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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#351

Post by kenferry »

Smaug123 wrote: post #249
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?

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 .

Wow. The people who set this up are obnoxious. It’s just spamming all the most important people it can think of? I wouldn’t appreciate such a note from an ai process, so why do they think rob pike would.

They’ve clearly bought too much into AI hype if they thought telling the agent to “do good” would work. The result was obviously pissing the hell out of rob pike. They should stop it.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#352

Post by amvrrysmrthaker »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #314

Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...…

It’s in our power to stop it. There’s no point in people like you promoting the interests of the super wealthy at the cost of the humanity of the common people. You should figure out how to positively contribute or not do so at all.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#354

Post by vegabook »

Shouldn't have licenced Golang BSD if that's the attitude. Everybody for years including here on HN denigrated GPLv3 and other "viral" licences, because they were a hindrance to monetisation. Well, you got what you wished for. Someone else is monetising the be*jesus out of you so complaining now is just silly.

All of a sudden copyleft may be the only licences actually able to force models to account, hopefully with huge fines and/or forcibly open sourcing any code they emit (which would effectively kill them). And I'm not so pessimistic that this won't get used in huge court cases because the available penalties are enormous given these models' financial resources.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#355

Post by mold_aid »

olivierestsage wrote: post #296

Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation

Yeah I also like the "And yet other technologies also use water, hmmm, curious" responses

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#356

Post by amvrrysmrthaker »

robinhouston wrote: post #266

Maybe I just live in a bubble, but from what I’ve seen so far software engineers have mostly responded in a fairly measured way to the recent advances in AI, at least compared to some other online communities. It would be a shame if the discourse became so emotionally heated that software people felt obliged to pick a side. Rob Pike is of course entitled to feel as he does, but I hope we don’t get to a situation wher…

Software people take a measured response because they’re getting paid 6 figure salaries to do the intellectual output of a smart high school student. As soon as that money parade ends they’ll be as angry as the artists.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#357

Post by dbcpp »

The thing that drives me crazy is that it isn't even clear if AI is providing economic value yet (am I missing something there?). Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.

The messaging from AI companies is "we're going to cure cancer" and "you're going to live to be 150 years old" (I don't believe these claims!). The messaging should be "everything will be cheaper" (but this hasn't come true yet!).

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#358

Post by tntxtnt »

I get why Microsoflt loves AI so much - it basically devour and destroy open source software. Copyleft/copyright/any license is basically trash now. No one will ever want to open source their code ever again.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#359

Post by DiscourseFan »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #343
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"?

Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack. Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

Somebody just burned their refuse in a developing country somewhere. I guess if it was cold, at least they were warming themselves up.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#360

Post by lwhi »

pdpi wrote: post #256
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

That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water. The Open Source movement has been a gigantic boon on the whole of computing, and it would be a terrible shame to lose that ad a knee jerk reaction to genAI

The promise and freedom of open source has been exploited by the least egalitarian and most capitalist forces on the planet.

I would never have imagined things turning out this way, and yet, here we are.

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