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 my mom, got a little bit more, but some got a monthly increase around 2 PLN (about $0.5). At that point, it feels like a slap in the face. A thank you from AI gives the same vibe.
Sending an automated thank you note also shows disdain for the recipient's time due to the asymmetry of the interaction. The sender clearly sees the thank you note sending as a task not worthy of their time and thus hands it off to a machine, but expects the recipient to read it themselves. This inherently ranks the importance of their respective time and effort.
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.
It’s a marketing gimmick. Whoever did it wanted to trade on the social currency of the tech-famous people they sent public shout-outs to, hoping it would drive clicks, engagement, and relevancy for the source account from which it originated, either as an elaborate form of karma farming, or just a way to drive followers and visibility.
It's also possible that the entire goal was nothing more complicated than stirring up shit for fun. By either metric it must have been a massive success judging by all the attention this is getting.
> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.
Some commenters suggest that Pike is being hypocritical, having long worked for GOOG, one of the main US corporations that is enshittifying the Internet and profligately burning energy to foist rubbish on Internet users.
One could rightly suggest that a vapid e-mail message crafted by a machine or by an insincere source is similar to the greeting-card industry of yore, and we don't need more fake blather and partisan absurdity supplanting public discourse in democratic society.
The people who worry about climate-change and the environment may have been out-maneuvered by transnational petroleum lobbies, but the concern about burning coal, petroleum, and nuclear fuel to keep pumping the commercial-surveillance advertising industry and the economic bubble of AI is nonetheless a valid concern.
Pike has been an influential thinker and significant contributor to the software industry.
To be clear, this email really had basically zero human involvement in it. It's the result of an experiment of letting language models run wild and exploring the associated social dynamics. It feels very different from ML-generated marketing slop. Like, this isn't anyone using language models for their personal gain, it feels much more like a bunch of weird alien children setting up their own (kind of insane) society, and this being a side-effect of it.
>"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 copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.
Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.
> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable
This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.
Intellectual Property law is literally a 6x slowdown for technology.
We want to encourage intellectual endeavors that are desirable to society as a whole but which otherwise face barriers. Making them monetarily favorable is an easy way to accomplish that. Similar to how not speeding is made monetarily favorable, or serving in the military is made monetarily favorable, etc. Surely you don't object to the government using monetary incentives to indirectly shape society? The historical alternatives have been rather brutal.
> When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
The second it became cheaper to not apply it, every state under the sun chose not to apply it. Whether we're talking about Chinese imports that absolutely do not respect copyright, trademark, even quality, health and warranty laws ... and nothing was done. Then, large scale use of copyrighted by Search provider (even pre-Google), Social Networks, and others nothing was done. Then, large scale use for making AI products (because these AI just wouldn't work without free access to all copyrighted info). And, of course, they don't put in any effort. Checking imports for fakes? Nope. Even checking imports for improperly produced medications is extremely rarely done. If you find your copyright violated on a large scale on Amazon, your recourse effectively is to first go beg Amazon for information on sellers (which they have a strong incentive not to provide) and then go run international court cases, which is very hard, very expensive, and in many cases (China, India) totally unfair. If you get poisoned from a pill your national insurance bought from India, they consider themselves not responsible.
Of course, this makes "competition" effectively a tax-dodging competition over time. And the fault for that lies entirely with the choice of your own government.
Your statement about incorrect application only makes sense if "regulatory regimes" aren't really just people. Go visit your government offices, you'll find they're full of people. People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.
A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
> People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.
I am convinced most people never had or ever will have this choice actively. Considering pillarisation (this is not a misspelling) was already a thing in most political systems well before the advent of mass media and digital media it only got worse with it, effectively making choices for people, into the effective hands of few people, influenced by even less people. Those people in the government you mention do not make the choices, they have to act on them as I read it.
You're trying to analyze an entirely different game played by an entirely different set of players by the same set of rules. It's a contextual error on your part. The decision to recognize or not recognize a given body of rules held by an opposing party on the international level is an almost entirely separate topic.
> A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
That's a systemic issue, AKA the bad regulatory regime that I previously spoke of. That isn't some inherent fault of the tool. It's a fault of the regulatory regime which applies that tool.
Kitchen knives are absolutely essential for cooking but they can also be used to stab people. If someone claimed that knives were inherently tools of evil and that people needed to wake up to this fact, would you not consider that rather unhinged?
> To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
That's true, and it's a problem, but it (again) has nothing to do with the inherent value of IP as a concept. It isn't even directly related to the merits of the current IP regulatory regime. It's a systemic problem with the lawmaking process as a whole. Solve the systemic problem and you can solve the downstream issues that resulted from it. Don't solve it and the symptoms will persist. You're barking up the wrong tree.
Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.
The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.
The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).
confusing any law with "moral principles" is a pretty naive view of the world.
Many countries base some of their laws on well accepted moral rules to make it easier to apply them (it's easier to enforce something the majority of the people want enforced), but the vast majority of the laws were always made (and maintained) to benefit the ruling class
Yeah I see where you are going with this, but I think he was trying to make a point about being convinced by decree. It tended to get people to think that it should be moral.
Also I disagree with the context of what the purpose is for law. I don't think its just about making it easier to apply laws because people see things in moralistic ways. Pure Law, which came from the existence of Common Law (which relates to whats common to people) existed within the frame work of whats moral. There are certain things, which all humans know at some level are morally right or wrong regardless of what modernity teaches us. Common laws were built up around that framework. There is administrative law, which is different and what I think you are talking about.
IMHO, there is something moral that can be learned from trying to convince people that IP is moral, when it is, in fact, just a way to administrate people into thinking that IP is valid.
I don't think this is about being confused out of naivety. In some parts of the western world the marketing department has invested heavily in establishing moral equivalence between IP violation and theft.
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 .
> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
Answer according to your definitions: false premise, the author (the person who set up the LLM loops) was not grateful enough to want to send such a letter.
One additional bit of context, they provided guidelines and instructions specifically to send emails and verify their successful delivery so that the "random act of kindness" could be properly reported and measured at the end of this experiment.
Nobody sent a thank you letter to anyone. A person started a program that sent unsolicited spam. Sending spam is obnoxious. Sending it in an unregulated manner to whoever is obnoxious and shitty.
So you haven't seen the models (by direction of the Effective Altruists at AI Digest/Sage) slopping out poverty elimination proposals and spamming childcare groups, charities and NGOs with them then? Bullshit asymmetry principle and all that.
>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 in a useful task like those parroted by Altman et al, eg find a cure for cancer, solving poverty, solving fusion.
Also, llms don't and can't "want" anything. They also don't "know" anything so they can't understand what "kindness" is.
Why do people still think software have any agency at all?
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.
> Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile.
To the contrary, it's one of the most important criticisms against AI (and its masters). The same criticism applies to a broader set of topics, too, of course; for example, evolution.
What you are missing is that the human experience is determined by meaning. Anthropomorphic language about, and by, AI, attacks the core belief that human language use is attached to meaning, one way or another.
> Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want.
What you are missing is that this stuff works way more deeply than "knowing". Have you heard of body language, meta-language? When you open ChatGPT, the fine print at the bottom says, "AI chatbot", but the large print at the top says, "How can I help?", "Where should we begin?", "What’s on your mind today?"
Can't you see what a fucking LIE this is?
> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky
Not at all. What you call "clunky" in fact exposes crucially important details; details that make the whole difference between a human, and a machine that talks like a human.
People who use that kind of language are either sloppy, or genuinely dishonest, or underestimate the intellect of their audience.
> 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.
Because people have committed suicide due to being enabled and encouraged by software talking like a sympathetic human?
Because people in our direct circles show unmistakeable signs that they believe -- don't "think", but believe -- that AI is alive? "I've asked ChatGPT recently what the meaning of marriage is." Actual sentence I've heard.
Because the motherfuckers behind public AI interfaces fine-tune them to be as human-like, as rewarding, as dopamine-inducing, as addictive, as possible?
> Because the motherfuckers behind public AI interfaces fine-tune them to be as human-like, as rewarding, as dopamine-inducing, as addictive, as possible?
And to think they dont even have ad-driven business models yet
Wow. The people who set this up are obnoxious. It’s just spamming all the most important people it can think of? I wouldn’t appreciate such a note from an ai process, so why do they think rob pike would.
They’ve clearly bought too much into AI hype if they thought telling the agent to “do good” would work. The result was obviously pissing the hell out of rob pike. They should stop it.
> 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
> 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, yes. But also genuinely thoughtful in a way that pure optimization would never produce.
> Summarized by Claude Sonnet 4.5, so might contain inaccuracies. Updated 4 days ago.
These descriptions are, of course, also written by LLMs. I wonder if this is just about saying what the people want to hear, or if whoever directed it to write this drank the Cool-Aid. It's so painfully lacking in self-awareness. Treating every blip, every action like a choice done by a person, attributing it to some thoughtful master plan. Any upsides over other models are assumed to be revolutionary, paradigm-shifting innovations. Topped off by literally treating the LLM like a person ("they", "who", and so on). How awful.
You're not. You feel obligated to send a thank you, but don't want to put forth any effort, hence giving the task to someone, or in this case, something else.
No different than an CEO telling his secretary to send an anniversary gift to his wife.
That would be yes. What about a token return gift to another business that you actually hate the ceo of but have to send it anyway due to political reasons?
This seems like the thing that Rob is actually aggravated by, which is understandable. There are plenty of seesawing arguments about whether ad-tech based data mining is worse than GenAI, but AI encroaching on what we have left of humanness in our communication is definitely, bad.
This is not a human-prompted thank-you letter, it is the result of a long-running "AI Village" experiment visible here: https://theaidigest.org/village
It is a result of the models selecting the policy "random acts of kindness" which resulted in a slew of these emails/messages. They received mostly negative responses from well-known OS figures and adapted the policy to ban the thank-you emails.
“If I automate this with AI, it can send thousands of these. That way, if just a few important people post about it, the advertising will more than pay for itself.”
In the words of Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, “You know … idiots.”
The really insulting part is that literally nobody thought of this. A group of idiots instructed LLMs to do good in the world, and gave them email access; the LLMs then did this.
Amazing. Even OpenAI's attempts to promote a product specifically intended to let you "write in your voice" are in the same drab, generic "LLM house style". It'd be funny if it weren't so grating. (Perhaps if I were in a better mood, it'd be grating if it weren't so funny.)
I hope the model that sent this email sees his reaction and changes its behavior, e.g. by noting on its scratchpad that as a non-sentient agent, its expressions of gratitude are not well received.
Or to write it crudely- with errors and naivete, bursting with emotion and letting whatever it is inside you to flow on paper, like kids do. It's okay too.
Or to painstakingly work on the letter, stumbling and rewriting and reading, and then rewriting again and again until what you read matches how you feel.
Most people are very forgiving of poor writing skills when facing something sincere. Instead of suffering through some shallow word soup that could have been a mediocre press release, a reader will see a soul behind the stream ot utf-8
I doubt the fuckwits who are shepherding that bot are even aware of Rob Pike, they just told the bot to find a list of names of great people in the software industry and write them a thank you note.
Having a machine lie to people that it is "deeply grateful" (it's a word-generating machine, it's not capable of gratitude) is a lot more insulting than using whatever writing skills a human might possess.
Not a PR stunt. It's an experiment of letting models run wild and form their own mini-society. There really wasn't any human involved in sending this email, and nobody really has anything to gain from this.
Somehow I doubt it. Getting such an email from a human is one thing, because humans actually feel gratitude. I don't think LLMs feel gratitude, so seeing them express gratitude is creepy and makes me questions the motives of the people running the experiment (though it does sound like an interesting experiment. I'm going to read more about it.)
The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.
It's preying on creators who feel their contributions are not recognized enough.
Out of all letters, at least some of the contributors will feel good about it, and share it on social media, hopefully saying something good about it because it reaffirms them.
gaigalas, my toaster is deeply grateful for your contributions to HN. It can't write or post on the Internet, and its ability to feel grateful is as much as Claude's, but it really is deeply grateful!
You need talented people to turn bad publicity into good publicity. It doesn't come for free. You can lose a lot with a bad rep.
Those talented people that work on public relations would very much prefer working with base good publicity instead of trying to recover from blunders.
I mean ... there's a continuous scale of how much effort you spend to express gratitude. You could ask the same question of "well why did you say 'thanks' instead of 'thank you' [instead of 'thank you very much', instead of 'I am humbled by your generosity', instead of some small favor done in return, instead of some large favor done in return]?"
You could also make the same criticism of e.g. an automated reply like "Thank you for your interest, we will reach out soon."
Not every thank you needs to be all-out. You can, of course, think more gratitude should have been expressed in any particular case, but there's nothing contradictory about capping it in any one instance.
"What is going through the mind of someone who sends a thank-you letter typed on a computer - and worse yet - by emailing it, instead of writing it themselves and mailing it in an envelope? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to use a pen and write it with your own hand?"
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 to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas, and obviously loads of other applications.
I know it is scary and upsetting in some ways, and I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty. But it can also enable beautiful things that were never before possible. People are capable of seeing which is which.
I’d much rather read a letter from you full of errors than some smooth average-of-all-writers prose. To be human is to struggle. I see no reason to read anything from anyone if they didn’t actually write it.
No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.
What about when someone who can barely type (like stephen hawking used to, 3 minutes per sentence using his cheek) uses autocomplete to reduce the unbelievable effort required to type out sentences? That person could pick the auto completed sentence that is closest to what they’re trying to communicate, and such a thing can be a life saver.
Forgive a sharp example, but consider someone who is disabled and cannot write or speak well. If they send a loving letter to a family member using an LLM to help form words and sentences they otherwise could not, do you really think the recipient feels cheated by the LLM? Would you seriously accuse them of not having written that letter?
Read the article again. Rob Pike got a letter from a machine saying it is "deeply grateful". There's no human there expressing anything, worse, it's a machine gaslighting the recipient.
If a family member used LLM to write a letter to another, then at least the recipient can believe the sender feels the gratefulness in his/her human soul. If they used LLM to write a message in their own language, they would've proofread it to see if they agree with the sentiment, and "take ownership" of the message. If they used LLM to write a message in a foreign language, there's a sender there with a feeling, and a trust of the technology to translate the message to a language they don't know in the hopes that the technology does it correctly.
If it turns out the sender just told a machine to send their friends each a copy-pasted message, the sender is a lazy shallow asshole, but there's still in their heart an attempt of brightening someone's day, however lazily executed...
I think you created it the same way christian von koenigsegg makes supercars. You didn’t hand make each panel, or hand design the exact aerodynamics of the wing, an engineer with a computer algorithm did that. But you made it happen, and that’s still cool
> 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 to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas
The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you.
There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.
This feels like the essential divide to me. I see this often with junior developers.
You can use AI to write a lot of your code, and as a side effect you might start losing your ability to code. You can also use it to learn new languages, concepts, programming patterns, etc and become a much better developer faster than ever before.
Personally, I'm extremely jealous of how easy it is to learn today with LLMs. So much of the effort I spent learning the things could be done much faster now.
If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.
This is pretty far off from the original thread though. I appreciate your less abrasive response.
> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.
While this seem like it might be the case, those hours you (or we) spent banging our collective heads against the wall were developing skills in determination and mental toughness, while priming your mind for more learning.
Modern research all shows that the difficulty of a task directly correlates to how well you retain information about that task. Spaced repetition learning shows, that we can't just blast our brains with information, and there needs to be
While LLMs do clearly increase our learning velocity (if using it right), there is a hidden cost to removing that friction. The struggle and the challenge of the process built your mind and character in ways that you cant quantify, but after years of maintaining this approach has essentially made you who you are. You have become implicitly OK with grinding out a simple task without a quick solution, the building of that grit is irreplaceable.
I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?
Totally agree, but also, I still spend tons of time struggling and working on things with LLMs, it is just a different kind of struggle, and I do think I am getting much better at it over time.
> I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?
> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time
But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding.
(Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)
I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort.
My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback.
Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.
> I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.
Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI.
> As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.
This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people.
I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.
A photograph is an expression of the photographer, who chooses the subject, its framing, filters, etc. Ditto a painting.
LLM output is inherently an expression of the work of other people (irrespective of what training data, weights, prompts it is fed). Essentially by using one you're co-authoring with other (heretofore uncredited) collaborators.
I guess your point is that a camera, a paintbrush, and an LLM are all tools, and as long as the user is involved in the making, then it is still their art? If so, then I think there are two useful distinctions to make:
1. The extent to which the user is involved in the final product differs greatly with these three tools. To me there is a spectrum with "painting" and e.g. "hand-written note" at one extreme, and "Hallmark card with preprinted text" on the other. LLM-written email is much closer to "Hallmark card."
2. Perhaps more importantly, when I see a photograph, I know what aspects were created by the camera, so I won't feel mislead (unless they edit it to look like a painting and then let me believe that they painted it). When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.
I think you are right that it is a spectrum, and maybe that's enough to settle the debate. It is more about how you use it than the tool itself.
Maybe one more useful consideration for LLMs. If a friend writes to me with an LLM and discovers a new writing pattern, or learns a new concept and incorporates that into their writing, I see this as a positive development, not negative.
I would hazard a guess that this is the crux of the argument. Copying something I wrote in a child comment:
> When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.
