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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#521

Post by lionkor »

dgellow wrote: post #412
tntxtnt wrote: post #358

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.

Not just code. You can plagiarize pretty much any content. Just prompt the model to make it look unique, and that’s it, in 30s you have a whole copy of someone’s else work in a way that cannot easily be identified as plagiarism.

There is still value in quality and craftsmanship. You might not be of that opinion, and you might not know anyone who is, but I do.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#522

Post by ThinkingGuy »

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…

If you're not already familiar, you sound like you may enjoy the works of Douglas Rushkoff:

https://rushkoff.com/

https://teamhuman.fm

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#523

Post by dbcpp »

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…

Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations.

Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters.

The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#524

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

tntxtnt wrote: post #358

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.

Maybe someone should vibe code the entire MS Office Suite and see how much they like that. Maybe add AD while they are at it. I'm for it if that frees European companies from the MS lock in.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#525

Post by lionkor »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #116
wrs wrote: post #19

To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails. At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly. [0] https://theaidigest.org/village

That's actually a pretty cool project

Name what value it adds to the world.

Its not art, so then it must ass value to be "cool", no?

Is it entertainment? Like ding dong ditching is entertainment?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#526

Post by Leynos »

namuol wrote: post #501

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?

The AI village was given the goal of spreading acts of kindness:

https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#527

Post by lokar »

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…

Not all of AI is consumer LLM chatbots and image generators.

AI has a massive positive impact, and has for decades.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#528

Post by tomlue »

simonask wrote: post #299
tomlue wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing. You can achieve these things, but this is a way to not do the work , by copying from people who did do the work, giving them zero credit. (As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.)

> I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.

Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI.

> As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.

This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people.

I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#529

Post by evdubs »

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…

> 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.

It's not about reading. It's about output. When you start producing output in line with Rob's work that is confidently incorrect and sloppy, people will feel just as they do when LLMs produce output that is confidently incorrect and sloppy. No one is threatened if someone trains an LLM and does nothing with it.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#530

Post by gtowey »

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…

> Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.

It has enormous benefits to the people who control the companies raking in billions in investor funding.

And to the early stage investors who see the valuations skyrocket and can sell their stake to the bagholders.

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