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Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

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Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

#21

Post by AlexeyBrin »

stavros wrote: post #4

Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).

Honest answer: nobody knows. You will need to create a poll large enough of people representing all society and ask the questions. Most people in tech (I include myself here) just speculate and project their own bias on the entire population.

Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

#22

Post by potsandpans »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19
stavros wrote: post #4

Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).

Speaking just for myself: I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix. I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the promp…

[flagged]

Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

#24

Post by sinigang »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19
stavros wrote: post #4

Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).

Speaking just for myself: I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix. I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the promp…

I feel the same. You're not alone.

Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

#26

Post by xscott »

epoxyhockey wrote: post #7
float4 wrote: post #5

As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?

The dotcom boom (it wasn't a crisis) was about putting brick and mortar stores online and making shopping more convenient and price efficient. The younger generation was much more enthusiastic about shopping online, and being initial drivers of it. I remember the $25 off (no minimum order) coupons to basically get free stuff every week. The older generations still preferred to go to a store. It was a much slower prog…

There was also a decent amount of enthusiasm for the "long tails" because with unlimited virtual shelf space, you could find products that would not have enough mass appeal to the average consumer to justify their space on physical shelves. For instance, Netflix would loan you a DVD of almost any movie but Blockbuster only stocked the middle of the bell curve.

Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

#27

Post by xscott »

stavros wrote: post #4

Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).

For me, I'm very enthusiastic about it's use for programming, mathematics, and as a teaching assistant[0]. I'm very worried about it being used for automated surveillance, terrible customer service, and deceptive targeted advertisements. I'm unconcerned about slop and alignment issues. I'm very much in favor of local models (democratization), just like I'm a fan of Wikipedia for making so many topics available to everyone for free.

[0] I don't see a lot of people using LLMs to learn a new topic, but I had a really great experience by walking through some math I wanted to know, forcing it to go slowly, and writing code and test cases for each concept to make sure it wasn't hallucinating. There are no "choose your own adventure" textbooks like this, and there are no professors who would be that patient with me in office hours. I don't think it will work well for unmotivated learners.

Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

#28

Post by jonstewart »

bediger4000 wrote: post #10
float4 wrote: post #5

As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?

There was some concern about Amazon in particular, but Amazon didn't eat all the bookstores until well after the dotcom boom/bust. I recall a more academic-economistically inclined friend saying that investing in Amazon now (2001) was buying a part of a future monopoly. The online stuff 1998-2003 was wimpy compared to today.

Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.

Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.

Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

#29

Post by kevin948 »

potsandpans wrote: post #22
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking just for myself: I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix. I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the promp…

[flagged]

No need to be so dismissively pathological. If you disagree, that's one thing, but this reads as 'look at this sad, crazy fool' when this is a pretty understandable reaction to feeling alienated by the way in which LLMs are being forcefully pushed in both personal and professional domains and the oft ensuing breakdown in human to human communication. 'Who does this technology serve?' is a valid question and 'not us' is a valid answer.

Sure, the poster's feelings may stem from a 'wider set of technology/tooling', but that doesn't necessarily take from the point. People are sensing that LLM technology is being used as an accelerant for further alienation, whether attributed perfectly to the specific technology or not.

Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

#30

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ompogUe wrote: post #17
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.

What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. While I did appreciate having access to stacks of modern computer manuals, it didn't last long: once the mom-and-pops were out of business, the big box stores pivoted to converting half of their floor space to selling candles and pillows.

There was never much money in books, B&N would always make their margins on their cafe and their overprice gifts and toys. Amazon never really made money from books either, and they don't really make it on retail, but the data they get from retail is very valuable and profitable.

Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.

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