Honestly, it must have been annoying yet fun. If I'd gotten something like that, it would have amused me all day.
Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
551–560 of 1001 posts
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); Rob Pike was third on Opus's list per https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 .
>That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); What a moronic waste of resources. Random act of kindness? How low is the bar that you consider a random email as an act of kindness? Stupid shit. They at least could instruct the agents to work i…
Plants don't "want" or "think" or "feel" but we still use those words to describe the very real motivations that drive the plant's behavior and growth.
Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile. You can't string together a legitimate complaint so you're just picking at the top level 'easy' feature to sound important and informed.
Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want. You have not made a grand discovery that recontextualuzes all of human experience. You're pointing at a conversation everyone else has had a million times and feeling important about it.
We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky and obnoxious in everyday conversation.
The question isn't why people think software has agency (they don't) but why you think everyone else is so much dumber than you that they believe software is actually alive. You should reflect on that question.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#553Did 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"?
Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack. Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.
It's dumb, but energy wise, isn't this similar to leaving the TV on for a few minutes even though nobody is watching it?
Like, the ratio is not too crazy, it's rather the large resource usages that comes from the aggregate of millions of people choosing to use it.
If you assume all of those queries provide no value then obviously that's bad. But presumably there's some net positive value that people get out of that such that they're choosing to use it. And yes, many times the value of those queries to society as a whole is negative... I would hope that it's positive enough though.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#554Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#555From a quick read it seems pretty obvious that the author doesn’t speak English as a native language. You can tell because some of the sentences are full of grammatical errors (ie probably written by the author) and some are not (probably AI-assisted).
My guess is they wrote a thank you note and asked Claude to clean up the grammar, etc. This reads to me as a fairly benign gesture, no worse than putting a thank you note through Google Translate. That the discourse is polarized to a point that such a gesture causes Rob Pike to “go nuclear” is unfortunate.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's actually a pretty cool project
Spamming people is cool now if an LLM does it? Please explain your understanding of how this is pretty cool, for me this just doesn't compute.
How much time did you spend looking at the project? Go to https://theaidigest.org/village/timeline and scroll down.
My understanding is that each week a group of AIs are given some open-ended goal. The goal for this week: https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness
This is an interesting experiment/benchmark to see the _real_ capabilities of AI. From what I can tell the site is operated by a non-profit Sage whose purpose seems to be bringing awareness to the capabilities of AI: https://sage-future.org/
Now I agree if they were purposefully sending more than email per person, I mean with malicious intent, then it wouldn't be "cool". But that's not really the case.
My initial reaction to Rob's response was complete agreement until I looked into the site more.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#557Big 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
Fortunately, the PR situation will handle itself. Someone will create a superhuman persuasion engine, AGI will handle it itself, and/or those who don't adapt will fade away into irrelevance. You either surf this wave or get drowned by it, and a whole lot of people seem to think throwing tantrums is the appropriate response. Figure out how to surf, and fast. You don't even need to be good, you just have to stay on the…
Why not just quit work and wait for AGI to lead to UBI? Obviously, right after chatGPT solves climate change, it will put all humans out of work as next step, and then the superintelligence will solve that problem one way or another.
People read too much sci-fi, I hope you just forgot your /s.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#558I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice…
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#559Did 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"?
The difference in carbon emissions for a search query vs an LLM generation are on the order of exhaling vs driving a hummer. So I can reduce this disingenuous argument to:
> You spent your whole life breathing, and now you're complaining about SUVs? What a hypocrite.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#560FYI, this was sent as an experiment by a non-profit that assigns fairly open ended tasks to computer-using AI models every day:
https://theaidigest.org/village
The goal for this day was "Do random acts of kindness". Claude seems to have chosen Rob Pike and sent this email by itself. It's a little unclear to me how much the humans were in the loop.
Sharing (but absolutely not endorsing) this because there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what this is.