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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#541

Post by Capricorn2481 »

tomlue wrote: post #267
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?

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…

> 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 to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas

The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you.

There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#543

Post by monsieurgaufre »

maplethorpe wrote: post #292
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

What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

Yes.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#544

Post by mackeye »

sethammons wrote: post #175
zmmmmm wrote: post #82

It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.

People used to handwrite letters. Getting a printed letter was an insult.

if a handwritten letter is a "faithful image," then say a typed letter or email is a simulacra, with little original today. an AI letter is a step below, wherein the words have utterly no meaning, and the gesture of bothering to send the email at all is the only available intention to read into. i get this is hyperbole, but it's still reductive to equate such unique intentions

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#545

Post by stego-tech »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #345

All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing. To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make. Just the haters here.

This. Folks trying to nullify his current position based on his recent work history alone with Google are deliberately trying to undermine his credibility through distraction tactics.

Don’t upvote sealions.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#546

Post by FeepingCreature »

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?

You don't because it isn't, unless it actually copies significant amounts of text.

Algorithms can not be copyrighted. Text can be copyrighted, but reading publicly available text and then learning from it and writing your own text is just simply not the sort of transformation that copyright reserves to the author.

Now, sometimes LLMs do quote GPL sources verbatim (if they're trained wrong). You can prove this with a simple text comparison, same as any other copyright violation.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#547

Post by pokstad »

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"?

This reminds me of how many Facebook employees were mad at Zuckerberg for going MAGA, but didn’t make any loud noise at the rapid rise of teenagers committing suicide or the misinformation and censorship done by their platform. People have blinders on.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#548

Post by qudat »

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…

Andrej talked about this in a podcast with dwarkesh: the same is true for the internet. You will not find a massive spike when LLMs were released. It becomes embedded in the economy and you’ll see a gradual rise. Further, the kind of impact that the internet had took decades, the same will be true for LLMs.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#549

Post by thatguymike »

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?

The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#550

Post by hnisforjakases »

hahahacorn wrote: post #222

If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying). GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse. Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear ov…

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