Devil’s advocate (not for robots.txt idea specifically but for the general pushback against AI infringing on copyrights):
It’s generally accepted that it’s okay for a human to look at publicly available code, text, and images, and learn from it and then become inspired to form new code, text, and images (all for free) even with commercial intent. Is there a significant difference with AI doing the same thing?
For those saying it’s a typo, it’s not, if you read further:
“More than [CEO] Yanai's own pay of 400 million yen, the maximum amount will be among the highest in the nation.”
Re: #2, it’s published/presented at a research conference so it’s inherently in research paper format. The sharing via their website more publicly is probably a lower priority / afterthought. Only a select number of higher impact research at these companies gets enough resources to have a dedicated page describing the work in a more accessible fashion with pedagogical illustrations etc…
Except they’re building the most popular consumer VR headsets by far? (Without going into any of the software/platform stuff that’s being developed). Also see ASIC part of comment for AR (they've been on a hiring spree for silicon)… The hardware is probably the most serious technical bottleneck because the sensory experience is kinda janky and isn't super-compelling, so that’s where innovation has to happen first.
Love the HN swagger-talk even when it’s misinformed. Maybe they’ve accelerated the rebrand due to PR issues, but they’ve been heavily investing in AR/VR/metaverse for years, with Oculus back in 2014 and in the past few years poaching top silicon talent for low-power ASIC hardware. Their pseudo-AR RayBans commercially deployed few months ago. This has been a long time coming… FB has its issues to fix but no progress is going to come from falsehoods being thrown around.
Their revenues would plummet - last time I checked, ads are something like 70-80% of their revenue. And they can’t charge anywhere near Apple can for their hardware products because they don’t have the established luxury brand. I’d doubt their other subscriptions can make up for much either. Maybe they’re making some progress on Google Cloud and it could be a long-term profit center but AFAIK Google Cloud still isn’t profitable as of yet. They ain’t turning off ads anytime soon.
Also, if the films could be so simply explained away (like IR of airplanes from far away) this would’ve been put down way earlier at multiple levels of the Navy, probably starting from the pilots themselves since they would see these things multiple times every day.
Mick West also has an incentive to come up with explanations to debunk these films since that’s his job, even if they’re low quality explanations since he has to… whereas it’s far more taboo and reputation-risking in the Navy for the pilots to come out and say what they saw.