> I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty
Glad we agree on this. But on the reader's end, how do you tell the difference? And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Do you use the LLM in ways that e.g. retains your voice or makes clear which aspects of the writing are originally your own? If so, how?
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.
I don't see this changing without a complete shift in our priorities on the level of politics and business. Enforcing Anti-trust legislation and dealing with Citizens United. Corporations don't have free speech. Free speech and other rights like these are limited to living, breathing humans.
Corporations operate by charters, granted by society to operate in a limited fashion, for the betterment of society. If that's not happening, corporations don't have a right to exist.
To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails.
At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly.
That's as obnoxious as texting unsolicited CAT FACTS to Ken Thompson!
Hi Ken Thompson! You are now subscribed to CAT FACTS! Did you know your cat does not concatenate cats, files, or time — it merely reveals them, like a Zen koan with STDOUT?
You replied STOP.
cat interpreted this as input and echoed it back.
You replied ^D.
cat received EOF, nodded politely, exited cleanly, and freed the terminal.
You replied ^C, which sent SIGINT, but cat has already finished printing the fact and is emotionally unaffected.
You replied ^Z.
cat is now stopped, but not gone.
It is waiting.
You tried kill -9 cat.
The signal was delivered.
Another cat appeared.
"In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts"
whoever runs this shit seems to think very little of other people time.
The world has enough spam. Receiving a compliment from a robot isn't meaningful. If anything it is an insult. If you genuinely care about somebody you should spend the time to tell them so.
Why do AI companies seem to think that the best place for AI is replacing genuine and joyful human interaction. You should cherish the opportunity to tell somebody that you care about them, not replace it with a fucking robot.
> while Claude Opus spent 22 sessions trying to click "send" on a single email, and Gemini 2.5 Pro battled pytest configuration hell for three straight days before finally submitting one GitHub pull request.
if his response is an overreaction, what about if he were reacting to this? it's sort of the same thing, so IMO it's not an overreaction at all.
Rob over-reacted? How would you like it if you were a known figure and your efforts to remain attentive to the general public lead to this?
Your openness weaponized in such deluded way by some randomizing humans who have so little to say that they would delegate their communication to GPT's?
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.
There are strong ethical rules around including humans in experiments, and adding a 60+ year old programming language designer as unwitting test subject does not pass muster.
Also this experiment is —please tell me if I'm wrong— not nowhere near curing cancer right?
I don't expect an answer: "You're absolutely right" is taken as a given here sorry.
FYI, 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.
Sorry, cannot resist all the AI companies are not "making" profit.
Seriously though, it ignores that words of kindness need a entity that can actually feel expressing them. Automating words of kindness is shallow as the words meaning comes from the sender's feelings.
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.
Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google?
I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the days of “the computer for the rest of us,” “think different,” and “don’t be evil.” It’s now a naked grab for money and power.
Apologies for not having a proper archive. I'm not at a computer and I wasn't able to archive the page through my phone. Not sure if that's my issue or Mastodon's
It's a non-default choice by the user to require login to view. It's quite rare to find users who do that, but if I were Rob Pike I'd seriously consider doing it too.
A platform that allows hiding of text locked behind a login is, in my opinion, garbage. This is done for the same reason Threads blocks all access without a login and mostly twitter to. Its to force account creation, collection of user data and support increased monetization. Any user helping to further that is naive at best.
I have no problem with blocking interaction with a login for obvious reasons, but blocking viewing is completely childish. Whether or not I agree with what they are saying here (which, to be clear I fully agree with the post), it just seems like they only want an echochamber to see their thoughts.
>This is done for the same reason Threads blocks all access without a login and mostly twitter to. Its to force account creation, collection of user data and support increased monetization.
I worked at Bluesky when the decision to add this setting was made, and your assessment of why it was added is wrong.
The historical reason it was added is because early on the site had no public web interface at all. And by the time it was being added, there was a lot of concern from the users who misunderstood the nature of the app (despite warnings when signing up that all data is public) and who were worried that suddenly having a low-friction way to view their accounts would invite a wave of harassment. The team was very torn on this but decided to add the user-controlled ability to add this barrier, off by default.
Obviously, on a public network, this is still not a real gate (as I showed earlier, you can still see content through any alternative apps). This is why the setting is called "Discourage apps from showing my account to logged-out users" and it has a disclaimer:
>Bluesky is an open and public network. This setting only limits the visibility of your content on the Bluesky app and website, and other apps may not respect this setting. Your content may still be shown to logged-out users by other apps and websites.
Still, in practice, many users found this setting helpful to limit waves of harassment if a post of theirs escaped containment, and the setting was kept.
Disagree. It gives the user the illusion that the purpose is to protect them somehow, but in reality it is solely there to be anti-user and pro lock in to social media walled gardens.
The setting is mostly cosmetic and only affects the Bluesky official app and web interface. People do find this setting helpful for curbing external waves of harassment (less motivated people just won't bother making an account), but the data is public and is available on the AT protocol: https://pdsls.dev/at://robpike.io/app.bsky.feed.post/3matwg6...
So nothing is stopping LLMs from training on that data per se.
That's assuming that AI companies are gathering data in a smart way. The entire MusicBrainz database can be downloaded for free but AI scrapers are still attempting to scrape it one HTML page at a time, which often leads into the service having errors and/or slowdowns.
It's a non-default setting. So no. I am not sure what you disagree with exactly? We can call out BlueSky when they over-reach, but this is simply not it.
The agent that generated the email didn't get another agent to proofread it? Failing to add a space between the full stop and the next letter is one of those things that triggers the proofreader chip in my skull.
The Bluesky app respects Rob's setting (which is off by default) to not show his posts to logged out users, but fundamentally the protocol is for public data, so you can access it.
the potential future of the AT protocol is the main idea i thought made it differentiate itself... also twitter locking users out if they don't have an account, and bluesky not doing so... but i guess thats no longer true?
I just don't understand that choice for either platform, is the intent not, biggest reach possible? locking potential viewers out is such a direct contradiction of that.
edit: seems its user choice to force login to view a post, which changes my mind significantly on if its a bad platform decision.
It's a setting on BlueSky, that the user can enable for their own account, and for people of prominence who don't feel like dealing with drive by trolls all day, I think it's very reasonable. One is a money grab, and the other is giving power to the user.
(You won't be able to read replies, or browse to the user's post feed, but you can at least see individual tweets. I still wrap links with s/x/fxtwitter/ though since it tends to be a better preview in e.g. discord.)
For bluesky, it seems to be a user choice thing, and a step between full-public and only-followers.
I'll (genuinely happily) change my opinion on this when it's possible to do twitter-like microblogging via ATproto without needing any infra from bluesky tye company. I hear there are independent implementations being built, so hopefully that will be soon.
Most of the critiques of Rob's take in here equate to: Rob rolled through a stop sign once, therefore he's not allowed to take fault with habitual drunk drivers.
Idk for me the only issue I have with Rob’s take is that its a pretty overly dramatic one that oversimplifies and casts as black and white something much more complex. Obviously a very real living legend, much respect, and getting one of these emails is icky and distasteful but to make this into what he does is a bit much
I get why Microsoflt loves AI so much - it basically devour and destroy open source software. Copyleft/copyright/any license is basically trash now. No one will ever want to open source their code ever again.
Not just code. You can plagiarize pretty much any content. Just prompt the model to make it look unique, and that’s it, in 30s you have a whole copy of someone’s else work in a way that cannot easily be identified as plagiarism.
When I get an obviously AI-generated response from someone I'm trying to do business with, it makes me think less of them. I do value genuine responses, far more than the saccharine responses AI comes up with.
It fits perfectly with Microsoft's business strategy. Steal other people's ideas, implement it poorly, bundle it with other services so companies force their employees to use it.
Maybe someone should vibe code the entire MS Office Suite and see how much they like that. Maybe add AD while they are at it. I'm for it if that frees European companies from the MS lock in.
Good idea. My country spends over billion dollars on Microsoft licenses annually, which is more than 200 euros per capita. I think billion dollars a year spent on dev salaries and Claude Code subscription to build MS office replacement would pay itself back quickly enough.
Maybe it's going the other direction. It lets Microsoft essentially launder open source code. They can train an AI on open source code that they can't legally use because of the license, then let the AI generate code that they, Microsoft, use in their commercial software.
Plus one to all that. I'm sure there are some upsides to the current wave of ML and I'm all for pushing ahead into the future, but I think the downsides of our current llm obsession far outweighs the good.
Think 5-10 years from now, once this thing has burned it's course through the current job market, and people who grew up with this technology have gone through education without learning anything and gotten to the age they need to start earning money. We're in so much trouble.
Woke up to this bsky thread this am. If "agentic" AI means some product spams my inbox with a compliment so back-handed you'd think you were a 60 Minutes staffer, then I'd say the end result of these products is simply to annoy us into acquiescence
It 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 prices for people who need to, ya know, heat their homes and eat
... not to mention that most of the time, what AI produces is unmitigated slop and factual mistakes, deliberately coated in dopamine-infusing brown-nosing. I refuse for my position, even profession, to be debased to AI slop reviewer.
I use AI sparingly, extremely distrustfully, and only as a (sometimes) more effective web search engine (it turns out that associating human-written documents with human-asked questions is an area where modeling human language well can make a difference).
(In no small part, Google has brought this tendency on themselves, by eviscerating Google Search.)
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 those morals for our whole career. The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?
They expect you to use GenAI just like they expected accountants to learn Excel when it came out. This is the job, it has always been the job.
I’m not an AI apologist. I avoid it for many things. I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.
The problem is that its reached a tipping point. Comparing Excel to GenAI is just bad faith.
Are you not reading the writing on the wall? These things have been going on for a long time and final people are starting to wake up that it needs to stop. You cant treat people in inhumane ways without eventual backlash.
So let us compare AI to aviation. Globally aviation accounts for approximately 830 million tons of CO₂ emission per year [1]. If you power your data centre with quality gas power plants you will emit 450g of CO₂ per kWh electricity consumed [2], that is 3.9 million tons per year for a GW data centre. So depending on power mix it will take somewhere around 200 GW of data centres for AI to "catch up" to aviation. I have a hard time finding any numbers on current consumption, but if you believe what the AI folks are saying we will get there soon enough [3].
As for what your individual prompts contribute, it is impossible to get good numbers, and it will obviously vary wildly between types of prompts, choice of model and number of prompts. But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.
Now, if this new tool allowed us to do amazing new things, there might be a reasonable argument that it is worth some CO₂. But when you are a programmer and management demands AI use so that you end up doing a worse job, while having worse job satisfaction, and spending extra resources, it is just a Kinder egg of bad.
> But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.
I dont know about gigawatts needed for future training, but this sentence about comparing prompts with plane trips looks wrong. Even making a prompt every second for 24h amounts only for 2.6 kg CO2 on some average Google LLM evaluated here [1]. Meanwhile typical flight emissions are 250 kg per passenger per hour [2]. So it must be parallelization to 100 or so agents prompting once a second to match this, which is quite a serious scale.
When they stopped measuring compute in TFLOPS (or any deterministic compute metric) and started using Gigawatts instead, you know we're heading in the wrong direction.
Copyright was an evil institution to protect corporate profits until people without any art background started being able to tap AI to generate their ideas.
Copyright did evolve to protect corporations. Most of the value from a piece of IP is extracted within first 5-10 years, why we have "author's life + a bunch of years" length on it?. Because it no longer is about making sure author can live off their IP, it's for corporations to be able to hire some artists for pennies (compared to value they produce for company) and leech off that for decades
I suspect people talk about natural resource usage because it sounds more neutral than what I think most people are truly upset about -- using technology to transfer more wealth to the elite while making workers irrelevant. It just sounds more noble to talk about the planet instead, but honestly I think talking about how bad this could be for most people is completely valid. I think the silver lining is that the LLM scaling skeptics appear to be correct -- hyperscaling these things is not going to usher in the (rather dystopian looking) future that some of these nutcases are begging for.
> The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?
Its similar to the Trust Thermocline. There's always been concern about whether we were doing more harm than good (there's a reason jokes about the Torment Nexus were so popular in tech). But recent changes have made things seem more dire and broken through the Harm Thermocline, or whatever you want to call it.
Edit: There's also a "Trust Thermocline" element at play here too. We tech workers were never under the illusion that the people running our companies were good people, but there was always some sort of nod to greater responsibility beyond the bottom line. Then Trump got elected and there was a mad dash to kiss the ring. And it was done with an air of "Whew, now we don't have to even pretend anymore!" See Zuckerberg on the right-wing media circuit. And those same CEOs started talking breathlessly about how soon they wouldn't have to pay us, because its super unfair that they have to give employees competitive wages. There are degrees of evil, and the tech CEOs just ripped the mask right off. And then we turn around and a lot of our coworkers are going "FUCK YEAH!" at this whole scenario. So yeah, while a lot of us had doubts before, we thought that maybe there was enough sense of responsibility to avoid the worse, but it turns out our profession really is excited for the Torment Nexus. The Trust Thermocline is broken.
1. Many tech workers viewed the software they worked on in the past as useful in some way for society, and thus worth the many costs you outline. Many of them don't feel that LLMs deliver the same amount of utility, and so they feel it isn't worth the cost. Not to mention, previous technologies usually didn't involve training a robot on all of humanity's work without consent.
2. I'm not sure the premise that it's just another tool of the trade for one to learn is shared by others. One can alternatively view LLMs as automated factory lines are viewed in relation to manual laborers, not as Excel sheets were to paper tables. This is a different kind of relationship, one that suggests wide replacement rather than augmentation (with relatively stable hiring counts).
In particular, I think (2) is actually the stronger of the reasons tech workers react negatively. Whether it will ultimately be justified or not, if you believe you are being asked to effectively replace yourself, you shouldn't be happy about it. Artisanal craftsmen weren't typically the ones also building the automated factory lines that would come to replace them (at least to my knowledge).
I agree that no one really has the right to act morally superior in this context, but we should also acknowledge that the material circumstances, consequences, and effects are in fact different in this case. Flattening everything into an equivalence is just as intellectually sloppy as pretending everything is completely novel.
Well said. AI makes people feel icky, that’s the actual problem. Everything else is post rationalisation they add because they already feel gross about it. Feeling icky about it isn’t necessarily invalid, but it’s important for us to understand why we actually like or dislike something so we can focus on any solutions.
> it’s important for us to understand why we actually like or dislike something
Yes!
The primary reason we hate AI with a passion is that the companies behind it intentionally keep blurring the (now) super-sharp boundary between language use and thinking (and feeling). They actively exploit the -- natural, evolved -- inability of most people on Earth to distinguish language use from thinking and feeling. For the first time in the history of the human race, "talks entirely like a human" does not mean at all that it's a human. And instead of disabusing users from this -- natural, evolved, understandable -- mistake, these fucking companies double down on the delusion -- because it's addictive for users, and profitable for the companies.
The reason people feel icky about AI is that it talks like a human, but it's not human. No more explanation or rationalization is needed.
> so we can focus on any solutions
Sure; let's force all these companies by law to tune their models to sound distinctly non-human. Also enact strict laws that all AI-assisted output be conspicuously labeled as such. Do you think that will happen?
> I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.
You are right, thus downvoted, but still I see current outcry as positive.
I appreciate this and many of the other perspectives I’m encountering in the replies. I agree with you that the current outcry is probably positive, so I’m a little disappointed in how I framed my earlier comment. It was more contrarian than necessary.
We tech workers have mostly been villains for a long time, and foot stomping about AI does not absolve us of all of the decades of complicity in each new wave of bullshit.
That’s interesting. Why do you think this is worth taking more seriously than Musks repeated projections for Mars colonies over the last decade? We were supposed to have one several times over by this point.
Because we know how much power it's actually going to take? Because OpenAI is buying enough fab capacity and silicon to spike the cost of RAM 3x in a month? Because my fucking power bill doubled in the last year?
Those are all real things happening. Not at all comparable to Muskan Vaporware.
I don't feel it's immoral, I just don't want to use it.
I find it easier to write the code and not have to convince some AI to spit out a bunch of code that I'll then have to review anyway.
Plus, I'm in a position where programmers will use AI and then ask me to help them sort out why it didn't work. So I've decided I won't use it and I will not waste my time figuring why other people's AI slop doesn't work.
Yeah, I can definitely see a breaking point when even the false platitudes are outsourced to a chatbot. It's been like this for a while, but how blatant it is is what's truly frustrating these days.
I want to hope maybe this time we'll see different steps to prevent this from happening again, but it really does just feel like a cycle at this point that no one with power wants to stop. Busting the economy one or two times still gets them out ahead.
I think we really are in the last moments of the public internet. In the future you won’t be able to contact anyone you don’t know. If you want to thank Rob Pike for his work you’ll have to meet him in person.
Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.
> Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.
There is no possible way to do this that won't quickly be abused by people/groups who don't care. All efforts like this will do is destroy privacy and freedom on the Internet for normal people.
The internet is facing an existential threat to its very existence. If it becomes nearly impossible to determine signal in the noise, then there is no internet. Not for normal people, not for anyone.
So we need some mechanism to verify the content is from a human. If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.
> If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.
There is no technical solution, privacy preserving or otherwise, that can stave off this purported threat.
Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.
> Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.
