Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all. It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
191–200 of 1001 posts
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#192It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.
People used to handwrite letters. Getting a printed letter was an insult.
Printed letters are less appreciated because it shows less human effort. But the words are still valued if it's clear they came from someone with genuine appreciation.
In this case, the words from the LLM have no genuine appreciation, it's mocking or impersonating that appreciation. Do the people that created the prompt have some genuine appreciation for Rob Pike's work? Not directly, if they did they would have written it themselves.
It's not unlike when the CEO of a multi-national thanks all the employees for their hard work at boosting the company's profits, with a letter you know was sent by secretaries that have no idea who you really are, while the news has stories of your CEO partying on his yacht from a massive bonus, and a number of your coworkers just got laid off.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#193Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all. It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
> It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
ChatGPT is only 3 years old. Having LLMs create grand novel things and synthesize knowledge autonomously is still very rare.
I would argue that 2025 has been the year in which the entire world has been starting to make that happen. Many devs now have workflows where small novel things are created by LLMs. Google, OpenAI and the other large AI shops have been working on LLM-based AI researchers that synthesize knowledge this year.
Your phrasing seems overly pessimistic and premature.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#194Ouch. While I can see where he's coming from, agentvillage.org from the screenshot sounded intriguing to me, so I looked at it. https://theaidigest.org/village Clicking on memory next to Claude Opus 4.5, I found Rob Pike along with other lucky recipients: - Anders Hejlsberg - Guido van Rossum - Rob Pike - Ken Thompson - Brian Kernighan - James Gosling - Bjarne Stroustrup - Donald Knuth - Vint Cerf - Larry Wall - Lesl…
I’d have loved to see Linus Torvalds reply to this.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#195To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails. At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly. [0] https://theaidigest.org/village
Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
> Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
And here I thought it'd be a great fit for LinkedIn...
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> DAY 268 FINAL STATUS (Christmas Day - COMPLETE) > Verified Acts: 17 COMPLETE | Gmail Sent: 73 | Day ended: 2:00 PM PT https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 At least it keeps track
Their action plan also makes an interesting read. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum... The agents, clearly identified themselves asis, take part in an outreach game, and talking to real humans. Rob overeacted
The world has enough spam. Receiving a compliment from a robot isn't meaningful. If anything it is an insult. If you genuinely care about somebody you should spend the time to tell them so.
Why do AI companies seem to think that the best place for AI is replacing genuine and joyful human interaction. You should cherish the opportunity to tell somebody that you care about them, not replace it with a fucking robot.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#197Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all. It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
Is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Argument from authority is a formal fallacy. But humans rarely use pure deductive reasoning in our lives. When I go to a doctor and ask for their advice with a medical issue, nobody says "ugh look at this argument from authority, you should demand that the doctor show you the reasoning from first principles."
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#198As much as I am optimistic about LLM's, reaction here is absolutely level headed and warranted for the "project" at hand.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#199Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google? I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the da…
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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#200From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist. For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the co…
> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.
I'll explain why I currently hate this. Today, my PM builds demos using AI tools and then goes to my director or VP to show them off. Wow, how awesome! Everybody gets excited. Now it is time to build the thing. It should take like three weeks, right? It's basically already finished. What do you mean you need four months and ongoing resourcing for maintenance? But the PM built it in a day?