimbleness.As people have pointed out below, this is overblown.
Bonus points: The "article" you linked from a grifter content slop mill is 100% AI generated slop. You can tell in the first sentence when they led with "In a groundbreaking move" which is total gpt slop, which absolutely not a single human journalist would even come close to writing. In fact, given the absolute 100% lack of any western reporting on this topic which would definitely generate clicks, I'm alllmost leaning towards calling this thing entirely a hoax.
Before anyone asks, I am 100% absolutely positively certain that this slop article is 100% AI generated. If you disagree you are simply wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean that this story is a hoax, but the fact that it's exclusively reported in low quality Indian tabloids is very very suspicious.
This actual human written article from what appears to be a real Dubai news outlet claims it's a hoax: https://www.khaleejtimes.com/business/tech/free-chatgpt-plus-for-all-uae-residents-what-you-need-to-know
Bonus bonus points: It appears that most, if not all stories about this are also AI slop (though I'm not saying this with total confidence). Even the "debunkings" except for the one I linked I think.
Its businesstoday.in. Their slop was worse before AI, at least now theres a semblance of grammatical coherence. I have placed hardstops on google to filter out all Indian news sources (except for theprint and thehindu) from any search results, and my news quality sources have improved dramatically. Thanks to slop like Eurasiantimes and businesstoday and all manner hindustantimes and ndtv and even 'respectable' not-obviously-indian sources like economictimes all being published in english and churning out AI slop nonstop we are going to see source pollution by AI generated articles very soon. Bad enough when AI overweights archived blogposts from the livejournal graveyards, worse when its the entire subcontinent clickjerking over every piece of mediocre slop churned out by hypernationalist basement dwellers.
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