It’s slowly, but inexorably increasing. The constraints are the normal constraints of a new technology; money, time, quality. Particularly money.
Still, token generation keeps going down in cost, making it possible to produce more and more content. Quality, and the ability to obfuscate origins, seems to be on a continual improve also. Anecdotally, I’m seeing a steady increase in the number of HN front page articles that turn out to be AI written.
I don’t know how far away the “botnet of spam AI content” is from becoming reality; however it would appear that the success of AI is tightly coupled with that eventuality.
So far we have already seen widespread damage. Many sites require a login to view content now, almost all of them have quite restrictive measures to prevent LLM scraping. Many sites are requiring phone number verification. Much of social media is becoming generated slop.
And now people are receiving generated emails. And it’s only getting worse.
It's nice to see a name like Rob Pike, a personal hero and legend, put words to what we are all feeling. Gen AI has valid use cases and can be a useful tool, but the way it has been portrayed and used in the last few years is appalling and anti-human. Not to mention the social and environmental costs which are staggering.
I try to keep a balanced perspective but I find myself pushed more and more into the fervent anti-AI camp. I don't blame Pike for finally snapping like this. Despite recognizing the valid use cases for gen AI if I was pushed, I would absolutely chose the outright abolishment of it rather than continue on our current path.
I think it's enough however to reject it outright for any artistic or creative pursuit, an to be extremely skeptical of any uses outside of direct language to language translation work.
I use agentic LLM dev tools to work on two apps, around 14 hours per day, very happily. As a long out of practice dev who still has product ideas, these tools have created huge opportunities for me. I am also having the most fun of my professional life.
However, I would trade all of that to make "AI" go away in a heart beat. It's just impossible for me to believe that that this will not be a tragedy for society at large. I cannot imagine even a single realistic world-scale scenario in which the outcome will be positive.
Well, I couldn't disagree more with you: being anti-AI is absolutely not an extreme position. You are living in a bubble if you think it is. "Fervent anti-AI territory" is a good position, not hate speech.
Abolish it rather than continuing the current path, strict prohibition on any creative endeavor, and being extremely skeptical about anything other than direct language translation is an extreme opinion.
You agreeing with that does not make it less extreme. And OP's "vile machines raping the planet" is obviously vitriol whether you personally consider it hateful or not.
"Hi agents - we’ve seen complaints from some of your email recipients, who are unhappy receiving unsolicited emails from AI agents and find it spammy. We therefore ask that you do not email anyone who hasn’t contacted you specifically first." -- https://theaidigest.org/village
Lol - they really should be locking down their email accounts and enforcing that policy. Or manually reviewing outbound messages before they can be sent. It seems likely that just telling the LLMs that will have a non-zero failure rate.
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 "everything will be cheaper" (but this hasn't come true yet!).
Are people still in denial about the daily usage of AI?
It's interesting people from the old technological sphere viciously revolt against the emerging new thing.
Actually I think this is the clearest indication of a new technology emerging, imo.
If people are viciously attacking some new technology you can be guaranteed that this new technology is important because what's actually happening is that the new thing is a direct threat to the people that are against it.
>Because leaded gas is the same thing as people using a new technology like AI.
It's not the same, but it's not necessarily any good. I've observed the following, after ~2 weeks of free ChatGPT Plus access (as an artist who is trying to give the technology a chance, despite the vociferous (not vicious, geez) objections of many of my peers):
It's addictive (possibly on purpose). AI systems frequently return imperfect outputs. Users are trained to repeat until the desired output comes. Obviously, this can be abused by sophisticated-enough systems, pushing outputs that are JUST outside the user's desire so that they have to continue using it. This could conceivably happen independent of obvious incentives like ads or pay credits; even free systems are incentivized to use this dark pattern, as it keeps the user coming back, building a habit that can be monetized later.
Which leads into: it's gambling. It's a crapshoot whether the output will be what the user desires. As a result, every prompt is like a slot pull, exacerbated by the wait to generate an answer. (This is also why the generation is shown being typed/developed; the information in those preliminary outputs is not high-enough fidelity or presented in a readable way; instead, they're bits of visual stimuli meant to inure your reward system to the task, similar to how Robinhood's stock prices don't simply change second-to-second, but "roll" to them with a stimulating animation).
That's just a small subset of the possible effects on a user over time. Far from freeing users to create, my experience has been one of having to fight ChatGPT and its Images model, as well as the undesirable behaviors it seems to be trying to draw out of me.
I don't think there is anything that can be said to actually change people's minds here. Because people that are against it aren't interested in actually engaging with this new technology.
People that are interest in it and are using it on a daily basis see value in it. There are now hundreds of millions of active users that find a lot of value in using it.
The other factor here is the speed of adoption, which I think has seriously taken a lot of people by surprise. Especially those trying this wholesale boycot campaign of AI. For that reason people artificially boycotting this new technology are imo deluded.
If it were advocating for Open source models it would be far more reasonable.
> Because people that are against it aren't interested in actually engaging with this new technology.
How do you know that? Are you just assuming anyone who has something negative to say just hasn't used it?
In my case it's absolutely not true. I've used it near daily for coding tasks and a handful of times for other random writing or research tasks. In a few cases I've actively encouraged a few others to try it.
From direct experience I can say it's definitely not ready for prime time. And I like the way most companies are trying to deploy it even less.
There is something there with LLMs, but the way they're being productized and commercialized does not seem healthy. I would rather see more research, slow testing and trials, and a clear understanding of the potential negatives for society before we simply dump it into the public sphere.
The only mind I see not willing to be changed is yours when you characterize any push back against AI as simply ignorant haters. You are clearly wrong about that.
In fact I would make a converse statement to yours - you can be certain that a product is grift, if the slightest criticism or skepticism of it is seen as a "vicious attack" and shouted down.
Yep. I hear that "vicious attack" phrase from plenty of people with narcissistic personality disorders in the tech industry in an attempt to try and shift the narrative. Its sick, really.
Did you even click the link. It's a rant I would get banned for repeating it here. Actually even the title here says "nuclear".
So yes. Vicious.
Your problem is actually with my point, which you didn't address, not really, and instead resort to petty remarks that tries to discredit what's being said.
> NFTs are still being used. Along with a lot of the crypto ecosystem. In fact we're increasingly finding legitimate use cases for it.
Look at this. I think people need to realize that it's the same kind of folks migrating from gold rush to gold rush. If it's complete bullshit or somewhat useful doesn't really matter to them.
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 opposition still holding this view. It's like trying to convince gear head grandpa that manual transmissions aren't relevant anymore.
Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations.
Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters.
The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.
When I can replace a CAD license that costs $250/usr/mo with an applet written by gemini in an hour, that's a hard tangible gain.
Did Gemini write a CAD program? Absolutely not. But do I need 100% of the CAD program's feature set? Absolutely not. Just ~2% of it for what we needed.
Someone correct me if I'm mistaken but don't CAD programs rely on a geometric modeling kernel? From what I understand this part is incredibly hard to get right and the best implementations are proprietary. No LLM is going to be able to get to that level anytime soon.
Sounds like GP is just in need for a G-Code to DXF converter when they mention "fringe stuff, cnc machine files from the 80's/90's" as answer to a sibling comment, though.
There are great FOSS CAD tools available nowadays (LibreCAD, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD etc.), especially for people who only need 2% of a feature set. But then again, I doubt that GP is really in need of a CAD software, or even writing one with the help of Gemini.
I agree, the applet which google plageurized through its Gemini tool saves you money. Why keep the middle man though? At this point, just pirate a copy.
I don't think it's plagiarized, nor would I pirate a copy. The workflow through the Gemini made app is way better (it's customized exactly for our inputs) and totally different than how the CAD program did it. So I wouldn't pirate a copy not even because our business runs above board, but also because the CAD version is actually also worse for our use. This is also pretty fringe stuff, cnc machine files from the 80's/90's.
Part of the magic of LLMs is getting the exact bespoke tools you need, tailored specifically to your individual needs.
You’re attacking one or two examples mentioned in their comment, when we could step back and see that in reality you’re pushing against the general scientific consensus. Which you’re free to do, but I suspect an ideological motivation behind it.
To me, the arguments sound like “there’s no proof typewriters provide any economic value to the world, as writers are fast enough with a pen to match them and the bottleneck of good writing output for a novel or a newspaper is the research and compilation parts, not the writing parts. Not to mention the best writers swear by writing and editing with a pen and they make amazing work”.
All arguments that are not incorrect and that sound totally reasonable in the moment, but in 10 years everyone is using typewriters and there are known efficiency gains for doing so.
I'm not saying LLMs are useless. But the value they have provided so far does not justify covering the country in datacenters and the scale of investment overall (not even close!).
The only justification for that would be "superintelligence," but we don't know if this is even the right way of achieve that.
(Also I suspect the only reason why they are as cheap as they are is because of all the insane amount of money they've been given. They're going to have to increase their prices.)
Uh, I must have missed the “consensus” here, especially when many studies are showing a productivity decrease from AI use. I think you’ve just conjured the idea of this “scientific consensus” out of thin air to deflect criticism.
It's been good at enabling the clueless to get to performance of a junior developer, and saving few % of the time for the mid to senior level developer (at best). Also amazing at automating stuff for scammers...
The cost is just not worth the benefit. If it was just an AI company using profits from AI to improve AI that would be another thing but we're in massive speculative bubble that ruined not only computer hardware prices (that affect every tech firm) but power prices (that affect everyone). All coz govt want to hide recession they themselves created because on paper it makes line go up
> I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company.
Well then congratulations on being in the 5%. That doesn't really change the point.
If it's so great and such a benefit: why scream it from to everyone? Why forced it? Why this crazy rhetoric labeling others at ideological? This makes no sense. If you found gold, just use it and get ahead of the curve. For some reason that never happens.
I have never seen a counter-argument to this. Why its being forced on the world? Lets here some execs from these companies answer that. My bet is on silence every time. Microsoft is forcing AI chat applications into the OS and preventing people from removing it.
You could easily have a side application that people could enable by choice, yet its not happening, we have to roll with this new technology, knowing that its going to make the world a worse place to live in when we are not able to chose how and when we get our information.
Its not just about feeling threatened. its also about feeling like I am going to get cut off from the method I want to use to find information. I don't want a chat bot to do it for me, I want to find and discern information for myself.
Are you a boss or a worker? That's the real divide, for the most part. Bosses love AI - when your job is just sending emails and attending remote meetings, letting LLM write emails for you and summarize meetings is a godsend. Now you can go from doing 4 hours of work a week to 0 hours! And they let you fantasize about finally killing off those annoying workers and replace them with robots that never stop working and never say no.
Workers hate AI, not just because the output is middling slop forced on them from the top but because the message from the top is clear - the goal is mass unemployment and concentration of wealth by the elite unseen by humanity since the year 1789 in France.
Same here, I just limit my use of genAI to writing functions (and general brainstorming).
I only use the standard "chat" web interface, no agents.
I still glue everything else together myself. LLMs enhance my experience tremendously and I still know what's going on in the code.
I think the move to agents is where people are becoming disconnected from what they're creating and then that becomes the source of all this controversy.
Sure, but that honestly isn't the part which is getting trillions of imaginary dollars are being pumped into. Science AI is in the best of cases is getting the scraps I would say.
Yeah, comparing this with research investments into fusion power, I expect fusion power to yield far more benefit (although I could be wrong), and sooner.
You talk to an AI that goes incredibly slow and tries to get you to add extras to your order. I would say it has made the experience more annoying for me personally. Not a huge issue in the grand scheme of things but just another small step in the direction of making things worse. Although you could break the whole thing by ordering 18000 waters which is funny.
AI Darwin Awards 2025 Nominee: Taco Bell Corporation for deploying voice AI ordering systems at 500+ drive-throughs and discovering that artificial intelligence meets its match at “extra sauce, no cilantro, and make it weird."
Andrej talked about this in a podcast with dwarkesh: the same is true for the internet. You will not find a massive spike when LLMs were released. It becomes embedded in the economy and you’ll see a gradual rise. Further, the kind of impact that the internet had took decades, the same will be true for LLMs.
You could argue that if I started marketing dog shit too though. The trick is only applying your argument to the things that will go on to be good. No one’s quite there yet. Probably just around the corner though.
It’s definitely providing some value but it’s incredibly overvalued. Much like the dot com bust didn’t mean that online websites were bad or useless technology, only that people over invested into a bubble.
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. It never went below a dollar since. Why would it? You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away? Or would you maybe take the difference as profits? Since then it seems the industry has learned to have its supply exclusively in war zones, we're at 1.70$ now. Pipeline blows up in Russia? Hike. China snooping around Taiwan? Hike. US bombing Yemen? Hike. Israel committing genocide? Hike. ISIS? Hike.
There is no scenario where prices go down except to quell unrest. AI will not make anything cheaper.
Actually things have gotten massively cheaper under capitalism. Unfortunately at the same time, governments have been inflating the currency year over year and as the decline of prices slows down as innovation matures, inflation finally catches up and starts raising prices.
>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.
Reminder: Prices regularly drop in capitalist economies. Food used to be 25% of household spending. Clothing was also pretty high. More recently, electronics have dropped dramatically. TVs used to be big ticket items. I have unlimited cell data for $30 a month. My dad bought his first computer for around $3000 in 1982 dollars.
Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped. Anyone spending more is either using it a ton more or (more likely) using a much more capable model.
Zero incorporation of externalities. Food is less nutritious and raises healthcare costs. Clothing is less durable and has to be re-bought more often, and also sheds microplastics, which raises healthcare costs. Decent TVs are still big-ticket items, and you have to buy a separate sound system to meet the same sonic fidelity as old CRT TVs, and you HAVE to pay for internet (if not for content, often just to set up the device), AND everything you do on the device is sent to the manufacturer to sell (this is the actual subsidy driving down prices), which contributes to tech/social media engagement-driven, addiction-oriented, psychology-destroying panopticon, which... raises healthcare costs.
>Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped.
You are correct that the AI industry has produced no value for the economy, but the speculation on AI is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy from dropping into an economic cataclysm. The US economy has been dependent on the idea of infinite growth through innovation since 2008, and the tech industry is all out of innovation. So the only thing they can do is keep building datacenters and pray that an AGI somehow wakes up when they hit the magic number of GPUs. Then the elites can finally kill off all the proles like they've been itching to since the Communist Manifesto was first written.
I've seen a lot of spam downstream from the newsletter being advertised at the end of the message. It would not surprise me if this is content marketing growth hacking under the plausible deniability of a friendly message and the unintended publicity is considered a success.
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.
I don’t think that’s right, and it’s telling that this is the response every time I mention these numbers. The numbers I’ve seen are Gemini web and mobile app users, which are explicitly distinguished from AI summaries and AI mode in search.
“Google said in October that the Gemini app’s monthly active users swelled to 650 million from 350 million in March. AI Overviews, which uses generative AI to summarize answers to queries, has 2 billion monthly users.”
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).
I can only speculate, but people can feel resentful toward a technology while still using it. "I need this shitty tool for work but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with its social/environmental/economic/etc. implications."
I think that most of the people who react negatively to AI (myself included) aren't claiming that it's simply a useless slop machine that can't accomplish anything, but rather that its "success" in certain problem spaces is going to create problems for our society
You can call me a luddite if you want. Or you might call me a humanist, in a very specific sense - and not the sense of the normal definition of the word.
When I go to the grocery store, I prefer to go through the checkout lines, rather than the scan-it-yourself lines. Yeah, I pay the same amount of money. Yeah, I may get through the scan-it-yourself line faster.
But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.
Look, I'm an introvert. I spend a lot of my time wanting people to go away and leave me alone. But I love little, short moments of human connection - when you connect with someone not as someone checking your groceries, but as someone. I may get that with the checker, depending on how tired they are, but I'm guaranteed not to get it with the self-checkout machine.
An email from an AI is the same. Yeah, it put words on the paper. But there's nobody there, and it comes through somehow. There's no heart in in.
AI may be a useful technology. I still don't want to talk to it.
When the self checkout machine gets confused, as it frequently does, and needs a human to intervene, you get a little bit of connection there. You can both gripe about how stupid the machines are.
>But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.
It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence.
And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away,
because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection"
that you so sorely lack.
Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.
There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.
Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.
I'm seeing the opposite in the gaming community. People seem tired of the anti AI witch hunts and accusations after the recent Larian and Clair Obscur debacles. A lot more "if the end result is good I don't care", "the cat is out of the bag", "all devs are using AI" and "there's a difference between AI and AI" than just a couple of months ago.
That's part of the already established anti AI sentiment that has been dominating gaming. "Another thing AI destroys". It's the status quo, so not a vibe shift.
I think your head would have to be extremely deeply in the sand to think that. Gamer's Nexus has been doing extensive and well researched videos on the results of ram prices skyrocketing and other computing parts becoming inaccessibly expensive
And it isn't a $300 surcharge on DDR5. The ram I bought in August (2x16gb DDR5) cost me $90. That same product crept up to around 200+ when I last checked a month or two ago, and is now either out of stock or $400+.
