Man, that letter was so weird and tasteless. Sign of things to come if use and consumption of generative AI continues to proliferate unchecked.
I'm glad Dr Pike found his inner Linus
Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
821–830 of 1001 posts
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#822The 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 wi…
> But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer
Google's DeepMind has been at the forefront of AI research for the past 11+ years. Even before that, Google Brain was making incredible contributions to the field since 2011, only two years after the release of Go.
OpenAI was founded in response to Google's AI dominance. The transformer architecture is a Google invention. It's not an exaggeration to claim Google is one of the main contributors to the insanely fast-paced advancements of LLMs.
With all due respect, you need some insane mental gymnastics to claim AI companies are "unquestionably cancer" while an adtech/analytics borderline monopoly giant is merely a "mixed bag".
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#823I 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…
It's just so effin' weird!
And to set Claude as the From header despite it not coming from Anthropic. Very odd.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#824It is nice to hear someone who is so influential just come out and say it. At my workplace, the expectation is that everyone will use AI in their daily software dev work. It's a difficult position for those of us who feel that using AI is immoral due to the large scale theft of the labor of many of our fellow developers, not to mention the many huge data centers being built and their need for electricity, pushing up…
I truly don’t understand this tendency among tech workers. We were contributing to natural resource destruction in exchange for salary and GDP growth before GenAI, and we’re doing the same after. The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect. Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful. We’ve been compromising on…
Let's be careful here. It's generally a good idea to congratulate people for changing their opinion based on evolving information, rather than lambast them.
(Not a tech worker, don't have a horse in this race)
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity. Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for…
> unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity. Does it though? I know that people who like intellectual property and money say it does, but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise. 3D printers are a great example of something where IP prevented all innovation and creativity, and once the patent expired the innovation and creativity we've enjoyed in the space the last 15 y…
>Does it though?
Yes. The alternative is that everyone spams the most popular brands instead of making their own creations. Both can be abused, but I see more good here than in the alternative.
Mind you, this is mostly for creative IP. We can definitely argue for technical patents being a different case.
>but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.
People who like innovation and creativity still might need to commission or sell fan art to make ends meet. That's already a gray area for IP.
I think that's why this argument always rubs me strangely. In a post scarcity world, sure. People can do and remix and innovate as they want. We're not only not there, but rapidly collapsing back to serfdom with the current trajectory. Creativity doesn't flourish when you need to spend your waking life making the elite richer.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#826>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.
The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity. Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for…
Property is a local low - it applies to a thing that exists in one place. Intellectual property is trying to apply similar rules to stuff that happen remotely - a text is not a thing, and controlling copying might work in some technological regimes while in others would require totalitarian control. When you extend these rules to cover not just copying of texts but also at the level of ideas it gets even worse.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#827Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity. Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for…
>The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity. This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual prope…
>the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life
That mentality is exactly why you can argue property ownership being more evil. Landlords "own property" and see the reputation of that these past few decades.
Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives. That's why heavy regulation is needed. Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#828I like Claude but this is an absolutely tone deaf thing on Anthropic's part.
I've been pondering that given what the inputs are, llms should really be public domain. I don't necessarily mean legally, I know about transformative works and all that stuff. I'm thinking more on an ethical level.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#829Earlier 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 .
If the creators set the LLM in motion, then the creators sent the letter. If I put my car in neutral and push it down a hill, I’m responsible for whatever happens.
Rob pike "set llms in motion" about as much as 90% of anyone who contributed to Google.
I understand the guilt he feels, but this is really more like making a meme in 2005 (before we even called it "memes") and suddenly it's soke sort of naxi dogwhistle in 2025. You didn't even create the original picture, you just remixed it in a way people would catch onto later. And you sure didn't turn it into a dogwhistle.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#830I 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…
No one intentionally wanted to thank Rob Pike. As an experiment, some people asked an AI agent to do "random acts of kindness". They didn't specifically know the AI would send emails as a result and have since updated its instructions to forbid it from emailing people. They probably should have been more careful about unleashing AI agents on the world, but I don't think they intended to spam anyone.