As a low income white boy from Queens myself, I can say with confidence yes they totally exist. I can’t speak for the rest of the country but in NYC there are a bunch of public/free magnet schools, that you get into on merit alone. Many years ago I tried to get into Bronx science high school but my grades weren’t good enough, so I ended up having to go to a standard NYC public high school.
Sounds like the security guard was just a knob
Right now AI companies are doing what they used to say drug dealers do “Hey it’s free! Why don’t you give it a try?” And once you get hooked they jack up the price.
In all my years I’ve never come across someone giving away free street drugs, but AI companies do it all the time. The problem is once the funding dries up, I suspect the real price of some of these services is going to be astronomical. They are giving away millions, if not billions of dollars of services free or deeply discounted all in the hopes of “gaining market share”.
When the bubble pops we will likely start seeing the actual cost of some of these services.
Mix in the fact that if you’ve ever used some of these AI services you’ll find most of the time you have to babysit the LLM to give you what you want and not go all haywire on you.
With our current level of technology I think we are in a place where we are only really able to augment some of our workers workflow. I really can’t see replacing the full staff of a large to mid-sized company considering the cost and efficiency of these products.
That said I think the genie is out of the bottle, and AI services are here for good. What the landscape will look like in the next few years I really can’t say. More people/companies may choose to run LLM’s locally on their own machines/servers trained on very specific use cases as that might be more cost effective than what our current generation entails.
Keep in mind NYC is a different world than the rest of the country, but yeah I totally knew a bunch of people who were lower income who got accepted to magnet schools. In NYC at least, magnet schools are filled with TONS of lower income smart/gifted students. That part of Spider-Man was totally based on reality.