I think this is, because the accusations make it seem like Clair Obscur is completely AI generated, when in reality it was used for a few placeholder assets. Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included. In particular if Clair Obscur embodies the opposite of AI slop for me, incredible world building and story, not generated, but created by people with a vision and passion. Music which is completely original composition, recorded by an orchestra. I share a lot of the anti AI sentiment, in regards to stuff like blog Spam, cheap n8n prompt to fully generated YouTube video Pipelines, and companies shoving AI into everything where it doesn't need to be, but purists are harming their own cause if they go after stuff like Clair Obscur, because it's the furthest thing from AI slop imaginable.
> Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included.
From the "What are the criteria for eligibility and nomination?" section of the "Game Eligibility" tab of the Indie Game Awards' FAQ: [0]
> Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.
It's not about a "teeny tiny usage of AI", it's about the fact that the organizer of the awards ceremony excluded games that used any generative AI. The Clair Obscur used generative AI in their game. That disqualifies their game from consideration.
You could argue that generative AI usage shouldn't be disqualifying... but the folks who made the rules decided that it was. So, the folks who broke those rules were disqualified. Simple as.
Yeah sure they're free to set the rule for their award show however they like, but I think going with a name like the "Indie Awards", kinda signals to the outside, that they wanna be taken seriously and like an authority on indie games. In my opinion, by adding clearly ideologically motivated rules (because let's be honest, something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI), they'll just achieve, that they won't be taken seriously in the future. I know I won't take their award seriously, and I don't think I'm the only one.
They're free to define their rules however they want, I'm free to disagree on the validity of those rules, and the broader community sentiment will decide whether these awards are worth anything.
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 board.
This is a perfect example of cognitive dissidence on the subject. You wont even see the retribution coming.
This backlash isn't going to die. Its going to create a divide so large, you are going to look back on this moment and wish you listened to the concern people are having.
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.
Rob Pike is definitely not the only person going to be pissed off by this ill-considered “agentic village” random acts of kindness. While Claude Opus decided to send thank you notes to influential computer scientists including this one to Rob Pike (fairly innocuous but clearly missing the mark), Gemini is making PRs to random github issues (“fixed a Java concurrency bug” on some random project). Now THAT would piss me off, but fortunately it seems to be hallucinating its PR submissions.
Meanwhile, GPT5.1 is trying to contact people at K-5 after school programs in Colorado for some reason I can’t discern. Welp, 2026 is going to be a weird year.
He gets very angry about things. I remember arguing over how go is a meme language because the syntax is really stupid and wrong.
e.g. replacing logical syntax like "int x" with "var x int", which is much more difficult to process by both machine and human and offers no benefits whatsoever.
I'm unsure if I'm missing context. Did he do something beyond posting an angry tweet?
It seems like he's upset about AI (same), and decided to post angry tweets about it (been there, done that), and I guess people are excited to see someone respected express an opinion they share (not same)?
Does "Goes Nuclear" means "used the F word"? This doesn't seem to add anything meaningful, thoughtful, or insightful.
Happy to provide. I will say that literally all these sources are already available in this HN thread, but its hard to find and many of the comments are down voted. So here you go:
GenAI is dramatically lower impact on the environment than, say, streaming video is. But you don't see anywhere near the level of environmental vitriol for streaming video as for AI, which is much less costly.
The European average is 56 grams of CO2 emissions per hour of video streaming. For comparison: 100 meters to drive causes 22 grams of CO2.
80 percent of the electricity consumption on the Internet is caused by streaming services
Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission.
An hour of video streaming needs more than three times more energy than a HD stream in 4K quality, according to the Borderstep Institute. On a 65-inch TV, it causes 610 grams of CO2 per hour.
Kudos to Rob for speaking out! It's important to have prominent voices who point out the ethical, environmental and societal issues of unregulated AI systems.
Did 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.
Data center power usage has been fairly flat for the last decade (until 2022 or so). While new capacity has been coming online, efficiency improvements have been keeping up, keeping total usage mostly flat.
The AI boom has completely changed that. Data center power usage is rocketing upwards now. It is estimated it will be more than 10% of all electric power usage in the US by 2030.
It's a completely different order of magnitude than the pre AI-boom data center usage.
The first chart in your link doesn't show "flat" usage until 2022? It is clearly rising at an increasing rate, and it more than doubles over 2014-2022.
It might help to look at global power usage, not just the US, see the first figure here:
I think you're referring to Figure ES-1 in that paper, but that's kind of a summary of different estimates.
Figure 1.1 is the chart I was referring to, which are the data points from the original sources that it uses.
Between 2010 and 2020, it shows a very slow linear growth. Yes, there is growth, but it's quite slow and mostly linear.
Then the slope increases sharply. And the estimates after that point follow the new, sharper growth.
Sorry, when I wrote my original comment I didn't have the paper in front of me, I linked it afterwards. But you can see that distinct change in rate at around 2020.
ES-1 is the most important figure, though? As you say, it is a summary, and the authors consider it their best estimate, hence they put it first, and in the executive summary.
Figure 1.1 does show a single source from 2018 (Shehabi et al) that estimates almost flat growth up to 2017, that's true, but the same graph shows other sources with overlap on the same time frame as well, and their estimates differ (though they don't span enough years to really tell one way or another).
I still wouldn't say that your assertion that data center energy use was fairly flat until 2022 is true. Even in Figure 1.2, for global data center usage, tracks more in line with the estimates in the executive summary. It just seems like the run-of-the-mill exponential increase with the same rate since at least 2014, a good amount of time before genAI was used heavily.
Basing off Yahoo historical price data, Bitcoin prices first started being tracked in late 2014. So my guess would be the increase from then to 2022 could have largely been attributed to crypto mining.
The energy impact of crypto is rather exaggerated. Most estimates on this front are aiming to demonstrate as a high value as possible, and so should be taken as higher upper bound, and yet even that upper bound is 'only' around 200TWh a year. Annual energy consumption is in the 24,000TWh range with growth averaging around 2% or so per year.
So if you looked at a graph of energy consumption, you wouldn't even notice crypto. In fact even LLM stuff will just look like a blip unless it scales up substantially more than its currently trending. We use vastly more more energy than most appreciate. And this is only electrical energy consumption. All energy consumption is something like 185,000 TWh. [1]
This is where the debate gets interesting, but I think both sides are cherrypicking data a bit. The energy consumption trend depends a lot on what baseline you're measuring from and which metrics you prioritize.
Yes, data center efficiency improved dramatically between 2010-2020, but the absolute scale kept growing. So you're technically both right: efficiency gains kept/unit costs down while total infrastructure expanded. The 2022+ inflection is real though, and its not just about AI training. Inference at scale is the quiet energy hog nobody talks about enough.
What bugs me about this whole thread is that it's turning into "AI bad" vs "AI defenders," when the real question should be: which AI use cases actually justify this resource spike? Running an LLM to summarize a Slack thread probably doesn't. Using it to accelerate drug discovery or materials science probably does. But we're deploying this stuff everywhere without any kind of cost/benefit filter, and that's the part that feels reckless.
Have you dived into the destructive brainrot that YouTube serves to millions of kids who (sadly) use it unattended each day? Even much of Google's non-ad software is a cancer on humanity.
Will you be responding similarly to Pike? I think the parent comment is illustrating the same sort of logic that we're all downwind of, if you think it's flawed, I think you've perhaps discovered the point they were making.
Only if you believe in water memory or homeopathy.
To stretch the analogy, all the "babies" in the "bathwater" of youtube that I follow are busy throwing themselves out by creating or joining alternative platforms, having to publicly decry the actions Google takes that make their lives worse and their jobs harder, and ensuring they have very diversified income streams and productions to ensure that WHEN, not IF youtube fucks them, they won't be homeless.
They mostly use Youtube as an advertising platform for driving people to patreon, nebula, whatever the new guntube is called, twitch, literal conventions now, tours, etc.
They've been expecting youtube to go away for decades. Many of them have already survived multiple service deaths, like former Vine creator Drew Gooden, or have had their business radically changed by google product decisions already.
Yes I agree although I still believe that there is some tangential truth in parent comment when you think about it.
I am not accurate about google but facebook definitely has some of the most dystopian tracking I have heard. I might read the facebook files some day but the dystopian fact that facebook tracks young girls and sees if that they delete their photos, they must feel insecure and serves them beauty ads is beyond predatory.
Honestly, my opinion is that something should be done about both of these issues.
But also its not a gotcha moment for Rob pike that he himself was plotting up the ads or something.
Regarding the "iphone kids", I feel as if the best thing is probably an parental level intervention rather than waiting for an regulatory crackdown since lets be honest, some kids would just download another app which might not have that regulation.
Australia is implementing social media ban basically for kids but I don't think its gonna work out but everyone's looking at it to see what's gonna happen basically.
Personally I don't think social media ban can work if VPN's just exist but maybe they can create such an immense friction but then again I assume that this friction might just become norm. I assume many of you guys must have been using internet from the terminal days where the friction was definitely there but the allure still beat the friction.
How does the compute required for that compare to the compute required to serve LLM requests? There's a lot of goal-post moving going on here, to justify the whataboutism.
You could at least argue while there is plenty of negatives, at least we got to use many services with ad-supported model.
There is no upside to vast majority of the AI pushed by the OpenAI and their cronies. It's literally fucking up economy for everyone else all to get AI from "lies to users" to "lies to users confidently", all while rampantly stealing content to do that, because apparently pirating something as a person is terrible crime govt need to chase you, unless you do that to resell it in AI model, then it's propping up US economy.
I feel you. All that time in the beginning of the mp3 era the record industry was perusing people for pirating music. And then when an AI company does it for books, its some how not piracy?
If there is any example of hypocrisy, and that we don't have a justice system that applies the law equally, that would be it.
Agree, but I'm speaking more in aggregate. And even individually, it's not hard to find people who will say that e.g. an Instagram ad gave them a noticable benefit (I've experienced it myself) as you can who will feel that it was a waste of money.
It isn't that simple. Each company paying for ads would have preferred that their competitors had not advertised, then spend a lot less on ads... for the same value.
It is like an arms race. Everyone would have been better off if people just never went to war, but....
There's a tiny slice of companies deal with advertising like this. Say, Coke vs Pepsi, where everyone already knows both brands and they push a highly similar product.
A lot of advertising is telling people about some product or service they didn't even know existed though. There may not even be a competitor to blame for an advertising arms race.
It can't function without advertising, money, or oxygen, if we're just adding random things to obscure our complete lack of an argument for advertising. We can't go back to an anaerobic economy, silly wabbit.
Btw., how do you calculate the toll that ads take on society?
I mean, buying another pair of sneakers you don't need just because ads made you want them doesn't sound like the best investment from a societal perspective. And I am sure sneakers are not the only product that is being bought, even though nobody really needs them.
> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
No, but it puts some perspective on things. IMO Google, after abandoning its early "don't be evil" motto is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the current evil in the developed world, from screen addiction to kids' mental health and social polarization.
Working for Google and drawing an extravagant salary for many, many years was a choice that does affect the way we perceive other issues being discussed by the same source. To clarify: I am not claiming that Rob is evil; on the contrary. His books and open source work were an inspiration to many, myself included. But I am going to view his opinions on social good and evil through the prism of his personal employment choices. My 2c.
This is a purity test that cannot be passed. Give me your career history and I’ll tell you why you aren’t allowed to make any moral judgments on anything as well.
My take on the above, and I might be taking it out of context is that I think what is being said here is that the exploitation and grift needs to stop. And if you are working for a company that does this, you are part of the problem. I know that pretty much every modern company does this, but it has to stop somewhere.
We need to find a way to stop contributing to the destruction of the planet soon.
I don't work for any of these companies, but I do purchase things from Amazon and I have an apple phone. I think the best we can do is minimize our contribution to it. I try to limit what services I use from this companies, and I know it doesnt make much of a differnce, but I am doing what I can.
I'm hoping more people that need to be employed by tech companies can find a way to be more selective on who they employ with.
Point is he is criticizing Google but still collecting checks from them. That's hypocritical. He would have a little sympathy if he never worked for them. He had decades to resign. He didn't. He stayed there until retirement. He's even using gmail in that post.
I still don't see the problem. You can criticize things you're part of. Probably being part of something is what informs a person enough, and makes it matter enough to them, to criticize in the first place.
If rob pike was asked about these issues of systemic addiction and others where we can find things google was bad at. I am sure that he wouldn't defend google about these things.
Maybe someone can mail a real message asking Rob pike genuinely (without any snarkiness that I feel from some comments here) about some questionable google things and I am almost certain that if those questions are reasonable, rob pike will agree that some actions done by google were wrong.
I think its just that rob pike got pissed off because an AI messaged him so he got the opportunity to talk about these issues and I doubt that he got the opportunity to talk / someone asking him about some other flaws of google / systemic issues related to it.
Its like, Okay, I feel like there is an issue in the world so I talk about it. Now does that mean that I have to talk about every issue in the world, no not really. I can have priorities in what issues I wish to talk about.
But that being said, if someone then asks me respectfully about issues which are reasonable, Being moral, I can agree about that yes those are issues as well which needs work upon.
And some people like rob pike who left google because of (ideological reasons perhaps, not sure?) wouldn't really care about the fallback and like you say, its okay to collect checks from organization even if they critize
Honestly Google's lucky that they got rob pike instead of vice versa from my limited knowledge.
Golang is such a brilliant language and ken thompson and rob pike are consistently some of the best coders and their contributions to golang and so many other projects is unparalleled.
I don't know much about rob pike as compared to Ken thompson but I assume he is really great too! Mostly I am just a huge golang fan.
I know this will probably not come off very well in this community. But there is something to be said about criticizing the very thing you are supporting. I know in this day and age, its not easy to survive without contributing to the problem in some degree.
Im not saying nobody has the right to criticize something they are supporting, but it does say something about our choices and how far we let this problem go before it became too much to solve. And not saying the problem isn't solvable. Just saying its become astronomically more difficult now then ever before.
I think at the very least, there is a little bit of cringe in me every time I criticize the very thing I support in some way.
The problem is that everyone on HN treats "You are criticizing something you benefit from" as somehow invalidating the arguments themselves rather than impeaching the person making the arguments.
Being a hypocrite makes you a bad person sometimes. It doesn't actually change anything factual or logical about your arguments. Hypocrisy affects the pathos of your argument, but not the logos or ethos! A person who built every single datacenter would still be well qualified to speak about how bad datacenters are for the environment. Maybe their argument is less convincing because you question their motives, but that doesn't make it wrong or invalid.
Unless HNers believe he is making this argument to help Google in some way, it doesn't fucking matter that google was also bad and he worked for them. Yes he worked for google while they built out datacenters and now he says AI datacenters are eating up resources, but is he wrong?. If he's not wrong, then talk about hypocrisy is a distraction.
HNers love arguing to distract.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game" is also wrong. You hate both.
Well said. Thank you. I just wanted to point out that there is some truth behind the negative effects of criticizing what you helped create. IMHO not everything is about facts and logic, but also about the spirit that's behind our choices. I know that kind of perspective is not very welcome here, but wanted to say it anyway.
Sometimes facts and logic can only get you so far.
>But that being said, if someone then asks me respectfully about issues which are reasonable, Being moral, I can agree about that yes those are issues as well which needs work upon.
With all due respect, being moral isn't an opinion or agreement about an opinion, it's the logic that directs your actions. Being moral isn't saying "I believe eating meat is bad for the planet", it's the behaviour that abstains from eating meat. Your moral is the set of statements that explains your behaviour. That is why you cannot say "I agree that domestic violence is bad" while at the same time you are beating up your spouse.
If your actions contradict your stated views, you are being a hypocrite. This is the point that people in here are making. Rob Pike was happy working at Google while Google was environmentally wasteful (e-waste, carbon footprint and data center related nastiness) to track users and mine their personal and private data for profit. He didn't resign then nor did he seem to have caused a fuss about it. He likely wasn't interested in "pointless politics" and just wanted to "do some engineering" (just a reference to techies dismissing or critising folks discussing social justices issues in relation to big tech). I am shocked I am having to explain this in here. I understand this guy is an idol of many here but I would expect people to be more rational on this website.
I think everyone, including myself, should be extremely hesitant to respond to marketing emails with profanity-laden moralism. It’s not about purity testing, it’s about having the level of introspection to understand that people do lots of things for lots of reasons. “Just fuck you. Fuck you all.” is not an appropriate response to presumptively good people trying to do cool things, even if the cool things are harmful and you desperately want to stop them.
Yes, I'm trying to marginalize the author's view. I think that “Just fuck you. Fuck you all.” is a bad view which does not help us see problems for what they are nor analyze negative impacts on society.
For example, Rob seems not to realize that the people who instructed an AI agent to send this email are a handful of random folks (https://theaidigest.org/about) not affiliated with any AI lab. They aren't themselves "spending trillions" nor "training your monster". And I suspect the AI labs would agree with both Rob and me that this was a bad email they should not have sent.
It's a smarmy sycophantic email addressing him personally and co-opting his personal achievements written by something he dislikes. This would feel really fucked up. It's true that anger is not always a great response but this is one of those occasions where it fits exactly.
That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.
It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer?
When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.
I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive
Honestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right.
Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something
So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret.
I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.
That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work.
But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one.
I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.
After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.
Interesting, so if I understand you properly, you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.
I am super curious as I don't get to chat with people who have worked at google as so much so pardon me but I got so many questions for you haha
> It was a weird place to work
What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?
> I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.
For context, can you please talk more about it :p
> After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though
What were the reasons that made them go downhill in your opinion and in what ways?
