“People love AI”
Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
651–660 of 1001 posts
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#652Big 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
How do you reconcile the sense that there's a vibe shift with the usage numbers: about a billion weekly users of ChatGPT and Gemini and continuing to grow.
It’s a bit cheating though particularly for Gemini. It’s been inserted into something that already had high usage numbers.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#653FYI, 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…
I got one of these stupid emails too. I’m guessing it spammed a lot of people. I’m not mad at AI, but at the people at this organisation who irresponsibly chose to connect a model to the internet and allow it to do dumb shit like this.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#654Did 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"?
I really hate this kind of lazy argument: Oh. do you use toilet paper? Then kindly keep your mouth shut while we burn the planet down.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#655This will get buried but one thing that really grinds my gears are parents whose kids are right now struggling to get a job. Yet the parents are super bullish on AI. Read the room guys.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#656Imagine a horse ranting about cars...
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#657https://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 think you're misrepresenting what Pike is mad about, why he's as mad as he is, and what Markov bots are.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#658https://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.
At the risk of being pedantic, it's not AI that requires massive resources, chatgpt 3.x was trained on a few million dollars. The jump to trillions being table stakes happened because everyone started using free services and there was just too much money in the hands of these tech companies. Among other things.
There are so many chickens that are coming home to roost where LLMs was just the catalyst.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#659The 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…
Are you waiting for things to get cheaper? Have you been around the last 20 years or so? Nothing gets cheaper for consumers in a capitalist society. I remember in Canada, in 2001 right when americans were at war with the entire middle east and gas prices for the first time went over a dollar a litre. People kept saying that it was understandable that it affected gas prices because the supply chain got more expensive.…
>You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away?
The thing about capitalism that is seemingly never taught, but quickly learned (when you join even the lowest rung of the capitalist class, i.e. even having an etsy shop), is that competition lowers prices and kills greed, while being a tool of greed itself.
The conspiracy to get around this cognitive dissonance is "price fixing", but in order to price fix you cannot be greedy, because if you are greedy and price fix, your greed will drive you to undercut everyone else in the agreement. So price fixing never really works, except those like 3 cases out of the hundreds of billions of products sold daily, that people repeat incessantly for 20 years now.
Money flows to the one with the best price, not the highest price. The best price is what makes people rich. When the best price is out of reach though, people will drum up conspiracy about it, which I guess should be expected.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#660Did 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"?
AFAIK Rob Pike has been retired for years.