What even was this email? Some kind of promotional spam, I assume, to target senior+ engineers on some mailing list with the hope to flatter them and get them to try out their SaaS?
Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#502The 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…
Are you a boss or a worker? That's the real divide, for the most part. Bosses love AI - when your job is just sending emails and attending remote meetings, letting LLM write emails for you and summarize meetings is a godsend. Now you can go from doing 4 hours of work a week to 0 hours! And they let you fantasize about finally killing off those annoying workers and replace them with robots that never stop working and never say no.
Workers hate AI, not just because the output is middling slop forced on them from the top but because the message from the top is clear - the goal is mass unemployment and concentration of wealth by the elite unseen by humanity since the year 1789 in France.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#503Shouldn'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…
AIs don’t respect BSD / MIT which require attribution any more than they respect GPL.
(fwiw, I do agree gpl is better as it would stop what’s happening with Android becoming slowly proprietary etc but I don’t think it helps vs ai)
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#504Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all. It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
> On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. That's because the credit is taken by the person running the AI, and every problem is blamed on the AI. LLMs don't have rights.
You wish. AI has no shortage of people like you trying so hard to give it credit for anything. I mean, just ask yourself. You had to try so hard that you, in your other comment, ended up hallucinating achievements of a degree that Rob Pike can only dream of but yet so vague that you can't describe them in any detail whatsoever.
> But I think in the aggregate ChatGPT has solved more problems, and created more things, than Rob Pike did
Other people see that kind of statement for what it is and don't buy any of it.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#505https://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 respe…
Its not really a glass house.
Pike's main point is that training AI at that scale requires huge amounts of resources. Markov chains did not.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#506I liked the thread sharing feature of BluSky.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#507It's hard to realize that the thing you've spent decades of your life working on can be done by a robot. It's quite dehumanizing. I'm sure it felt the same way to shoemakers.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#508https://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 respe…
This is really getting desperate. Markov chains were fun in those days. You might as well say that anyone who ever wrote an IRC bot is not allowed to criticize current day "AI".
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#509https://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 respe…
I don't think he stole entirety of published copyrighted works to make it
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? Welcome to 2025. https://openai.com/index/superhuman/
This is verging on parody. What is the point of emails if it’s just AI talking to each other?
They're not hiding it. Normally everyone here laps this shit up and asks for seconds.
> They’ve used OpenAI’s API to build a suite of next-gen AI email products that are saving users time, driving value, and increasing engagement.
No time to waste on pesky human interactions, AI is better than you to get engagement.
Get back to work.