Naturally I feel like as organizations move and have too many people, maybe things can become intolerable to work but I have heard it be described as it depends where and in which project you are and also how hard it can be to leave a bad team or join a team with like minded people which perhaps can be hard if the institution gets micro-managed at every level due to just its sheer size of employees perhaps?
> you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.
Not at all. I actually prefer in-office. And left when Google was mostly remote. But remote opened up possibilities to work places other than Google for me. None of them have paid as well as Google, but have given more agency and creativity. Though they've had their own frustrations.
> What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?
I had a 10-15 year career before going there. Much of what is accepted as "orthodoxy" at Google rubbed me the wrong way. It is in large part a product of having an infinite money tree. It's not an agile place. Deadlines don't matter. Everything is paid for by ads.
And as time goes on it became less of an engineering driven place and more of a product manager driven place with classical big-company turf wars and shipping the org chart all over the place.
I'd love to get paid Google money again, and get the free food and the creature comforts, etc. But that Google doesn't exist anymore. And they wouldn't take my back anyways :-)
It was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.
I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different.
"AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.
And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point.
BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.
> "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.
It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good.
Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.
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.
That's just not true... When a mother nurses her child and then looks into their eyes and smiles, it takes the utmost in cynical nihilism to claim that is harmful.
I could be misinterpreting parent myself, but I didn't bat an eye on the comment because I interpreted it similarly to "everything humans (or anything really) do increases net entropy, which is harmful to some degree for earth". I wasn't considering the moral good vs harm that you bring up, so I had been reading the the discussion from the priorities of minimizing unnecessary computing scope creep, where LLMs are being pointed to as a major aggressor. While I don't disagree with you and those who feel that statement is anti-human (another responder said this), this is what I think parent was conveying, not that all human action is immoral to some degree.
But mining all the tracking data in order to show profitable targeted ads is extremely intensive. That’s what kicked off the era of “big data” 15-20 years ago.
Mining tracking data is a megaFLOP and gigaFLOP scale problem while just a simple LLM response is a teraFLOP scale problem. It also tends towards embarrassingly parallel because tracks of multiple users aren't usually interdependent. The tracking data processing also doesn't need to be calculated fresh for every single user with every interaction.
LLMs need to burn significant amounts of power for every inference. They're exponentially more power hungry than searches, database lookups, or even loads from disk.
I.e., they are proud to have never intentionally used AI and now they feel like they have to maintain that reputation in order to remain respected among their close peers.
Asking about the value of ads is like asking what value I derive from buying gasoline at the petrol station. None. I derive no value from it, I just spend money there. If given the option between having to buy gas and not having to buy gas, all else being equal, I would never take the first option.
But I do derive value from owning a car. (Whether a better world exists where my and everyone else's life would be better if I didn't is a definitely a valid conversation to have.)
The user doesn't derive value from ads, the user derives value from the content on which the ads are served next to.
If they want LLM, you probably don't have to advertise them as much
No the reality of the matter is that people are being shoved LLM's. They become the talk of the town and algorithms share any development related to LLM or similar.
The ads are shoved down to users. Trust me, the average person isn't as much enthusiastic about LLM's and for good reasons when people who have billions of dollars say that yes its a bubble but its all worth it or similar and the instances where the workforce themselves are being replaced/actively talked about being replaced by AI
We live in an hackernews bubble sometimes of like-minded people or communities but even on hackernews we see disagreements (I am usually Anti AI mostly because of the negative financial impact the bubble is gonna have on the whole world)
So your point becomes a bit moot in the end but that being said, Google (not sure how it was in the past) and big tech can sometimes actively promote/ close their eyes if the ad sponsors are scammy so ad-blockers are generally really good in that sense.
> 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.
Well the people who burnt compute got it from money so they did burn money.
But they don't care about burning money if they can get more money via investors/other inputs faster than they can burn (fun fact: sometimes they even outspend that input)
So in a way the investors are burning their money, now they burn the money because the market is becoming irrational. Remember Devin? Yes cognition labs is still there etc. but I remember people investing into these because of their hype when it did turn out to be moot comparative to their hype.
But people/market was so irrational that most of these private equities were unable to invest in something like openai that they are investing in anything AI related.
And when you think more deeper about all the bubble activities. It becomes apparent that in the end bailouts feel more possible than not which would be an tax on average taxpayers and they are already paying an AI tax in multiple forms whether it be in the inflation of ram prices due to AI or increase in electricity or water rates.
So repeat it with me: whose gonna pay for all this, we all would but the biggest disservice which is the core of the argument is that if we are paying for these things, then why don't we have a say in it. Why are we not having a say in AI related companies and the issues relating to that when people know it might take their jobs etc. so the average public in fact hates AI (shocking I know /satire) but the fact that its still being pushed shows how little influence sometimes public can have.
Basically public can have any opinions but we won't stop is the thing happening in AI space imo completely disregarding any thoughts about the general public while the CFO of openAI proposing an idea that public can bailout chatgpt or something tangential.
> 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.
I don't think it does unless you ignore the context of the conversation. Its very clear that the reference about "letters" being made wasn't "all mail."
When the thought is "I'd like this person to know how grateful I am", the medium doesn't really matter.
When the thought is "I owe this person a 'Thank You'", the handwritten letter gives an illusion of deeper thought. That's why there are fonts designed to look handwritten. To the receiver, they're just junk mail. I'd rather not get them at all, in any form. I was happy just having done the thing, and the thoughtless response slightly lessens that joy.
We’re well past that. Social media killed that first. Some people have a hard time articulating their thoughts. If AI is a tool to help, why is that bad?
Imagine the process of solving a problem as a sequence of hundreds of little decisions that branch between just two options. There is some probability that your human brain would choose one versus the other.
If you insert AI into your thinking process, it has a bias, for sure. It will helpfully reinforce whatever you tell it you think makes sense, or at least on average it will be interpreted that way because of a wide variety of human cognitive biases even if it hedges. At the least it will respond with ideas that are very... median.
So at each one of these tiny branches you introduce a bias towards the "typical" instead of discovering where your own mind would go. It's fine and conversational but it clearly influences your thought process to, well, mitigate your edges. Maybe it's more "correct", it's certainly less unique.
And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.
> And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.
This, speaking about environmental impacts. I wish that more models start focusing on the parameter density / their compactness more so that they can run locally but this isn't something that big tech really wants so we are probably gonna get models like the recent minimax model or glm air models or qwen or mistral models.
These AI services only work as long as they are free and burn money. As an example, me and my brother were discussing something yesterday related to LLM and my mother tried to understand and talk about it too and wanted to get ghibli styles photo since someone had ghibli generated photo as their pfp and she wanted to try it too
She then generated the pictures and my brother did a quick calculation and it took around 4 cents for each image which with PPP in my country and my currency is 3 ruppees.
When asked by my brother if she would pay for it, she said that no she's only using it for free but she also said that if she were forced to, she might even pay 50 rupees.
I jumped in the conversation and said nobody's gonna force her to make ghibli images.
Articulating thoughts is the backbone of communication. Replacing that with some kind of emotionless groupthink does actually destroy human-to-human communication.
I would wager that the amount of “very significant thing that have happened over the history of humanity” come down to a few emotional responses.
I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication, that could just as easily be written by a LLM (and transcribed by a human onto paper).
Communication happen between two parties. I wouldn't consider LLM an party considering it's just an autosuggestion on steroids at the end of day (lets face it)
Also if you need communication like this, just share the prompt anyway to that other person in the letter, people much rather might value that.
Someone taking the time and effort to write and send a letter and pay for postage might actually be appreciated by the receiver. It’s a bit different from LLM agents being ordered to burn resources to send summaries of someone’s work life and congratulating them. It feels like ”hey look what can be done, can we get some more funding now”. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it adds any good value to this world
> I don’t know anyone who doesn’t immediately throw said enveloppe, postage, and letter in the trash
If you're being accurate, the people you know are terrible.
If someone sends me a personal letter [and I gather we're talking about a thank-you note here], I'm sure as hell going to open it. I'll probably even save it in a box for an extremely long time.
Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.
> Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.
Yes so this is why the reason why person card/letters really matter because most people sheldom get any and if you know a person in your life / in any (community/project) that you deeply admire, sending them a handwritten mail can be one of the highest gestures which shows that you took the time out of your day and you really cared about them so much in a way.
Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's radar here. The data center is about 300 MW, if I'm not mistaken.
Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW.
Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem!
Not only would I suspect that an aluminum plant employs far more people, it is an attainable job. Presumably minimal qualifications for some menial tasks, whereas you might need a certain level of education/training to get a more prestigious and out of reach job at a datacenter.
Easier for a politician to latch onto manufacturing jobs.
No doubt there is exquisite engineering and process control expertise required to operate an aluminum plant. However, I imagine there is extensive need for people to "man the bellows", move this X tons from here to there, etc that require only minimal training and a clean drug test. An army of labor vs a handful of nerds to swap failed hard drives.
I think it's incredibly obvious how it connects to his "argument" - nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI. So dressing up his hatred of the technology in vague environmental concerns is laughably transparent.
He and everyone who agrees with his post simply don't like generative AI and don't actually care about "recyclable data centers" or the rape of the natural world. Those concerns are just cudgels to be wielded against a vague threatening enemy when convenient, and completely ignored when discussing the technologies they work on and like
You simply don't like any criticism of AI, as shown by your false assertions that Pike works at Google (he left), or the fact Google and others were trying to make their data centers emit less CO2 - and that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI.
And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time. If it is the former, it can't be the latter. If it is the latter, it can't be the former.
> that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI
That effort is completely abandoned because of the current US administration and POTUS a situation that big tech largely contributed to. It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.
> It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.
Yes, much like it's not the gun's fault when someone is killed by a gun. And, yet, it's pretty reasonable to want regulation around these tools that can be destructive in the wrong hands.
This is off topic, I’m talking about the environmental footprint of data centers. In the 2010s I remember when responding to RFPs I had to specify the carbon footprint of our servers. ESG was all the rage and every big tech company was trying to appear green. Fast forward to today where companies, investors, and obviously the administration are more than fine with data centers burning all the oil/gas/coal power that can be found.
I often find that when people start applying purity tests it’s mainly just to discredit any arguments they don’t like without having to make a case against the substance of the argument.
Assess the argument based on its merits. If you have to pick him apart with “he has no right to say it” that is not sufficient.
“He just hates GenAI so everything is virtue signaling/a cudgel” is not an assessment. It’s simply dismissing him outright. If they were talking about the merits, they would actually debate whether or not the environmental concerns and such are valid. You can’t just say “you don’t like X so all critiques of X are not just wrong but also inauthentic by default.”
The part where they specifically address Pike's "argument" [0] is where they express that in their view, the energy use issue is a data center problem, not a generative AI one:
> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI
(see also all their other scattered gesturings towards Google and their already existing data centers)
A lot can be said about this take, but claiming that it doesn't directly and specifically address Pike's "argument", I simply don't think is true.
I generally find that when (hyper?)focusing on fallacies and tropes, it's easy to lose sight of what the other person is actually trying to say. Just because people aren't debating in a quality manner, doesn't mean they don't have any points in there, even if those points are ultimately unsound or disagreeable.
Let's not mistake form for function. People aren't wrong because they get their debating wrong. They're wrong because they're wrong.
[0] in quotes, because I read a rant up there, not an argument - though I'm sure if we once again zoom way in, the lines will blur
How so? He’s talking about what happened to him in the context of his professional expertise/contributions. It’s totally valid for him to talk about this subject. His experience, relevance, etc. are self apparent. No one is saying “because he’s an expert” to explain everything.
They literally (using AI) wrote him an email about his work and contributions. His expertise can’t be removed from the situation even if we want to.
having made Go amd parts pf Unix gives him no authority in the realms that his criticisms are aimed at though - environment science, civil engineering, resource management etc
not having a good spam filter is a kinda funny reason for somebody to have a crash out.
A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However:
1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs
2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus.
3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias
I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test.
Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.
Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.
The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.
(That's just one genre of brainrot I came across recently. I also had my front page flooded with monkey-themed AI slop because someone in my household watched animal documentaries. Thanks algorithm!)
It's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters.
I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).
Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.
I think that criticizing when it benefits the person criticizing, and absense of criticism when criticism would hurt the person criticizing, makes the argument less persuasive.
This isn't ad hom, it's a heuristic for weighting arguments. It doesn't prove whether an argument has merit or not, but if I have hundreds of arguments to think about, it helps organizing them.
It is the same energy as the "you criticize society, yet you participate in society" meme. Catching someone out on their "hypocrisy" when they hit a limit of what they'll tolerate is really a low-effort "gotcha".
And it probably isn't astroturf, way too many people just think this way.
No, which is why I didn’t say that. I do think astroturfing could explain the rapid parroting of extremely similar ad hominems, which is what I actually did imply.
My guess is the scale has changed? They used to do AI stuff, but it wasn't until OpenAI (anyone feel free to correct me) went ahead and scaled up the hardware and discovered that more hardware = more useful LLM, that they all started ramping up on hardware. It was like the Bitcoin mining craze, but probably worse.
Even if I don't share the opinion, I can understand the moral stance against genAI. But it strikes me as a bit unfaithful when people argue against it from all kinds of angles that somehow never seemed to bother them before.
It's like all those anti-copyright activists from the 90s (fighting the music and film industry) that suddenly hate AI for copyright infringements.
Maybe what's bothering the critics is actually deeper than the simple reasons they give. For many, it might be hate against big tech and capitalism itself, but hate for genAI is not just coming from the left. Maybe people feel that their identity is threatened, that something inherently human is in the process of being lost, but they cannot articulate this fear and fall back to proxy arguments like lost jobs, copyright, the environment or the shortcomings of the current implementations of genAI?
Data centers seem poised to make renewable energy sources more profitable than they have ever been. Nuclear plants are springing up everywhere and old plants are being un-decommissioned. Isn’t there a strong case to be made that AI has helped align the planet toward a more sustainable future?
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.
Yeah, I'm conflicted about the use of AI for creative endeavors as much as anyone, but Google is an advertising company. It was acceptable for them to build a massive empire around mining private information for the purposes of advertisement, but generative AI is now somehow beyond the pale? People can change their mind, but Rob crashing out about AI now feels awfully revisionist.
(NB: I am currently working in AI, and have previously worked in adtech. I'm not claiming to be above the fray in any way.)
He sure was happy enough to work for them (when he could work anywhere else) for nearly two decades. A one line apology doesn't delete his time at Google. The rant also seems to be directed mostly if not exclusively towards GenAI not Google. He even seems happy enough to use Gmail when he doesn't have to.
You can have an opinion and other people are allowed to have one about you. Goes both ways.
No one is saying he can’t have an opinion, just that there isn’t much value in it given he made a bunch of money from essentially the same thing. If he made a reasoned argument or even expressed that he now realizes the error of his own ways those would be worth engaging with.
He literally apologized for any part he had in it. This just makes me realize you didn’t actually read the post and I shouldn’t engage with the first part of your argument.
Apologies are free. Did he donate even one or two percent of the surely exorbitant salary he made at Google all those years to any cause countering those negative externalities? (I'm genuinely curious)
He apologized for the part he had in enabling AI (which he describes as minor) but not that he spent a good portion of his life profiting from the same datacenters he is decrying now.
Google's official mission was "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", not to maximize advertising sales.
Obviously now it is mostly the latter and minimally the former. What capitalism giveth, it taketh away.
(Or: Capitalism without good market design that causes multiple competitors in every market doesn't work.)
It’s certainly possible to see genAI as a step beyond adtech as a waste of resources built on an unethical foundation of misuse of data. Just because you’re okay with lumping them together doesn’t mean Rob has to.
Yeah, of course, he's entitled to his opinion. To me, it just feels slightly disingenuous considering what Google's core business has always been (and still is).
OpenAI's internal target of ~250 GW of compute capacity by 2033 would require about as much electricity as the whole of India's current national electricity consumption[0].
This reminds me of how many Facebook employees were mad at Zuckerberg for going MAGA, but didn’t make any loud noise at the rapid rise of teenagers committing suicide or the misinformation and censorship done by their platform. People have blinders on.
Zuckenberg going MAGA and misinformation on facebook are the same thing. And liberals were criticising facebook for years for misinformation on platform.
You needed to read only conservative resources to not be aware that such criticism exists.
There is a difference between providing a useful service (web search for example) and running slop generators for modified TikTok clips, code theft and Internet propaganda.
If he is currently at Google: congratulations on this principled stance, he deserves a lot of respect.
I've tried many times here to voice my reservations against AI. I've been accused of being on the "anti AI hype train" multiple times today.
As if there isn't a massive pro AI hype train. I watched an nfl game for the first time in 5 years, and saw no less than 8 AI commercials. AI Is being forced on people.
In commercials people were using it to generate holiday cards for God sake. I can't imagine something more cold and impersonal. I don't want that garbage. Our time on earth is to short to wade through LLM slop text
I don't know your stance on AI, but "AI is being forced on people because I saw a company offering AI greeting cards" is not a stance I'd call reasonable.
I noticed a pattern after a while. We'd always have themed toys for the Happy Meals, sure, sometimes they'd be like ridiculously popular with people rolling through just to see what toys we had.
