Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

nbcnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 445 posts

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#291

Post by phainopepla2 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #202
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While as argument, it may work, it does not seem to be conservatives that are afraid of AI ( at least in public fora ). But that is separate from your point on class type ( the rich ), which seems to be reason why it does not land well ( for me at least ).

The reason why this seems weird to you (and many other people for sure) is that current "conservative" politicians are actually more neoliberals than conservatives. So of course they will push cheap labour, offshoring, outsourcing and eventually AI. But it shouldn't be hard to understand actual conservative ideology here, since, like, it's already in the word.

You're right about conservatism as long as you take a nearly archaic definition of the word (and I lament how the definition has changed, but it is what it is).

You're wrong about the other side of the aisle, though. People who are otherwise pro immigration, pro social change, pro downwards wealth redistribution, etc. (in other words, not at all conservative), are typically against AI.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#292

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #193
qsera wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich... I don't get people who believe this. Why would an AI company provide a service that someone can sell at 10x the price, mostly unchanged? Why wouldn't the AI company sell it directly?

Wholesale vs retail. I think the highest value, biggest markets will have products straight from the AI labs (ie legal review) but there's a lot of "last mile" type stuff that it's probably not as economical for anthropic to care about but maybe for some other company.

Why wouldn't it be economical?

Following the logic their agents should be able to find and make money with niche businesses cheaper than human entrepreneurs.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#293

Post by echelon »

moosedev wrote: post #230
echelon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then start using DeepSeek. Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen. Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use. The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap,…

Please don’t post AI slop to HN. It’s against the guidelines.

> Please don’t post AI slop to HN.

??? - My comment doesn't even look like an LLM wrote it.

> It’s against the guidelines.

To be clear:

I wRoTe

- E V E R Y - w o r d -

by [picture ASCII art of "human hand" here]⠀

Do not accuse me of using an LLM as a substitute for thinking.

I do not use LLMs to write any of my Hacker News comments, and I never have.

I have used LLMs to help me search for information, but I have never once in my life posted the outputs of an LLM into a post verbatim as my own. That's laziness.

I'm not dismissing LLMs here. They produce better writing than a lot of humans. They are fantastic tools for constructing media, for getting work done, and for furthering your own capabilities.

But I curate my thoughts and craft my arguments. That sort of wanton dismissal of my comments is worse than using an LLM as a substitute for thinking. That's real "human slop".

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#294

Post by coldpie »

10xDev wrote: post #9
davemp wrote: post #3

Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.

The numbers speak for itself. What has had the same level of user growth?

I opened a grocery store where anyone can walk in, take whatever they want, and walk out without having to pay for it. No grocery store has ever seen the level of customer growth as mine!

The reason for all the LLM spend & forced adoption is to make LLMs a critical part of everyone's processes while it's cheap/free, and then crank up the price once it's too late to easily back out. Just like I will jack up the price on my grocery store once all the fools at competing stores who are charging their customers money go out of business, and I'm the only one left in the area, leaving everyone (except for me!) worse off than where they started.

It's a scam, and it seems to be working.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#295

Post by Zigurd »

xt00 wrote: post #275
Zigurd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than having to pick one position or the other: both are hypocritical, and both are deceptive hype mongering. Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to…

Totally agree — if AI tools are already or nearly at the point where you can say “write a program to do X” and it does it, that’s like telling people they need to learn skills to order something at McDonald’s. The goal is for the barrier to entry to be basically zero. Oh sure today there are things like “I made a claude.md file that does this and I wrote a really clever prompt!!” But the goal is for that work to be d…

I use coding agents every day for non-trivial projects. But I can definitely say that a prompt of the form "Write a program that does X" will earn you a git rollback of a mess, unless what you want has been done a bazillion times before.

Peak efficiency in using coding agents is a weird balancing act at this point in the development of coding agents: being too incremental and detailed is inefficient, but if you let it rip on a task with multiple sub tasks you have to be ready for the coding agent to get utterly lost while providing you with only hints at what made it to lose its way. It's like an inexperienced intern with a high opinion of its competency.

LLMs trained for coding are most productive when pushed to their limits, but that's where they start to fall down.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#296

Post by itsalwaysgood »

keybored wrote: post #30
itsalwaysgood wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably too early for this, but I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. Evil acts made real by the decisions of those at the top, and the rest of us reject the acts. But quitely we accept these acts by being satisfied with verbal protest. In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a differenc…

Thus Evil speaks.

Evil wins when the Good do nothing.

How hard should we 'try', how much time should a person spend working, learning, versus living?

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#297

Post by tofuziggy »

berkay wrote: post #64
nilirl wrote: post #8

> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with. I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.

It's not clear to me why they booed him. you think for only asserting predictions that benefit him? Not because they agree on those predictions and don't want that future, blame him for this role in it?

AI is going to take away their jobs, big companies like google will profit greatly, meanwhile accelerating climate change with full speed ahead data centers, and no real thought about what will happen to all these unemployed graduates. But also try to keep an open mind

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#298

Post by ryandrake »

jeroenhd wrote: post #235
wvbdmp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas. They may not actively use LLMs or even know what they are, but they’re satisfied with Google’s AI overview and they love using voice assistants. These aren’t people from any particular sphere I sought out or which self-se…

People are varied. My grandma can't tell the difference between reality and AI. My parents and older family members either treat AI as a dog ("wow, look at this fun trick") or, worryingly, as Google. People younger than about 35 I know dislike AI, ranging from mild annoyance up to passionate hatred, except for the people who are all-in on it. Calling something "slop" causes a fun diverse reaction, with some people of…

I’ve found love of AI seems to be (with exceptions of course) pretty directly proportional to age and wealth. Older people and wealthier / business-owning people seem to be more excited by it, younger, working people not so much, especially artists and creative types. And it makes sense too, given who stands to gain and lose from it.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#299

Post by FeloniousHam »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #202
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While as argument, it may work, it does not seem to be conservatives that are afraid of AI ( at least in public fora ). But that is separate from your point on class type ( the rich ), which seems to be reason why it does not land well ( for me at least ).

The reason why this seems weird to you (and many other people for sure) is that current "conservative" politicians are actually more neoliberals than conservatives. So of course they will push cheap labour, offshoring, outsourcing and eventually AI. But it shouldn't be hard to understand actual conservative ideology here, since, like, it's already in the word.

> is that current "conservative" politicians are actually more neoliberals than conservatives.

I suppose "neoliberal" means whatever anyone wants it too, but perhaps you were looking for "postliberal". From the AI summary:

> Postliberalism is a political and social philosophy that rejects the core tenets of traditional liberalism. It argues that liberalism’s hyper-focus on individual autonomy, free-market capitalism, and secularism has eroded social cohesion and community.

"Conservative" is used to describe the current US administration, and I suppose they imagine they're conserving _something_, but they seem very eager to attack the liberal foundation of the Republic.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#300

Post by AlexeyBrin »

542458 wrote: post #119
let_rec wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I use Google Search to do a search and I get an AI answer that I scroll past, do I count an AI user? The numbers are not reliable.

You could use ChatGPT/anthropic/etc signups as your proxy if you wanted, and those show similarly spectacular trajectories.

It is only spectacular because of the free tiers and the artificially lowered costs of the services. Put the real prices on the OpenAI and Anthropic services, remove the free tier and only than you will have a true picture of how many people are willing to pay to use it.
Post reply on HN