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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#491

Post by [deleted] »

christophilus wrote: post #475
vegabook wrote: post #354

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 h…

I tend to agree, but I wonder… if you train an LLM on only GPL code, and it generates non-deterministic predictions derived from those sources, how do you prove it’s in violation?

[deleted]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#492

Post by mdavidn »

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

This holiday season, hearing my parents rant about AI features unnaturally forced onto their daily gadgets warmed my heart.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#493

Post by cons0le »

tgv wrote: post #450
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"?

Oh look, the purity police have arrived, and this time they're the AI-bros. How righteous does one have to be before being allowed to voice criticism?

I've tried many times here to voice my reservations against AI. I've been accused of being on the "anti AI hype train" multiple times today.

As if there isn't a massive pro AI hype train. I watched an nfl game for the first time in 5 years, and saw no less than 8 AI commercials. AI Is being forced on people.

In commercials people were using it to generate holiday cards for God sake. I can't imagine something more cold and impersonal. I don't want that garbage. Our time on earth is to short to wade through LLM slop text

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#494

Post by pier25 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #436
mold_aid wrote: post #216

Woke up to this bsky thread this am. If "agentic" AI means some product spams my inbox with a compliment so back-handed you'd think you were a 60 Minutes staffer, then I'd say the end result of these products is simply to annoy us into acquiescence

Somebody at Anthropic committed a seriously stupid PR mistake.

they thought this would be a brilliant marketing campaign... oopsie

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#495

Post by sungho_ »

lesostep wrote: post #201
da_grift_shift wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permalink for the spam operation: https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness The homepage will change in 11 hours to a new task for the LLMs to harass people with. Posted timestamped examples of the spam here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950

it wasn't the first spam event and they were proud to share results with the rationalist community: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RuzfkYDpLaY3K7g6T/what-do-we... " In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, d…

"....what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses"

It went well, right?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#496

Post by mikojan »

eleventen wrote: post #423
bigbluedots wrote: post #370

It is nice to hear someone who is so influential just come out and say it. At my workplace, the expectation is that everyone will use AI in their daily software dev work. It's a difficult position for those of us who feel that using AI is immoral due to the large scale theft of the labor of many of our fellow developers, not to mention the many huge data centers being built and their need for electricity, pushing up…

I truly don’t understand this tendency among tech workers. We were contributing to natural resource destruction in exchange for salary and GDP growth before GenAI, and we’re doing the same after. The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect. Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful. We’ve been compromising on…

OpenAI's AI data centers will consume as much electricity as the entire nation of India by 2033 if they hit their internal targets[0].

No, this is not the same.

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#497

Post by SoftTalker »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #465
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

You can call me a luddite if you want. Or you might call me a humanist, in a very specific sense - and not the sense of the normal definition of the word. When I go to the grocery store, I prefer to go through the checkout lines, rather than the scan-it-yourself lines. Yeah, I pay the same amount of money. Yeah, I may get through the scan-it-yourself line faster. But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me abou…

When the self checkout machine gets confused, as it frequently does, and needs a human to intervene, you get a little bit of connection there. You can both gripe about how stupid the machines are.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#498

Post by AnimalMuppet »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #410
delichon wrote: post #336

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 wit…

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. An easy way to answer this question, at least on a preliminary basis, is to ask how many times in the past the ludds have been right in the long run. About anything , from cameras…

The luddites have been right to some degree about second-order effects.

Some of them said that TV was making us mindless. Some of them said that electronic communication was depersonalizing. Some of them said that social media was algorithms feeding us anything that would make us keep clicking.

They weren't entirely wrong.

AI may be a very useful tool. (TV is. Electronic communication is. Social media is.) But what it does to us may not be all positive.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#499

Post by observationist »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney

Pike, stone throwing, glass houses, etc.

The AI village experiment is cool, and it's a useful example of frontier model capabilities. It's also ok not to like things.

Pike had the option of ignoring it, but apparently throwing a thoughtless, hypocritical, incoherently targeted tantrum is the appropriate move? Not a great look, especially for someone we're supposed to respect as an elder.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#500

Post by PunchyHamster »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #478
dbcpp wrote: post #357

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 "every…

I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company. Ironically it's the very MIT report that "found AI to be a flop" (remember the "MIT study finds almost every AI initiative fails"), that also found that virtually every single worker is using AI (just not company AI, hence the flop part). At this point, it's only people with an ideological op…

It's been good at enabling the clueless to get to performance of a junior developer, and saving few % of the time for the mid to senior level developer (at best). Also amazing at automating stuff for scammers...

The cost is just not worth the benefit. If it was just an AI company using profits from AI to improve AI that would be another thing but we're in massive speculative bubble that ruined not only computer hardware prices (that affect every tech firm) but power prices (that affect everyone). All coz govt want to hide recession they themselves created because on paper it makes line go up

> I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company.

Well then congratulations on being in the 5%. That doesn't really change the point.

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