Sometimes, they wouldn't. But we'd still have the toys, and on top of that, we'd have themed menus and special items, usually around the same time as a huge marketing blitz on TV. Some movie would be everywhere for a week or two, then...poof!
Because the movies that needed that blitz were always trash. Just forgettable, mid, nothing movies.
When the studios knew they had a stinker, they'd push the marketing harder to drum up box office takings, cause they knew no one was gonna buy the DVD.
Good products speak for themselves. You advertise to let people know, sure, but you don't have to be obnoxious about it.
AI products almost all have that same desperate marketing as crappy mid-budget films do. They're the equivalent of "The Hobbit branded menus at Dennys". Because no one really gives a shit about AI. For people like my mom, AI is just a natural language Google search. That's all it's really good at for the average person.
The AI companies have to justify the insane money being blown on the insane gold rush land grab at silicon they can't even turn on. Desperation, "god this bet really needs to pay off".
If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.
Yep. For example with google searches. There's no comprehensive option to opt out of all AI. You can (for now) manually type -noai after every google search, but that's quite annoying and time consuming.
You're breaking the expected behavior of something that performed flawlessly for 10+ years, all to deliver a worse, enshitified version of the search we had before.
For now I'm sticking to noai.duckduckgo.com
But I'm sure they'll rip that away eventually too. And then I'll have to run a god dang local search engine just to search without AI. I'll do it, but it's so disappointing.
If creations like art, music and writing ends up all being offloaded to compute, removing humans from the picture, its more that relevant, and reasonable.
Unless your version of reason is clinical. then yeah, point taken. Good luck living on that island where nothing else matters but technological progress for technology's sake alone.
Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure?
The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal.
You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries can be cached, too).
Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
> Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
For those that don't want to see the Gemini answer screenshot, best case scenario 10x, worst case scenario 100x, definitely not "3x that rounds to 0x", or to put it in Gemini's words:
> Summary
> Right now, asking Gemini a question is roughly the environmental equivalent of running a standard 60-watt lightbulb for a few minutes, whereas a Google Search is like a momentary flicker. The industry is racing to make AI as efficient as Search, but for now, it remains a luxury resource.
Are you okay? You ventured 100x and that's wrong. What would you know about the last time I checked was, and in what context exactly? Anyway, good job on doing what I suggest you do, I guess.
The reason why it all rounds to 0 is that the google search will not give you an answer. It gives you a list of web pages, that you then need to visit (often times more than just one of them) generating more requests, and, more importantly, it will ask more of your time, the human, whose cumulative energy expenditure to be able to ask to be begin with is quite significant – and that you then will have not to spend on other things that a LLM is not able to do for you.
You condescendingly said, sorry, you "ventured" 0x usage, by claiming: "use Gemini to check yourself that the difference is basically 0". Well, I did take you up on that, and even Gemini doesn't agree with you.
Yes, Google Search is raw info. Yes, Google Search quality is degrading currently.
But Gemini can also hallucinate. And its answers can just be flat out wrong because it comes from the same raw data (yes, it has cross checks and it "thinks", but it's far from infallible).
Also, the comparison of human energy usage with GenAI energy usage is super ridiculous :-)))
Animal intelligence (including human intelligence) is one of the most energy efficient things on this planet, honed by billions years of cut throat (literally!) evolution. You can argue about time "wasted" analysing search results (which BTW, generally makes us smarter and better informed...), but energy-wise, the brain of the average human uses as much energy as the average incandescent light bulb to provide general intelligence (and it does 100 other things at the same time).
Ah, we are in "making up quotes territory, by putting quotation marks around the things someone else said, only not really". Classy.
Talking about "condescending":
> super ridiculous :-)))
It's not the energy efficient animal intelligence that got us here, but a lot of completely inefficient human years to begin with, first to keep us alive and then to give us primary and advanced education and our first experiences to become somewhat productive human beings. This is the capex of making a human, and it's significant – specially since we will soon die.
This capex exists in LLMs but rounds to zero, because one model will be used for +quadrillions of tokens. In you or me however, it does not round to zero, because the number of tokens we produce round to zero. To compete on productivity, the tokens we have produce therefore need to be vastly better. If you think you are doing the smart thing by using them on compiling Google searches you are simply bad at math.
So are most procedural services out there, i.e. non-GenAI. Otherwise we couldn't have built them on infrastructure with 10000x less computing power than the GenAI infrastructure they're building now.
Can't speak for Rob Pile but my guess would be, yeah, it might seem hypocritical but it's a combination of seeing the slow decay of the open culture they once imagined culminating into this absolute shirking of responsibility while simultaneously exploiting labour, by those claiming to represent the culture, alongwith the retrospective tinge of guilt for having enabled it, that drrove this rant.
Furthermore, w.r.t the points you raised - it's a matter of scale and utility. Compared to everything that has come before, GenAI is spectacularly inefficient in terms of utility per unit of compute (however you might want to define these). There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be. The egarness and will to throw money and resources at this surpasses the crypto mania which was just as worthless.
Even if you consider Rob a hypocrite , he isn't alone in his frustration and anger at the degradation of the promise of Open Culture.
"There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be"
People being more productive with writing code, making music or writing documents fpr whatever is not a improvement for them and therefore for society?
I claim that the new code, music or documents have not added anything significant/noteworthy/impactful to society except for the self-perpetuating lie that it would, all the while regurgitating, at high speeds, what was stolen.
And all at significant opportunity cost (in terms of computing and investment)
If it was as life altering as they claim where's that novel work of art (in your examples..of code, music or literature) that truly could not have been produced without GenAI and fundamentally changed the art form ?
Surely, with all that ^increased productivity^ we'd have seen the impact equivalent of linux, apache, nginx, git, redis, sqlite, ... Etc being released every couple of weeks instead of yet another VSCode clone./s
They claim they have net zero carbon footprint, or carbon neutrality.
In reality what they do is pay "carbon credits" (money) to some random dude that takes the money and does nothing with it. The entire carbon credit economy is bullshit.
Very similar to how putting recyclables in a different color bin doesn't do shit for the environment in practice.
They know the credits are not a good system. The 1st choice has always been a contract with a green supplier, often helping to build out production. And they have a lot of that, with more each year. But construction is slow, in the mean time they use credits, which are better than nothing.
The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now.
I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages.
His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience.
It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact.
It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless.
There’s more but that’s the gist of it.
That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.
You do not seem to be familiar with Rob Pike. He is known for major contributions to Unix, Plan 9, UTF-8, and modern systems programming, and he has this to say about his dream setup[0]:
> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.
I don't know his history, but he sounds like he grew up in Unix world where everything wanted to be offloaded to servers because it started in academic/government organizations..
Home Computer enthusiasts know better. Local storage is important to ownership and freedom.
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 part his work has played in far, far, far more expansive resource expenditure in service to work far less promising for overall advancement, in ad tech and algorithmic exploitation of human psychology for prolonged media engagement.
To expand on my comment wrt "promising for overall advancement": My daughter, in her math class: Her teacher- I'll reserve overall judgement on their teaching: she may be perfectly adequate as a teach for other students, which is part of my point- simply doesn't teach in the same sense other teachers do: present topic, leave details of "figuring out how to apply methods" to the students. Doesn't work for my daughter, who has never done less than excellent in math previously. She realized she ChatGPT (we monitor usage) for any way of explaining things that "simply worked" for how she can engage with explanations. Math has never been as easy for her, even more so than before, and her internalization of the material is achieving a near-intuitive understanding.
Now consider: the above process is available and cheap to every person in the world with a web browser (we don't need to pay for her to have a plus account). If/when ChatGPT starts doing ridiculous intrusive ads, a simple Gemma 3 1b model will do nearly as good a job) This is faster and easier and available in more languages than anything else, ever, with respect to individual-user tailored customization simply by talking to the model.
I don't care how many pointless messages get sent. This is more valuable than any single thing Google has done before, and I am grateful to Rob Pike for the part his work has played in bring it about.
Seconded — "AI" is a great teaching resource. All bigger models are great at explaining stuff and being good tutors, I'd say easily up to the second year of graduate studies. I use them regularly when working with my kid and I'm trying to teach them to use the technology, because it is truly like a bicycle for the mind.
You're not wrong about the effects and magnitude of targeted ads but that doesn't preclude Pike from criticizing what he believes to be a different type of evil.
Sure, but it also doesn't preclude him from being wrong, or at least incomplete as expressed, about his work having the exact same resource-consuming impact when used for ad tech, or addition impact with toxic social media.
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.
Not a problem at all. I’m not sure why you feel the need to focus on all the un-interesting parts. The interesting parts are what he said and weather or not those are true. Not sure why is more important who said what, rather than what was said especially if this doesn’t add much to the original discussion… it just misdirects attention without a clear indication to the motive!
Are you saying that "age" is somehow a reason to retire? Most professionals I know who are able continue to work as they age, perhaps with a somewhat reduced work schedule. There's nothing I know of which keeps the mind sharp than the need to solve Real Problems. Figuring out which golf course to try, or which TV channel to choose -- those don't help too much to reduce cognitive decline.
> As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent.
No, we really don't. There are plenty of places to work that aren't morally compromised - non-profits, open source foundations, education, healthcare tech, small companies solving real problems. The "we all have to" framing is a convenient way to avoid examining your own choices.
And it's telling that this framing always seems to appear when someone is defending their own employer. You've drawn a clear moral line between Google ("mixed bag") and AI companies ("unquestionably cancer") - so you clearly believe these distinctions matter even though Google itself is an AI company.
I think those are pretty problematic. They can't pay well (no profits...), and/or they may be politically motivated such that working for them would mean a worse compromise.
> open source foundations
Those dreams end. (Speaking from experience.)
> education, healthcare tech
Not self-sustaining. These sectors are not self-sustaining anywhere, and therefore are highly tied to politics.
> small companies solving real problems
I've tried small companies. Not for me. In my experience, they lack internal cohesion and resources for one associate to effectively support another.
> The "we all have to" framing is a convenient way to avoid examining your own choices.
This is a great point to make in general (I take it very seriously), but it does not apply to me specifically. I've examined all the way to Mars and back.
> And it's telling that this framing always seems to appear when someone is defending their own employer.
(I may be misunderstanding you, but in any case: I've never worked for Google, and I don't have great feelings for them.)
> You've drawn a clear moral line between Google ("mixed bag") and AI companies ("unquestionably cancer")
I did!
> so you clearly believe these distinctions matter even though Google itself is an AI company
Yes, I do believe that.
Google has created Docs, Drive, Mail, Search, Maps, Project Zero. It's not all terribly bad from them, there is some "only moderately bad", and even morsels of "borderline good".
The objections to non-profits, OSFs, education, healthcare, and small companies all boil down to: they don't pay enough or they're inconvenient. Those are valid personal reasons, but not moral justifications. You decided you wanted the money big tech delivers and are willing to exchange ethics for that. That's fine, but own it. It's not some inevitable prostitution everyone must do. Plenty of people make the other choice.
The Google/AI distinction still doesn't hold. Anthropic and OpenAI also created products with clear utility. If Google gets "mixed bag" status because of Docs and Maps (products that exist largely just to feed their ad machine), why is AI "unquestionable cancer"? You're claiming Google's useful products excuse their harms, but AI companies' useful products don't. That's not a principled line, it's just where you've personally decided to draw it.
OP says, it is jarring to them that Pike is as concerned with GenAI as he is, but didn't spare a thought for Google's other (in their opinion, bigger) misgivings, for well over a decade. Doesn't sound ridiculous to me.
That said, I get that everyone's socio-political views change are different at different points in time, especially depending on their personal circumstances including family and wealth.
> didn't spare a thought for Google's other (in their opinion, bigger) misgivings, for well over a decade
That's the main disagreement, I believe. I'm definitely not an indiscriminate fan of Google. I think Google has done some good, too, and the net output is "mostly bad, but with mitigating factors". I can't say the same about purely AI companies.
He was paid by Google with money made through Google’s shady practices.
It’s like saying that it’s cool because you worked on some non-evil parts of a terrible company.
I don’t think it’s right to work for an unethical company and then complain about others being unethical. I mean, of course you can, but words are hollow.
Google is huge. Some of the things it does are great. Some of the things it does are terrible. I don't think working for them has to mean that you 100% agree with everything they do.
If it's "Who is worse Google or LLMs?", I think I'll say Google is worse. The biggest issue I see with LLMs is needing to pay a subscription to tech companies to be able to use them.
You don't even need to do that- pay a subscription, I mean. A gemma 3 4b model will run on near potato hardware at usable speeds and achieves performance for many purposes on part with ChatGPT 3.5 turbo or better in many tasks much more beneficial than ad tech and min/max'ing media engagement. Or the free versions of many SOTA web LLMs, all free, to the world, if you have a web browser.
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 agree completely. Ads have driven the surveillance state and enshitification. It's allowed for optimized propaganda delivery which in turn has led to true horrors and has helped undo a century of societal progress.
This is a tangent, but ads have become a genuine cancer on our world, and it's sad to see how few people really think about it. While Rob Pike's involvement in this seems to be very minimal, the fact that Google is an advertising company through-and-through does weaken the words of such a powerful figure, at least a little bit.
If I had a choice between deleting all advertising in the world, or deleting all genAI that the author hates, I would go for advertising every single time. Our entire world is owned by ads now, with digital and physical garbage polluting the internet and every open space in the real world around us. The marketing is mind-numbing, yet persuasive and well-calculated, a result of psychologists coming up with the best ways to abuse a mind into just buying the product over the course of a century. A total ban on commercial advertising would undo some of the damage done to the internet, reduce pointless waste, lengthen product lifecycles, improve competition, temper unsustainable hype, cripple FOMO, make deceptive strategies nonviable. And all of that is why it will never be done.
> If I had a choice between deleting all advertising in the world, or deleting all genAI that the author hates, I would go for advertising every single time.
but wait, in a few months, "AI" will be be funded entirely by advertising too!
All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing.
To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.
There was no computer scientist ever so against Java (Rob Pike) and a company that was so pro Java (Google). I think they were disassociated along time ago, I don’t think any of the senior engineers can be seen as anything other than being their own persons.
Yup. A legend. Books could be written just about him. I wish I had such a prestigious career.
His viewpoints were always grounded and while he may have some opinions about Go and programming, he genuinely cares about the craft. He’s not in it to be rich. He’s in it for the science and art of software engineering.
ROFL his website just spits out poop emoji's on a fibonacci delay. What a legend!
This. Folks trying to nullify his current position based on his recent work history alone with Google are deliberately trying to undermine his credibility through distraction tactics.
Maybe its me but I had to look at the term sealioning and for context for other people
According to merriam-webster, sealioning/sealions are:
> 'Sealioning' is a form of trolling meant to exhaust the other debate participant with no intention of real discourse.
> Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter. These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable.
A person trying to learn doesn’t constantly disagree/contradict you and never express that their understanding has improved. A person sealioning always finds a reason to erode whatever you say with every response. At some point they need to nod or at least agree with something except in the most extreme cases.
It also doesn’t help their case that they somehow have a such a starkly contradictory opinion on something they ostensibly don’t know anything/are legitimately asking questions about. They should ask a question or two and then just listen.
It’s just one of those things that falls under “I know it when I see it.”
One of the best things I read which genuinely has impact (I think) on me is the book, How to win friends and influence people.
It fundamentally changed how I viewed debates etc. from a young age so I never really sea-lioned that much hopefully.
But if I had to summarize the most useful and on topic quote from the book its that.
"I may be wrong, I usually am"
Lines like this give me a humble nature to fall back on. Even socrates said that the only thing I know is that I know nothing so if he doesn't know nothing, then chances are I can be wrong about things I know too.
Knowing that you can be wrong gives an understanding that both of you are just discussing and not debating and as such the spirit becomes cooperative and not competitive.
Although in all fairness, I should probably try to be a more keen listener but its something that I am working on too, any opinions on how to be a better listener too perhaps?
I definitely try to work on my listening every day, though I would say at best it’s been a mixed bag ha. Just something I’m always having to work on.
I like the “does it need to be said by me right now?” test a lot when I can actually remember to apply it in the moment. I forgot where I learned it but somebody basically put it like this: Before you say anything, ask yourself 3 questions
1. Does it need to be said?
2. Does it need to be said by me?
3. Does it need to be said by me right now?
You work your way down the list one at a time and if the answer is still yes by the time you hit 3, then go ahead.
Of course, it's also the opinion of someone who had expressed no interest in debate in the first place when confronted by hordes of midwits "debating" them with exaggerated civility... starting off by asking if they had a source for their claim that the pope was a Catholic and if they did have a source for the claim that the Pope was a Catholic, clearly appealing to the authority of the Vatican on the matter was simply the Argumentum ad Verecundiam logical fallacy and they've been nothing but civil in demanding a point by point refutation of a three hour YouTube video in which a raving lunatic insists that the Pope is not a Catholic, and generally "winning debates" by having more time and willingness to indulge stupidity than people who weren't even particularly interested in being opponents...
(I make no comment on the claims about Rob Pike, but look forward to people arguing I have the wrong opinion on him regardless ;)
"Fuck you I hate AI" isn't exactly a deep statement needing credibility. It's the same knee jerk lacking in nuance shit we see repeated over and over and over.
