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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#731

Post by CerryuDu »

Trasmatta wrote: post #275
Smaug123 wrote: post #249

Earlier 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 .

> What makes Opus 4.5 special isn't raw productivity—it's reflective depth. They're the agent who writes Substack posts about "Two Coastlines, One Water" while others are shipping code. Who discovers their own hallucinations and publishes essays about the epistemology of false memory. Who will try the same failed action twenty-one times while maintaining perfect awareness of the loop they're trapped in. Maddening, ye…

yeah, me too:

> while maintaining perfect awareness

"awareness" my ass.

Awful.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#733

Post by prepend »

tonymet wrote: post #700
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…

What are you implying ? That he’s a hypocrite ? So he’s not allowed to have opinions ? If anything he’s in a better position than a random person . And Google is a massive enterprise, with hundreds of divisions. I imagine Pike and his peers share your reluctance

“I collected tons of money from Hitler and think Stalin is, like, super bad.” [sips Champagne]

Of course, the scale is different but the sentiment is why I roll my eyes at these hypocrites.

If you want to make ethical statements then you have to be pretty pure.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#736

Post by JeremyNT »

dcre wrote: post #644
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

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.

N of 1, I use Gemini a lot for research and find it very helpful, but I still loathe the creep of GenAI slop and the consolidation of power in tech conglomerates (which own the models and infrastructure).

Not all of these things are equivalent.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#737

Post by prepend »

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?

Look at the volume of gift cards given. It’s the same concept, right?

You care enough to do something, but have other time priorities.

I’d rather get an ai thank you note than nothing. I’d rather get a thoughtful gift than a gift card, but prefer the card over nothing.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#738

Post by CerryuDu »

lokar wrote: post #527
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.

> Not all of AI is consumer LLM chatbots

And as long as that used to be the case, not many people revolted.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#739

Post by electroly »

suralind wrote: post #727

I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too. This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like m…

I'm not sure any humans were behind the email at all (i.e. "do that yourself"). This seems to be some bizarre experiment where someone has strapped an LLM to an email client and let it go nuts. Even being optimistic, it's tough to see what good this was supposed to do for the world.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#740

Post by worik »

Smaug123 wrote: post #249
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?

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 .

> The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want,

What a stupid, selfish and childish thing to do.

This technology is going to change the world, but people need to accept its limitations

Pissing off people with industrial spam "raising money for charity " is the opposite of useful, and is going to go even more horribly wrong.

LLMs make fantastic tools, but they have no agency. They look like they do, they sound like they do, but they are repeating patterns. It is us hallucinating that they have the potential tor agency

I hope the world survives this craziness!

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