Live data from Hacker News

The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

wsj.com

71–80 of 146 posts

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#71

I'll just keep repeating this: There are three options: 1. AI owned by everyone 2. No AI 3. AI owned by billionaires If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI. Any of us arguing for (1) get sh…

[deleted]

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#72

Bunch of idiots. We’re all going to lose our jobs but you can only hold back the inevitable for so long. This idiot populous has a total inability to see past the extremely short term. What exactly is going to happen you’re going to block the data centers. You’re going to make it hard to make technical progress and then someone else will eat your lunch and now you’re just poor.

Seeing the future is hard for everyone, but what I have a hard time understanding is people who act ignorant of the recent past. Because that's what tells us how AI is going to be used against us.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#73
Related:

Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419

Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674

Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107

An AI Hate Wave Is Here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#74

I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A gr…

No one wants to be the one to ring the "we're in a recession" bell first

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#75

1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers. 2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people. 3. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about AI and the number is falling: ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep... ) The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly…

> The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.

The goal was to raise as much money as possible as fast as possible before the curtain is pulled back to reveal the Wizard's empire of lies.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#76
post #16

All that's going to happen is people will "voluntarily" take it away from themselves. The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI. The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI. People who ar…

There are many cheap, open models available on the vLLM engine: https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm . This includes gpt-oss, LLaMa, and Gemma. This is in addition to Qwen, Deepseek, Mistral, Kimi, GLM, and Poolside.

Yes, and I keep copies of the ones I like[0]. I can't run the huge ones, but the ones I can run aren't as good the "frontier" models. Regardless, I expect they will be considered contraband someday.

[0] - I've been using llama.ccp and Ollama. I should checkout vLLM.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#78
post #51

It's funny how easily you can differentiate people in the tech industry who spend all their time with others in the tech industry from those who don't. The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on). Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in th…

Is there room for people who are already in the acceptance phase? We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example. I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are r…

[deleted]

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#79

1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers. 2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people. 3. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about AI and the number is falling: ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep... ) The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly…

I think AI companies have actually broadly adopted the right strategy. There's no way to sugarcoat or hide that your company's pitch is "your salary is our TAM, btw our product is so powerful it might cause human extinction". Deploying as widely as possible while steamrolling opposition before it can get its bearings is the only viable option for the technology as they describe it.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#80
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real reason is "make number go up". A few years ago, you showed the stock market (or your investors if you weren't listed yet) how amazing a company you were by hiring people like crazy, even if you didn't need them, and giving them all sorts of perks, including (but not limited to) home office. Now, the stock market wants to see blood, so you have to sacrifice people - not because you're actually losing money, b…

This tactic is wearing thin on investors. All companies doing layoffs as of recent have started to lose share value. AI or not. I think investors are starting to see stress on the market for fewer working people contributing back as customers and investors themselves. This creates depreciation in share value as no one is willing to invest.

It helps to think of investors in tiers. The lower tiers mimic higher ups. Each tier has two orders of magnitude deeper pockets than the lower tier.

At the very top are the big investment banks and fund houses, berkshire. Second are smaller institutions and third retail/individual.

The top two layers demand a steady return, never losing money on average in any 36 month window. Otherwise it triggers a selloff top down to cover for it.

The bottom follows the top so the selloff or buy just gets mimicked, with the top tier never losing (the bottom layers make sure of it by following blindly)

With wild indicators already set a massive selloff should have already been in motion, but its not. The top tier is getting more greedy.

No one is betting on AI long term. Everyone's in for the ride. As always the bottom will feed the top.

Post reply on HN