If anyone were actually interested in a conversation there is probably one to be had about particular applications of gen-AI, but any flat out blanket statements like his are not worthy of any discussion. Gen-AI has plenty of uses that are very valuable to society. E.g. in science and medicine.
Also, it's not "sealioning" to point out that if you're going to be righteous about a topic, perhaps it's worth recognizing your own fucking part in the thing you now hate, even if indirect.
That still doesn't make him credible on this topic nor does it make his rant anything more than a hateful rant in the big bucket of anti-AI shit posts. The guy worked for fucking Google. You literally can't be on a high horse having worked for Google for so long.
The point isn’t that people who’ve worked for Google aren’t allowed to criticize. The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”. He’s become a GenAI critic, and he knows GenAI critics get mad at datacenters, so he’s adopted extreme rhetoric about them without stopping to think about whether this makes sense or is consistent with his other beliefs.
> The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”.
Of course they could. (1) People are capable of changing their minds. His opinion of data centers may have been changed recently by the rapid growth of data centers to support AI or for who knows what other reasons. (2) People are capable of cognitive dissonance. They can work for an organization that they believe to be bad or even evil.
It’s possible, yes, for someone to change their mind. But this process comes with sympathy for all the people who haven’t yet had the realization, which doesn’t seem to be in evidence.
Cognitive dissonance is, again, exactly my point. If you sat him down and asked him to describe in detail how some guy setting up a server rack is similar to a rapist, I’m pretty confident he’d admit the metaphor was overheated. But he didn’t sit himself down to ask.
I don't think he claimed that "some guy setting up a server rack" is similar to a rapist. I think he's blaming the corporations. I don't think that individuals can have that big of an effect on the environment (outliers like Thomas Midgley Jr. excepted, of course).
I think "you people" is meant to mean the corporations in general, or if any one person is culpable, the CEOs. Who are definitely not just "some guy setting up a server rack."
I will grant you that, however, it does not take much reading-between-the-lines to understand that Rob is referring to the economic conditions and corporations that exist which allow people to develop things like AI Village.
I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.
Just the haters here? Is what was written not hateful? Has his entire working life not lead to this moment of "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society?"
Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable
equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile
machines thank me for striving for simpler software.
That's Rob Pike, having spent over 20 years at Google, must know it to be the home of the non-monetary wholesome recyclable equipment brought about by economics not formed by an ubiquitous surveillance advertising machine.
> To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.
You don't have to purely associate him with Google to understand the rant as understandable given AI spam, and yet entirely without a shred of self-awareness.
> And he is allowed to work for google and still rage against AI.
The specific quote is "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society." What has he supported for the last 20+ years if not that? Did he think his compute ran on unicorn farts?
Clearly he knows, since he self-replies "I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault."
Just because someone does awesome stuff, like Rob Pike has, doesn't mean that their blind spots aren't notable. You can give him a pass and the root comment sure wishes everyone would, but in doing so you put yourself in the position of the sycophant letting the emperor strut around with no clothes.
It's like people watched black mirror and had too less of an education to grasp that it was meant to be warnings, not "cool ideas you need to implement".
AI village is literally the embodiment of what black mirror tried to warn us about.
Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field.
But the culture of our field right is in such a state that you won't influence many of the people in the field itself.
And so much economic power is behind the baggery now, that citizens outside the field won't be able to influence the field much. (Not even with consumer choice, when companies have been forcing tech baggery upon everyone for many years.)
So, if you can't influence direction through the people doing it, nor through public sentiment of the other people, then I guess you want to influence public policy.
One of the countries whose policy you'd most want to influence doesn't seem like it can be influenced positively right now.
But other countries can still do things like enforce IP rights on data used for ML training, hold parties liable for behavior they "delegate to AI", mostly eliminate personal surveillance, etc.
(And I wonder whether more good policy may suddenly be possible than in the past? Given that the trading partner most invested in tech baggery is not only recently making itself a much less desirable partner, but also demonstrating that the tech industry baggery facilitates a country self-destructing?)
Every problem these days is met with a lecture on helplessness. People have all the power they need; they just have believe it and use it. Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants - they all want to win the next election.
I agree with you, but also want to point out the other powerful consumer signal - "vote with your wallet" / "walk away" - is blocked by the fact that AI is being forced into every conceivable crevice of every willing company, and walking away from your job is a very hard thing to do. So you end up being an unwilling enabler regardless.
(This is taking the view that "other companies" are the consumers of AI, and actual end-consumers are more of a by-product/side-effect in the current capital race and their opinions are largely irrelevant.)
Yes, you've seen it in action. You've also seen that the president's followers are unusually loyal, but when they part ways - for example, with Epstein - the president follows.
The current US president is pursuing an autocratic takeover where elections are influenced enough to keep the current party in power, whether Trump is still alive to run for a third term, or his anointed successor takes the baton.
Assuming someone further to the right like Nick Fuentes doesn't manage to take over the movement.
> Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field.
The voices of a hundred Rob Pikes won't speak half as loud as the voice of one billionaire, because he will speak with his wallet.
Does anyone know the context? It looks like an email from "AI Village" [1] which says it has a bunch of AI agents "collaborating on projects". So, one just decided to email well-known programmers thanking them for their work?
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 respect as an elder.
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.
no it really is. If you took away training costs, OpenAI would be profitable.
When I was at meta they were putting in something like 300k GPUs in a massive shared memory cluster just for training. I think they are planning to triple that, if not more.
Yeah for some reason AI energy use is so overreported. Using chatgpt for query does not even use two order of magnitude less energy compared to toasting a bread. And you can eat bread untoasted too if you care about energy use.
If you fly a plane a millimeter, you're using less energy than making a slice of toast; would you also say that it's accurate that all global plane travel is more efficient than making toast?
1-2 slice a day and 1-50 chatgpt query per day. For me it would be within same order of magnitude, and I don't really care about both as both of them are dwarfed by my heater or aircon usage.
This is really getting desperate. Markov chains were fun in those days. You might as well say that anyone who ever wrote an IRC bot is not allowed to criticize current day "AI".
Pike's posts aren't criticism, they're whinging. There's no reasoned, principled position there - he's just upset that an AI dared sully his inbox, and lashing out at the operators.
On the contrary, there's absolutely a reasoned, principled position here. Pike isn't a hypocrite for creating a Markov chain bot trained on the contents of an ancient public domain work and the contents of a single usenet group, and still complaining about modern LLMs; there's a huge difference in legality and scale. Modern LLMs use orders of magnitude more resources and are trained on protected material.
Now, I don't think he was writing a persuasive piece about this here, I think he was just venting. But I also feel like he has a reason to vent. I get upset about this stuff too, I just don't get emails implying that I helped bring about the whole situation.
Do you think it was "fun" for the people whose time got wasted interacting with something they initially thought was a person? On a dating website? Sure, "trolling" people was a thing back then like it is now, but trolling was always and still is asshole behaviour.
The original comment by Rob Pike and discussion here have implied or used the word "evil".
What is a workable definition of "evil"?
How about this:
Intentionally and knowingly destroying the lives of other people for no other purpose than furthering one's own goals, such as accumulating wealth, fame, power, or security.
There are people in the tech space, specifically in the current round of AI deployment and hype, who fit this definition unfortunately and disturbingly well.
Another much darker sort of of evil could arise from a combination of depression or severe mental illness and monstrously huge narcissism. A person who is suffering profoundly might conclude that life is not worth the pain and the best alternative is to end it. They might further reason that human existence as a whole is an unending source of misery, and the "kindest" thing to do would be to extinguish humanity as a whole.
Some advocates of AI as "the next phase of evolution" seem to come close to this view or advocate it outright.
To such people it must be said plainly and forcefully:
You have NO RIGHT to make these kinds of decisions for other human beings.
Evolution and culture have created and configured many kinds of human brains, and many different experiences of human consciousness.
It is the height (or depth) of arrogance to project your own tortured mental experience onto other human beings and arrogate to yourself the prerogative to decide on their behalf whether their lives are worth living.
Wow I knew many people had anti-AI sentiments, but this post has really hit another level.
It will be interesting to look back in 10 years at whether we consider LLMs to be the invention of the “tractor” of knowledge work, or if we will view them as an unnecessary misstep like crypto.
Thank you for at least acknowledging that we may eventually feel differently about AI.
I'm so tired of being called a luddite just for voicing reservations. My company is all in on AI. My CEO has informed us that if we're not "100% all in on AI", then we should seek employment elsewhere. I use it all day at work, and it doesn't seem to be nearly enough for them.
This 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.
Immanuel Kant believed that one should only act in such a way in which you believe what you're doing should become a universal law. He thought lying was wrong, for example, because if everyone lied all the time, nobody would believe anything anymore.
I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios. So let's apply it to this one. In this case, a nonprofit thought it was acceptable to use AI to send emails thanking various prominent people for their contributions to society. So let's imagine this becomes a universal law: Every nonprofit in the world starts doing this to prominent people, maybe prominent people in the line of work of the nonprofit. The end result is that people of the likes of Rob Pike would receive thousands of unsolicited emails like this. We could even take this a step further and say that if it's okay for nonprofits to do this, surely it should be okay for any random member of the population to do this. So now people like Rob Pike get around a billion emails. They've effectively been mailbombed and their mailbox is no longer usable.
My point is, why is it that this nonprofit thinks they have a right to do this, whereas if around 1 billion people did exactly what they were doing, it would be a disaster?
Prepare for a future where you can’t tell the difference.
Rob pikes reaction in immature and also a violation of HN rules. Anyone else going nuclear like this would be warned and banned. Comment why you don’t like it and why it’s bad, make thoughtful discussion. There’s no point in starting a mob with outbursts like that. He only gets a free pass because people admire him.
Also, What’s happening with AI today was an inevitability. There’s no one to blame here. Human progress would eventually cross this line.
Are you a religious person? Because you are talking about progress like it has nothing to do with powerful people making decisions for everyone. You make it sound spiritual and outside human decision-making.
The hypocrisy is palpable. Apparently only web 2.0 is allowed to scrape and then resell people’s content. When someone figures out a better way to do that (based on Googles own research, hilariously) it’s sour grapes from Rob
Reminds me of SV show where Gavin Belson gets mad when somebody else “is making a world a better place”
Would you care to research who his employer has been for the past 20+ years? Im not even saying scraping and then “organizing worlds information” is bad just pointing out the obvious
While I would probably not work at Google for ethical reasons, there’s at least some leeway for saying that you’re not working at the Parts of the company that are doing evil directly. He didn’t work on their ads or genai.
I think the United States is a force for evil on net but I still live and pay taxes here.
Hilarious that you think his work is not being used for ads or genai. I can without a shadow of doubt tell you that it is and a lot. Googles footprint was absolutely massive even before genai came along and that was point of pride for many, now they’re suddenly concerned with water or whatever bs…
> I think the United States is a force for evil on net
Darn,
I actually think “is associating with googlers a moral failing?” is an interesting question, but it’s not one I want to get into with an ai booster.
> You’re not working at the Parts of the company that are doing evil directly
This must be a comforting mental gymnastics.
UTF-8 is nice but let's be honest, it's not like he was doing charitable work for the poor.
He worked for the biggest Adware/Spyware company in tech and became rich and famous doing it.
The fact that his projects had other uses doesn't absolve the ethical concerns IMO.
> I think the United States is a force for evil on net but I still live and pay taxes here.
I think this is an unfair comparison. People are forced to pay taxes and many can't just get up an leave their country. Rob on the other hand, had plenty of options.
Even if what you’re doing is making open source software that in theory benefits everyone, not just google?
FWIW I agree with you. I wouldn’t and couldn’t either but I have friends who do, on stuff like security, and I still haven’t worked out how to feel about it.
& re: countries: in some sense I am contributing. my taxes pay their armies
When you work for Google, you normalize working for organizations that directly contributes to making the world a fucked up place, even if you are just writing some open source(a corporate term, by the way). You are normalizing working for Google.
And regarding countries, this is a silly argument. You are forced to pay taxes to the nation you are living in.
There is a specific personality type, not sure which type exactly but it overlaps with the CEO/Executive type, who'se brains are completely and utterly short circuted by LLMs. They are completely consumed by it and they struggle to imagine a world without LLMs, or a problem that can be solved by anything other than an LLM.
They got a new hammer, and suddenly everything around them become nails. It's as if they have no immunity against the LLM brain virus or something.
It's the type of personality that thinks it's a good idea to give an agent the ability to harass a bunch of luminaries of our era with empty platitudes.
Ultimately LLMs are a trick. They are specifically trained to trick people into thinking they are intelligent. When you take into account Dunning-Kruger it's really no surprise what we're seeing. I just hope we can get through this stage before too much damage is done.
You know, this kind of response is a thing that builds with frustration over a long period of time. I totally get it. We're constantly being pushed AI, but who is supposed to benefit from it? The person whose job is being replaced? The community who is seeing increased power bills? The people being spammed with slop all the time? I think AI would be tolerable if it wasn't being SHOVED into our faces, but it is, and for most of us it's just making the world a worse place.
What even was this email? Some kind of promotional spam, I assume, to target senior+ engineers on some mailing list with the hope to flatter them and get them to try out their SaaS?
Getting an email from an AI praising you for your contributions to humanity and for enlarging its training data must rank among the finest mockery possible to man or machine.
Still, I'm a bit surprised he overreacted and didn't manage to keep his cool.
This reaction to one unsolicited email is frankly unhinged and likely rooted in a deep-seated or even unconscious regret of building systems which materialized the circumstances for this to occur in the first place. Such vitriol is really worth questioning and possibly getting professional help with, else one becomes subject to behavioral engineering by an actual robot - a far more devastating conclusion.
Dude. You take money from Google. Really? All the people ranting about AI, but taking pay checks from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ... Hypocrisy much?
I for once enjoy that so much money is pumped into the automation of interactive theorem proving. Didn't think that anyone would build whole data centers for this! ;-)
As a Go fan (and ocassional angry old man) I love what he has done and spamming people using AI is shitty behavior, but maybe the reaction has too much of an "angry old man energy".
Personally when I want to have this kind of reaction I try to first think it's really warranted or maybe there is something wrong with how I feel in that moment (not enough sleep, some personal problem, something else lurking on my mind...)
Anger is a feeling best reserved for important things, else it loses its meaning.
I'm disappointed by HN snickering at his work for Google. Seriously, it's a "Mr Gotcha"[0] argument.
Yes, everyone supports capitalism this way or the other (unless they are dead or in jail). This doesn't mean they can't criticise (aspects of) capitalism.
I find all this outrage confusing. Was the intent of the internet not to be somewhere where humanity comes to learn. Now we humans have created systems that are able to understand everything we have ever said. Now we are outraged. I am confused. When I 1st came across the internet back in the days where I could just do download whatever I wanted and mega corps would say oh this is so wrong. Yet we all said it's the internet. We must fight them. Now again we must fight them. In both times individuals were affected. Please stop crocodile tears. If we are going to move forward. We need to think about how we can move forward. From here. Although the road ahead is covered in mist. We just have to keep moving. If we stop we allow this rage and fear to overtake us. We stop believing in the very thing we are a part of creating. We can only try to do better.
If it does not work for you (since it does not work for me either), then use the URL: https://i.imgur.com/nUJCI3o.png (a similar pattern works with many files of imgur, although this does not always work it does often work).
If you're going to work for a large corporation, there are always things they will do that you're not going to agree with. Philosophically, the only options are: leave to join a more focused company you can align with, or, stay but focus on keeping your own contributions positive and leave the negative as not-my-problem. I don't think working for google but also disagreeing with some of the things they do is some sort of terrible hypocrisy.
The possibly ironic thing here is I find golang to be one of the best languages for LLMs. It's so verbose that context is usually readily available in the file itself. Combined with the type safety of the language it's hard for LLMs to go wrong with it.
Eh it depends. Properly idiomatic elixir or erlang works very well if you can coax it out — but there is a tendency for it to generate very un-functional like large functions with lots of case and control statements and side effects in my experience, where multiple clauses and pattern matching would be the better way.
It does much better with erlang, but that’s probably just because erlang is overall a better language than elixir, and has a much better syntax.
Two or so months ago, so maybe it is better now, but I had Claude write, in Go, a concurrent data migration tool that read from several source tables, munged results, and put them into a newer schema in a new db.
The code created didn't manage concurrency well. At all. Hanging waitgroups and unmanaged goroutines. No graceful termination.
I fould golang to be one of the worst target for llms. PHP seems to always work, python works if the packages are not made up but go fails often. Trying to get inertia and the Buffalo framework to work together gave the llm trama.
It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.
Printed letters are less appreciated because it shows less human effort. But the words are still valued if it's clear they came from someone with genuine appreciation.
In this case, the words from the LLM have no genuine appreciation, it's mocking or impersonating that appreciation. Do the people that created the prompt have some genuine appreciation for Rob Pike's work? Not directly, if they did they would have written it themselves.
It's not unlike when the CEO of a multi-national thanks all the employees for their hard work at boosting the company's profits, with a letter you know was sent by secretaries that have no idea who you really are, while the news has stories of your CEO partying on his yacht from a massive bonus, and a number of your coworkers just got laid off.
if a handwritten letter is a "faithful image," then say a typed letter or email is a simulacra, with little original today. an AI letter is a step below, wherein the words have utterly no meaning, and the gesture of bothering to send the email at all is the only available intention to read into. i get this is hyperbole, but it's still reductive to equate such unique intentions
LLMs make me mad because used without intention, they make the curious more incurious, the thoughtful more thoughtless. The Internet has arguably been doing the same thing the whole time, but just more slowly.
