> you need some insane mental gymnastics

Perhaps. I dislike google (have disliked it for many years with varying intensity), but they have done stuff where I've been compelled to say "neat". Hence "mixed bag".

This "new breed of purely AI companies" -- if this term is acceptable -- has only ever elicited burning hatred from me. They easily surpass the "usual evils" of surveillance capitalism etc. They deceive humanity at a much deeper level.

I don't necessarily blame LLMs as a technology. But how they are trained and made available is not only irresponsible -- it's the pinnacle of calculated evil. I do think their evil exceeds the traditional evils of Google, Facebook, etc.