Does he still work for Google? If so, I wonder what his views are on Google and their active development of Google Gemini.
A critic from the inside is more persuasive, not less.
Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#232[flagged]
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#233If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying). GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse. Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear ov…
It's pure envy. Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers because they aren't making money like tech companies. The resource usage complaint is completely contrived.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#234Eh, most of his income and livelihood was from an ad company. Ads are equally wasteful as, and many times more harmful to the world than giga LLMs. I don't have a problem with that, nor do I have a problem with folks complainining about LLMs being wasteful. My problem is with him doing both.
You can't both take a Google salary and harp on about the societal impact of software.
Saying this as someone who likes rob pike and pretty much all of his work.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#235If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying). GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse. Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear ov…
We're not allowed to criticize anything we find wrong if there's anything else that's even worse?
By the same logic, I could say that you should redirect your alfalfa woes to something like the Ukraine war or something.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#236[flagged]
Any evidence behind your claim? I have a hard time believing that streaming data from memory over a network can be so energy demanding, there's little computation involved.
I dont feel like putting together a study but just look up the energy/co2/environment cost to stream one hour of video. You will see it is an order of magnitude higher than other uses like AI.
The European average is 56 grams of CO2 emissions per hour of video streaming. For comparison: 100 meters to drive causes 22 grams of CO2.
https://www.ndc-garbe.com/data-center-how-much-energy-does-a...
80 percent of the electricity consumption on the Internet is caused by streaming services
Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission.
An hour of video streaming needs more than three times more energy than a HD stream in 4K quality, according to the Borderstep Institute. On a 65-inch TV, it causes 610 grams of CO2 per hour.
https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/netflix-d...
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#237[flagged]
There are several takes looking at this comparison. Here's a representative one: https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar...
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#238[flagged]
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#239What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
You're not. You feel obligated to send a thank you, but don't want to put forth any effort, hence giving the task to someone, or in this case, something else.
No different than an CEO telling his secretary to send an anniversary gift to his wife.