The same people who are being boo'd for being AI tycoons would have been cheered by the same students 4 years ago for just being tycoons.
I hope everybody reflects on the fact that it's the same people.
College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
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Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#42AI Bros are spending too much good will being obnoxious about fancy approximation algorithms, when their purpose in real AI will be lizard brain/reflex type actions. The next AI winter can't happen soon enough. (Note each past AI winter did give us new tools just like this one will, it's just a shame that it'll be an excuse to worsen customer support)
Unfortunately this AI ship has the US economy lashed to its bow, and the moment it begins to founder we're all going to have to hold our breath for a while in the best case. Thought leaders are all out of ideas that don't have AI in them (and even that ideation is probably being delegated to an LLM these days).
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every one of these posts about boos at commencement speeches has one of these comments near the bottom. I feel like I’m failing some pop culture quiz. What does this mean?
AI is largely unpopular outside of the tech & business worlds. Most laypeople see it as falling on a spectrum between unwanted and annoying (google getting worse, AI chatbots proliferating in every app and site) to actively harmful (jobs being replaced by ai). The fact that comments agreeing with this sentiment get downvoted here isn't a huge surprise, hn is firmly inside the tech/business world.
For what it's worth, you're probably downvoted way more for the whole "woe is me, I'm always downvoted for being right by people who are wrong" false martyrdom routine. Maybe leave that part off your post next time: it only detracts from the rest of it.
You might also refrain from generalizations like "hn is firmly inside the tech/business world". HN is not a single person, there are a variety of people here with a variety of experiences and opinions and biases.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#44Correctly or not (probably to some degree correctly) new grads are hearing AI is a major reason why they're having trouble finding jobs which is simultaneously 1.) Probably mostly has always been the case--I no longer have the vast sheaf of rejection letters when I ever got one at all and 2.) Is anecdotally actually the case for a variety of reasons that also include pandemic overhiring and probably an out-sized AI e…
I think the overhiring sentiment is largely accurate, but not as it’s frequently presented.
It’s not purely over hiring, it’s that many of these companies are doubling down on AI spend(in terms of model creation, hardware investment, etc), and need to allocate their funds differently.
So it’s not AI efficiency causing the layoffs, it’s AI resource allocation.
And the reason they don’t have the funds to invest? Overhiring.
A lot of the companies doing layoffs (META, Microsoft, Amazon) aren’t just using AI coding tools, they’re trying to be the hardware and be the models behind the AI.
And they see the failure to do so as an existential threat.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#45> Tennessee State University suggested AI was "rewriting production as we sit here" and told his audience to "deal with it" as they jeered him in response. Guess it doesn't take much to see what's under the mask.
So what is he supposed to say? "Ok let's stop developing AI so you can all have the exact job you trained for?" That hasn't been the case for decades.
When I left my eduction I could sequence 200 basepairs using gels. Now I process terabytes of NGS data on supercomputers. I dealt with it, I enjoyed it.
Edit: Not saying these kids have nothing to rage against, they can't afford houses, are uninsured, they face a huge wealth gap in the population, possible a war, the country is tearing apart... But why so anti AI specifically?
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#46The same people who are being boo'd for being AI tycoons would have been cheered by the same students 4 years ago for just being tycoons. I hope everybody reflects on the fact that it's the same people.
Am I out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#47The same people who are being boo'd for being AI tycoons would have been cheered by the same students 4 years ago for just being tycoons. I hope everybody reflects on the fact that it's the same people.
No? What is this ad hominem?
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#48Correctly or not (probably to some degree correctly) new grads are hearing AI is a major reason why they're having trouble finding jobs which is simultaneously 1.) Probably mostly has always been the case--I no longer have the vast sheaf of rejection letters when I ever got one at all and 2.) Is anecdotally actually the case for a variety of reasons that also include pandemic overhiring and probably an out-sized AI e…
I think it's more than that. They've heard for most of their lives that college is the way to a good job. Now they're graduating, many of them with debt, and as they do, they're hearing that AI means that the jobs won't be there. And now, at their commencement, someone is talking about AI. One of the people responsible is talking about AI!
Who thought that this was going to go well?
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#49The same people who are being boo'd for being AI tycoons would have been cheered by the same students 4 years ago for just being tycoons. I hope everybody reflects on the fact that it's the same people.
This isn't true at all
Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
#50The same people who are being boo'd for being AI tycoons would have been cheered by the same students 4 years ago for just being tycoons. I hope everybody reflects on the fact that it's the same people.
If your behavior doesn't change when you realize the world has changed, that's a bad sign.
So, the change in behavior by the students is a good sign.