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

Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

skyview.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 1001 posts

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#331

Post by alpha_squared »

maplethorpe wrote: post #292
blibble wrote: post #241

> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more

What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

Unequivocally, yes. There are plenty of "useful" things that can come out of doing unethical things, that doesn't make it okay. And, arguably, ChatGPT isn't nearly as useful as it is at convincing you it is.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#332

Post by 2026iknewit »

blibble wrote: post #241

> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more

I learned what i learned due to all the openess in software engineering and not because everyone put it behind a pay wall.

Might be because most of us got/gets payed well enough that this philosophy works well or because our industry is so young or because people writing code share good values.

It never worried me that a corp would make money out of some code i wrote and it still doesn't. AFter all, i'm able to write code because i get paid well writing code, which i do well because of open source. Companies always benefited from open source code attributed or not.

Now i use it to write more code.

I would argue though, I'm fine with that, to push for laws forcing models to be opened up after x years, but i would just prefer the open source / open community coming together and creating just better open models overall.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#333

Post by Smaug123 »

nkrisc wrote: post #317
Smaug123 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); Rob Pike was third on Opus's list per https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 .

If the creators set the LLM in motion, then the creators sent the letter. If I put my car in neutral and push it down a hill, I’m responsible for whatever happens.

I merely answered your question!

> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?

Answer according to your definitions: false premise, the author (the person who set up the LLM loops) was not grateful enough to want to send such a letter.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#334

Post by dmd »

maplethorpe wrote: post #292
blibble wrote: post #241

> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more

What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

Er... yes? Obviously? What are you even asking?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#336

Post by delichon »

When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.

I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#337

Post by skywhopper »

nkohari wrote: post #308
jabedude wrote: post #252

Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?

Yeah, I'm conflicted about the use of AI for creative endeavors as much as anyone, but Google is an advertising company. It was acceptable for them to build a massive empire around mining private information for the purposes of advertisement, but generative AI is now somehow beyond the pale? People can change their mind, but Rob crashing out about AI now feels awfully revisionist. (NB: I am currently working in AI, a…

It’s certainly possible to see genAI as a step beyond adtech as a waste of resources built on an unethical foundation of misuse of data. Just because you’re okay with lumping them together doesn’t mean Rob has to.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#338

Post by amvrrysmrthaker »

tomlue wrote: post #267
nkrisc wrote: post #227

What 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?

I think what all theses kinds of comments miss is that AI can be help people to express their own ideas. I used AI to write a thank you to a non-english speaking relative. A person struggling with dimentia can use AI to help remember the words they lost. These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us…

What beautiful things? It just comes across as immoral and lazy to me. How beautiful.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#339

Post by xoogthrowkappa »

epolanski wrote: post #221
cm2012 wrote: post #212

[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 see GP is talking more about Netflix and the like, but user-generated video is horrendously expensive too. I'm pretty sure that, at least before the gen AI boom, ffmpeg was by far the biggest consumer of Google's total computational capacity, like 10-20%.

The ecology argument just seems self-defeating for tech nerds. We aren't exactly planting trees out here.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#340

Post by dale_glass »

sojournerc wrote: post #318
Sol- wrote: post #238

[flagged]

Food is frivolous!? Good God the future is bleak.

Food isn't frivolous, meat arguably is if you're talking about efficiency.

You've got to feed a cow for a year and half until it's slaughtered. That's a whole lot of input, for a cow's worth of meat output.

Post reply on HN