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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#681

Post by trinsic2 »

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…

I hear you. and I think AI has some good uses esp. assisting with challenges like you mentioned. I think whats happening is that these companies are developing this stuff without transparency on how its being used, there is zero accountability, and they are forcing some of these tech into our lives with out giving us a choice.

So Im sorry but much of it is being abused and the parts of it being abused needs to stop.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#682

Post by overgard »

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…

Manual transmissions are still great! More fun to drive and an excellent anti-theft device.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#683

Post by montag »

ineedasername wrote: post #662

The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the par…

I disagree completely.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#684

Post by gaws »

ineedasername wrote: post #662

The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the par…

He got his bag. He doesn't care anymore.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#687

Post by tomlue »

trinsic2 wrote: post #681
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 hear you. and I think AI has some good uses esp. assisting with challenges like you mentioned. I think whats happening is that these companies are developing this stuff without transparency on how its being used, there is zero accountability, and they are forcing some of these tech into our lives with out giving us a choice. So Im sorry but much of it is being abused and the parts of it being abused needs to stop.

I agree about the abuse, and the OP is probably a good example of that. Do you have any ideas on how to curtail abuse?

Ideas I often hear usually assume it is easy to discern AI content from human, which is wrong, especially at scale. Either that, or they involve some form of extreme censorship.

Microtransactions might work by making it expensive run bots while costing human users very little. I'm not sure this is practical either though, and has plenty of downsides as well.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#688

Post by xuhu »

ineedasername wrote: post #662

The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the par…

He worked on: Go, the Sawzall language for processing logs, and distributed systems. Go and Sawzall are usable and used outside Google.

Are those distributed systems valuable primarily to Google, or are they related to Kubernetes et cetera ?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#689

Post by CerryuDu »

ineedasername wrote: post #662

The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the par…

Don't be ridiculous. Google has been doing many things, some of those even nearly good. The super talented/prolific/capable have always gravitated to powerful maecenases. (This applies to Haydn and Händel, too.) If you uncompromisingly filter potential employers by "purely a blessing for society", you'll never find an employment that is both gainful and a match for your exceptional talents. Pike didn't make a deal with the devil any more than Leslie Lamport or Simon Peyton Jones did (each of whom had worked for 20+ years at Microsoft, and has advanced the field immensely).

As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent. But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer.

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