Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation • Hacker News Board

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#381

Post by pickleRick243 » Mon, May 18, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

lancebeet wrote: post #87

rdtsc wrote: post #55

> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.” How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of…

I think his train of thought is "young graduates generally aren't anti-immigration, so if I insinuate they're anti-immigration if they disagree with me they will be convinced by my argument". I don't think we need to read much more than that into it.

He's just trying to meet the graduates at their intellectual level, since the graduates' boos operate at about the same level of depth.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#382

Post by ryandrake » Mon, May 18, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #319

abtinf wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouting people down isn’t “open debate”.

Shouting people with power down is the closest to an open debate you will get with them. No one with power like Schmidt will join in an open debate with you and me (well, unless you are one of the 9-figure millionaires that might be around HN), they circulate around others with similar power, they don't engage with the powerless, they have no need for it. They are not having a debate with us about rolling out AI, the…

These guys are obviously both tone deaf and totally unconcerned with the desires and fears of the next generation of hopeful knowledge workers. To have the audacity and callousness to stand in front of a group of people you are hoping to destroy for profit, and talk about the technology you are going to use to do this… I’m surprised these guys are only getting booed.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#383

Post by pickleRick243 » Mon, May 18, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

nunez wrote: post #335

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…

> 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 might not know that those assets are AI-generated. It's easy to not know if you don't have this stuff (somehow) constantly shoved into your face. I had a sticker on my water bottle from a brewery for several days.…

"Normal people" are not that political. They don't automatically change their opinion about a picture they like because they find out it was AI generated. They say, "oh that's interesting, I guess I should keep an eye out for this AI generated stuff. I heard a lot of it is slop, but it seems they can make some really cool stuff now".

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#384

Post by ChrisArchitect » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#385

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

"While the computer connected people, "democratized knowledge" and lifted many out of poverty, it also carried a darker side, Schmidt said.

"The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you're using now, also degraded the public square," he said. "They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society."

Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer - and was immediately met with boos."

In other words, he tried to promote Silicon Valley's shift away from one "business model" (e.g., search, social media) to another

YouTube is among the "platforms" that are "rewarding outrage" and "degrading the public square" in order to support an ad services business. The days of this "business model" may be numbered

As one unsustainable model fails, there is always another one to replace it. Maybe people are noticing the pattern

All these "business models" share something in common: use of a computer and a Silicon Valley middleman spying on peoples' computer use

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#386

Post by echelon » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #134

echelon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people running these companies give interviews every few months where the gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs. That was not the original narrative by any company. I was here ten years ago when WaveNet and DeepDream were first published. The media started shitting on this stuff immediately. DALL-E and Midjourney were not describing themselves as artist destroyers. GPT-3 was not hailed as…

I am a working artist. Professional visual artists were furious about DALL-E and Midjourney immediately . If you didn’t see this, or you weren’t aware of it, it’s a self-selection problem. Sam Altman was talking about how we neeeed UBI because AI was going to take everyone’s job very early in the development of LLMs. I have no idea why you don’t remember that, but it’s in writing everywhere.

Oh sure. But that was a different tone and audience.

The "it's stealing" arguments have quieted down. Especially since there are weights trained on fully licensed materials by Adobe and others.

Now that code models can do it, it's a moot point. Data can be found anywhere, and models are pretty good at generalizing out of domain, not unlike human brains.

Engineers finding out these models are good is drawing a lot of the same "slop" / "clanker" arguments that non-artists have been using. These arguments are much less interesting than arguments about copyright and control.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#387

Post by timmytokyo » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

panny wrote: post #238

mbgerring wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, and in a world where this technology is broadly available and not controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat, I can see how this could be a good outcome. But that’s not the situation we’re in. For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital t…

>controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat This has been the situation for CPUs for decades. We now carry a 1980 cray super computer in our pockets. >For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive. They won't need to engine…

>The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.

So, in other words, a utopian scenario totally divorced from historical precedent and present reality.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#388

Post by echelon » Mon, May 18, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #252

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,…

Which GPU cloud instance are you using?

Lambda, RunPod, and I've used GCP and AWS instances and clusters too.

I'd prefer if we had a more open version of all of this. That's where open source will matter.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#389

Post by spixy » Mon, May 18, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #114

Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to…

health - issue detection, cancer treatments, new drugs creation, etc..

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#390

Post by xwkd » Mon, May 18, 2026, 7:31 PM UTC

I watched the whole commencement, and it seems that Eric Schmidt himself was booed louder than anything "AI" that came before him in the program. The students had strong reactions to almost every statement he made. If you listen to the other speakers... it's generally positive / calm. The media characterization of this event seems inaccurate, to be generous.