I mean how can you blame her for not being excited at yet-another-AI-powered planner.
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
771–780 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#772Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people really do hate AI That's probably me for a lot of people. The reality is a bit finer than this namely : - I hate VC funded AI which is actually super shallow (basically OpenAI/Claude wrappers) - I hate VC funded genuine BigAI that sells itself as the literal opposite of what it is, e.g. OpenAI... being NOT open. - I hate AI that hides it's ecological cost. Generating text, videos, etc is actually fascin…
> making the shittiest video with the dumbest script is taking the same amount of energy I'd need to fly across the globe. I get your overall point, but the hyperbole is probably unhelpful. Flying a human across the globe takes several MWh. That's billions of tokens created (give or take an order of magnitude...).
Does your comparison include training, data center building, GPUs productions, etc or solely inference? (genuine question I don't know the total cost for e.g. Sora2, only inference which AFAIK is significant yet pale in comparison to everything upstream)
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#773Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT is one of the most used websites in the world and it's used by the most normal people in the world, in what way is the opinion "generally negative"?
Seemingly the primary economic beneficiaries of AI are people who own companies and manage people. What this means for the average person working for a living is probably a lot of change, additional uncertainty, and additional reductions in their standard of living. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, and they aren't rich.
What has this to do with what I wrote? Go take your class conflict somewhere else.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#774Earlier quoted context omitted.
> making the shittiest video with the dumbest script is taking the same amount of energy I'd need to fly across the globe. I get your overall point, but the hyperbole is probably unhelpful. Flying a human across the globe takes several MWh. That's billions of tokens created (give or take an order of magnitude...).
Does your comparison include training, data center building, GPUs productions, etc or solely inference? (genuine question I don't know the total cost for e.g. Sora2, only inference which AFAIK is significant yet pale in comparison to everything upstream)
No, that's one reason why there's at least an order of magnitude wiggle room there. I just took the first number for J/Token I found on arxiv from 2025. Choosing the exact model and hardware it runs on is also making a large difference (probably larger than your one-time upfront costs, since those are needed only once and spread out across years of inference).
My point is mobility, especially commercial flight, is extremely energy intense and the average westerner will burn much more resources here than on AI use. People get mad at the energy and water use of AI, and they aren't wrong, but right now it really is only a drop in the ocean of energy and water we're wasting anyways.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hate starts with the name. LLMs don't have the I in AI. It's like marketing a car as self-driving while all it can do is lane assist.
That's because there are at least 5 different definitions of AI. - At it's inception in 1955 it was "learning or any other feature of intelligence" simulated by a machine [1] (fun fact: both neural networks and computers using natural language were on the agenda back then) - Following from that we have the "all machine learning is AI" which was the prevalent definition about a decade ago - Then there's the academic d…
And yet, somehow, "it's not actually AI" has wormed its way into the minds of various redditors.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#776Someone wrote on HN the (IMO) main reason why people do not accept AI. AI is about centralisation of power So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things, and will lend you your computer collecting monthly fees. Also see https://be-clippy.com/ for more arguments (like Adobe moving to cloud to teach their model on your work). For me AI is just a natur…
But why not? AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models. As an average consumer, I actually feel like i'm less locked into gemini/chatgpt/claude than I am to Apple or Google for other tech (i.e. photos).
> AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models.
It was already tough to run flagship-class local models and it's only getting worse with the demand for datacenter-scale compute from those specific big players. What happens when the model that works best needs 1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs?
AI computation looks a lot like early Bitcoin: first the CPU, then the GPUs, then the ASICs, then the ASICs mostly being made specifically by syndicates for syndicates. We are speedrunning the same centralization.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#777Someone wrote on HN the (IMO) main reason why people do not accept AI. AI is about centralisation of power So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things, and will lend you your computer collecting monthly fees. Also see https://be-clippy.com/ for more arguments (like Adobe moving to cloud to teach their model on your work). For me AI is just a natur…
Sorry but your SQL comparison is way off. SQL is deterministic, has a defined implementation that databases must follow and when you run a statement it presents a query plan.
This is the absolute opposite to using an LLM. Please stop using this comparison and perhaps look for others, like for example, a randomised search engine.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#778Very new ex-MSFT here. I couldn’t relate more with your friend. That’s exactly what happened. I left Microsoft about 5 weeks ago and it’s been really hard to detox from that culture. AI pushed down everywhere. Sometimes shitty-AI that needed to be proved at all cost because it should live up to the hype. I was in one of such AI-orgs and even there several teams felt the pressure from SLT and a culture drift to a dysf…
Best of luck with this transition. I had a really hard time when I left Microsoft. It’s took longer than I expected to feel better but I do now.
Jesus, is it actually a thing to grieve after leaving a job? (doesn't sound like you were laid off)
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#779Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not only the hype though. What about the complete lack of morality some (most?) AI companies exhibit? What about the consequences in the environment? What about the enshitification of products? What about the usage of water and energy? Etc.
Not to diminish your overall point, but enshittification has been happening well before AI, AI just made it much easier and faster to enshittify everything.
But AI allows us to make customised enshitification, think of the possibilities!
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#780Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas company. There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems. Maybe AI…
> To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, I don't understand why people seem so impatient about AI adoption. AI is the future, but many AI products aren't fully mature yet. That lack of maturity is probably what is dampening the adoption curve. To unseat incumbent tools and practices you either nee…
> I don't understand why people seem so impatient about AI adoption.
We're burning absurd, genuinely farcical amounts of money on these tools now, so of course they're impatient. There's Trillions (with a "T") riding on this massive hypewave, and the VCs and their ilk are getting nervous because they see people are waking up to the reality that it's at best a kinda useful tool in some situations and not the new God that we were promised that can do literally everything ever.