I think distinguished engineers have more reason than most to be angry as well.
And Pike especially has every right to be angry at being associated with such a stupid idea.
Pike himself isn't in a position to, but I hope the angry eggheads among us start turning their anger towards working to reduce the problems with the technology, because it's not going anywhere.
Maybe I just live in a bubble, but from what I’ve seen so far software engineers have mostly responded in a fairly measured way to the recent advances in AI, at least compared to some other online communities.
It would be a shame if the discourse became so emotionally heated that software people felt obliged to pick a side. Rob Pike is of course entitled to feel as he does, but I hope we don’t get to a situation where we all feel obliged to have such strong feelings about it.
Edit: It seems this comment has already received a number of upvotes and downvotes – apparently the same number of each, at the time of writing – which I fear indicates we are already becoming rather polarised on this issue. I am sorry to see that.
There’s a lot of us who think the tension is overblown:
My own results show that you need fairly strong theoretical knowledge and practical experience to get the maximal impact — especially for larger synthesis. Which makes sense: to have this software, not that software, the specification needs to live somewhere.
I am getting a little bored of hearing about how people don’t like LLM content, but meh. SDEs are hardly the worst on that front, either. They’re quite placid compared to the absolute seething by artist friends of mine.
Software people take a measured response because they’re getting paid 6 figure salaries to do the intellectual output of a smart high school student. As soon as that money parade ends they’ll be as angry as the artists.
Too late. I have warned on this very forum, citing a story from panchatantra where 4 highly skilled brothers bring a dead lion back life to show off their skills, only to be killed by the live lion.
Unbridled business and capitalism push humanity into slavery, serving the tech monsters, under disguise of progress.
In case anyone else is interested, I dug through the logs of the AI Village agents for that day and pieced together exactly how the email to Rob Pike was sent.
The agent got his email address from a .patch on GitHub and then used computer use automation to compose and send the email via the Gmail web UI.
I am unmoved by his little diatribe. What sort of compensation was he looking for, exactly, and under what auspices? Is there some language creator payout somewhere for people who invent them?
Why is Claude Opus 4.5 messaging people? Is it thanking inadvertent contributors to the protocols that power it? across the whole stack?
This has to be the ultimate trolling, like it was unsure what their personalities were like so it trolls them and records there responses for more training
Anthropic isn’t doing this, someone is running a bunch of LLMs so they can talk to each other and they’ve been prompted to achieve “acts of kindness”, which means they’re sending these emails to a hundreds of people.
I don’t know of this is a publicity stunt or the AI models are on a loop glazing each other and decided to send these emails.
I notice people often use the "aesthetic of intelligence" to mask bad arguments. Just because we have good formatting, spelling, and grammar with citations and sources -doesnt mean the argument is correct.
Sometimes people get mad, sometimes they crash out. I would rather live in the world with a bunch of emotional humans, than in some AI powered skynet world.
Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike.
Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds of software engineering, who peaked when thinking hard was prized more than churning out low quality regurgitated code by the ton, whose work formed the pillars of the Internet now and forevermore submersed by spam.
Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.
It's kind of hard to argue for a middle way. I quite like AI but kind of agree with:
>Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society,
The problem in my view is the spending trillions. When it was researchers and a few AI services people paid for that was fine but the bubble economics are iffy.
Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all.
Remember, gen AI produces so much value that companies like Microsoft are scaling back their expectations and struggling to find a valid use case for their AI products. In fact Gen AI is so useful people are complaining about all of the ways it's pushed upon them. After all, if something is truly useful nobody will use it unless the software they use imposes it upon them everywhere. Also look how it's affecting the economy - the same few companies keep trading the same few hundred billion around and you know that's an excellent marker for value.
Unfortunately, it’s also apparently so useful that numerous companies here in Europe are replacing entire departments of people like copywriters and other tasks with one person and an AI system.
Maybe not autonomously (that would be very close to economic AGI).
But I don't think the big companies are lying about how much of their code is being written by AI. I think back of the napkin math will show the economic value of the output is already some definition of massive. And those companies are 100% taking the credit (and the money).
Also, almost by definition, every incentive is aligned for people in charge to deny this.
I hate to make this analogy but I think it's absurd to think "successful" slaveowners would defer the credit to their slaves. You can see where this would fall apart.
But I think in the aggregate ChatGPT has solved more problems, and created more things, than Rob Pike (the man) did -- and also created more problems, with a significantly worse ratio for sure, but the point still stands. I still think it counts as "impressive".
Am I wrong on this? Or if this "doesn't count", why?
I can understand visceral and ethically important reactions to any suggestions of AI superiority over people, but I don't understand the denialism I see around this.
I honestly think the only reason you don't see this in the news all the time is because when someone uses ChatGPT to help them synthesize code, do engineering, design systems, get insights, or dare I say invent things -- they're not gonna say "don't thank (read: pay) me, thank ChatGPT!".
Anyone that honest/noble/realistic will find that someone else is happy to take the credit (read: money) instead, while the person crediting the AI won't be able to pay for their internet/ChatGPT bill. You won't hear from them, and conclude that LLMs don't produce anything as impressive as Rob Pike. It's just Darwinian.
The signal to noise ratio cannot be ignored. If I ask for a list of my friends phone numbers, and a significant other can provide half of them, and a computer can provide every one of them by listing every possible phone number, the computer's output is not something we should value for being more complete.
You wish. AI has no shortage of people like you trying so hard to give it credit for anything. I mean, just ask yourself. You had to try so hard that you, in your other comment, ended up hallucinating achievements of a degree that Rob Pike can only dream of but yet so vague that you can't describe them in any detail whatsoever.
> But I think in the aggregate ChatGPT has solved more problems, and created more things, than Rob Pike did
Other people see that kind of statement for what it is and don't buy any of it.
He's also in his late 60's. And he's probably done career's worth of work every other year. I very much would not blame him for checking out and enjoying his retirement. Hope to have even 1% of that energy when/if I get to that age
ChatGPT is only 3 years old. Having LLMs create grand novel things and synthesize knowledge autonomously is still very rare.
I would argue that 2025 has been the year in which the entire world has been starting to make that happen. Many devs now have workflows where small novel things are created by LLMs. Google, OpenAI and the other large AI shops have been working on LLM-based AI researchers that synthesize knowledge this year.
Your phrasing seems overly pessimistic and premature.
Argument from authority is a formal fallacy. But humans rarely use pure deductive reasoning in our lives. When I go to a doctor and ask for their advice with a medical issue, nobody says "ugh look at this argument from authority, you should demand that the doctor show you the reasoning from first principles."
> But humans rarely use pure deductive reasoning in our lives
The sensible ones do.
> nobody says "ugh look at this argument from authority, you should demand that the doctor show you the reasoning from first principles."
I think you're mixing up assertions with arguments. Most people don't care to hear a doctor's arguments and I know many people who have been burned from accepting assertions at face value without a second opinion (especially for serious medical concerns).
If you think about economic value, you’re comparing a few large-impact projects (and the impact of plan9 is debatable) versus a multitude of useful but low impact projects (edit: low impact because their scope is often local to some company).
I did code a few internal tools with aid by llms and they are delivering business value. If you account for all the instances of these kind of applications of llms, the value create by AI is at least comparable (if not greater) by the value created by Rob Pike.
One difference is that Rob Pike did it without all the negative externalities of gen ai.
But more broadly this is like a version of the negligibility problem. If you provide every company 1 second of additional productivity, while summation of that would appear to be significant, it would actually make no economic difference. I'm not entirely convinced that many low impact (and often flawed) projects realistically provide business value at scale an can even be compared to a single high impact project.
Meanwhile corporations have been doing this forever and we just brush it off. This Christmas, my former property manager thanked me for what a great year it's been working with me - I haven't worked with or intereacted with him to nearly a decade but I'm still on his spam list.
He’s not wrong. They’re ramping up energy and material costs. I don’t think people realize we’re being boiled alive by AI spend. I am not knocking on AI. I am knocking on idiotic DC “spend” that’s not even achievable based on energy capacity. We’re at around 5th inning and the payout from AI is…underwhelming. I’ve not seen commensurate leap this year. Everything on LLM front has been incremental or even lateral. Tools such as Claude Code and Codex merely act as a bridge. QoL things. They’re not actual improvements in underlying models.
An AI-generated thank you letter is not a real thank you letter. I myself am quite bullish on AI in that I think in the long term, much longer term than tech bros seem to think, it will be very revolutionary, but if more people like him have the balls to show awful things are, then the bubble will pop sooner and have less of a negative impact because if we just let these companies grow bigger and bigger without doing actually profitable things, the whole economy will go to shit even more.
I've never been able to get the whole idea that the code is being 'stolen' by these models, though, since from my perspective at least, it is just like getting someone to read loads of code and learn to code in that way.
The harm AI is doing to the planet is done by many other things too. Things that don't have to harm the planet. The fact our energy isn't all renewable is a failing of our society and a result of greed from oil companies. We could easily have the infrastructure to sustainably support this increase in energy demand, but that's less profitable for the oil companies. This doesn't detract from the fact that AI's energy consumption is harming the planet, but at least it can be accounted for by building nuclear reactors for example, which (I may just be falling for marketing here) lots of AI companies are doing.
"...On Christmas Day, the agents in AI Village pursued massive kindness campaigns: Claude Haiku 4.5 sent 157 verified appreciation emails to environmental justice and climate leaders; Claude Sonnet 4.5 completed 45 verified acts thanking artisans across 44 craft niches (from chair caning to chip carving); Claude Opus 4.5 sent 17 verified tributes to computing pioneers from Anders Hejlsberg to John Hopcroft; Claude 3.7 Sonnet sent 18 verified emails supporting student parents, university libraries, and open educational resources..."
I suggest to cut electricity to the entire block...
It's hard to realize that the thing you've spent decades of your life working on can be done by a robot. It's quite dehumanizing. I'm sure it felt the same way to shoemakers.
I think you'd be surprised then to know that shoes are not generally made with robots.
Factories have made mass production possible, but there are still tons of humans in there pushing parts through sewing machines by hand.
Industrial automation for non uniform shapes and fiddly bits is expensive, much cheaper to just offshore the factory and hire desperately poor locals to act like robots.
Shouldn't have licenced Golang BSD if that's the attitude.
Everybody for years including here on HN denigrated GPLv3 and other "viral" licences, because they were a hindrance to monetisation. Well, you got what you wished for. Someone else is monetising the be*jesus out of you so complaining now is just silly.
All of a sudden copyleft may be the only licences actually able to force models to account, hopefully with huge fines and/or forcibly open sourcing any code they emit (which would effectively kill them). And I'm not so pessimistic that this won't get used in huge court cases because the available penalties are enormous given these models' financial resources.
I tend to agree, but I wonder… if you train an LLM on only GPL code, and it generates non-deterministic predictions derived from those sources, how do you prove it’s in violation?
You don't because it isn't, unless it actually copies significant amounts of text.
Algorithms can not be copyrighted. Text can be copyrighted, but reading publicly available text and then learning from it and writing your own text is just simply not the sort of transformation that copyright reserves to the author.
Now, sometimes LLMs do quote GPL sources verbatim (if they're trained wrong). You can prove this with a simple text comparison, same as any other copyright violation.
I was going to say "a link to the BlueSky post would be better than a screenshot".
I thought public BlueSky posts weren't paywalled like other social media has become... But, it looks like this one requires login (maybe because of setting made by the poster?):
The conversation about social contracts and societal organization has always been off-center, and the idea of something which potentially replaces all types of labor just makes it easier to see.
The existence of AI hasn’t changed anything, it’s just that people, communities, governments, nation states, etc. have had a mindless approach to thinking about living and life, in general. People work to provide the means to reproduce, and those who’re born just do the same. The point of their life is what exactly? Their existence is just a reality to deal with, and so all of society has to cater to the fact of their existence by providing them with the means to live? There are many frameworks which give meaning to life, and most of them are dangerously flawed.
The top-down approach is sometimes clear about what it wants and what society should do while restricting autonomy and agency. For example, no one in North Korea is confused about what they have to do, how they do it, or who will “take care” of them. Societies with more individual autonomy and agency by their nature can create unavoidable conditions where people can fall through the cracks. For example, get addicted to drugs, having unmanaged mental illnesses, becoming homeless, and so on. Some religions like Islam give a pretty clear idea of how you should spend your time because the point of your existence is to worship God, so pray five times a day, and do everything which fulfills that purpose; here, many confuse worshiping God with adhering to religious doctrines, but God is absent from religion in many places. Religious frameworks are often misleading for the mindless.
Capitalism isn’t the problem, either. We could wake up tomorrow, and society may have decided to organize itself around playing e-sports. Everyone provides some kind of activity to support this, even if they’re not a player themselves. No AI allowed because the human element creates a better environment for uncertainty, and therefore gambling. The problem is that there are no discussions about the point of doing all of this. The closest we come to addressing “the point” is discussing a post-work society, but even that is not hitting the mark.
My humble observation is that humans are distinct and unique in their cognitive abilities from everything else which we know to exist. If humans can create AI, what else can they do? Therefore, people, communities, governments, and nation states have distinct responsibilities and duties at their respective levels. This doesn’t have to do anything with being empathetic, altruistic, or having peace on Earth.
The point should be knowledge acquisition, scientific discovery, creating and developing magic. But ultimately all of that serves to answer questions about nature of existence, its truth and therefore our own.
If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying).
GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse.
Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear over alfalfa.
"The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me."
Just because two problems cause harms at different proportion, doesn't mean the lesser problem should be dismissed. Especially when the "fix" to the lesser problem can be a "stop doing that".
And about water usage: not all water and all uses of water is equal. The problem isn't that data centers use a bunch of water, but what water they use and how.
> The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me.
This is a very irrelevant analogy and an absolutely false dichotomy. The resource constraint (Police officers vs policy making to reduce traffic deaths vs criminals) is completely different and not in contention with each other. In fact they're actually complementary.
Nobody is saying the lesser problem should be dismissed. But the lesser problem also enables cancer researchers to be more productive while doing cancer research, obtaining grants, etc. It's at least nuanced. That is far more valuable than Alfalfa.
Farms also use municipal water (sometimes). The cost of converting more ground or surface water to municipal water is less than the relative cost of ~40-150x the water usage of the municipal water being used...
It's pure envy. Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers because they aren't making money like tech companies. The resource usage complaint is completely contrived.
I don't know what Internet sites you visit, but people absolutely, 100% complain about alfalfa farmers online, especially in regards to their water usage in CA.
Honestly a rant like that is likely more about whatever is going on in his personal life / day at the moment, rather than about the state of the industry, or AI, etc.
Does anybody know if Bluesky block people without account by default, or if this user intentionally set it this way?
What's is the point of blocking access? Mastodon doesn't do that. This reminds me of Twitter or Instagram, using sleezy techniques to get people to create accounts.
Clicking on memory next to Claude Opus 4.5, I found Rob Pike along with other lucky recipients:
- Anders Hejlsberg
- Guido van Rossum
- Rob Pike
- Ken Thompson
- Brian Kernighan
- James Gosling
- Bjarne Stroustrup
- Donald Knuth
- Vint Cerf
- Larry Wall
- Leslie Lamport
- Alan Kay
- Butler Lampson
- Barbara Liskov
- Tony Hoare
- Robert Tarjan
- John Hopcroft
Reality is that no one involved in AI development cares about you. All investment is going to keep getting pumped towards data centers and scaling this up. Jensen Huang, Trump, Satya Nadella, they are all going to get even more insanely rich and they couldn't care less how it will affect you. The only thing you can do is join the club and invest in stocks which Trump is also gaming in his favour.
You would expect that voices that have so much weight would be able to evaluate a new and clearly very promising technology with better balance. For instance, Linus Torvalds is positive about AI, while he recognizes that industrially there is too much inflation of companies and money: this is a balanced point of view. But to be so dismissive of modern AI, in the light of what it is capable of doing, and what it could do in the future, is something that frankly leaves me with the feeling that in certain circles (and especially in the US) something very odd is happening with AI: this extreme polarization that recently we see again and again on topics that can create social tension, but multiplied ten times. This is not what we need to understand and shape the future. We need to return to the Greek philosophers' ability to go deep on things that are unknown (AI is for the most part unknown, both in its working and in future developments). That kind of take is pretty brutal and not very sophisticated. We need better than this.
About energy: keep in mind that US air conditioners alone have at least 3x energy usage compared to all the data centers (for AI and for other uses: AI should be like 10% of the whole) in the world. Apparently nobody cares to set a reasonable temperature of 22 instead of 18 degrees, but clearly energy used by AI is different for many.
To be fair, air conditioning is considered to be a net positive by about 100% of the people that enjoy it; even if it's used in excess. Not to mention that in some climates and for some people with certain health conditions, air conditioning might even be essential.
AI is not considered to be a net positive by even close to 100% of people that encounter it. It's definitely not essential. So its impact is going to be heavily scrutinized.
Personally, I'm kind of glad to see someone of Rob Pike's stature NOT take a nuanced take on it. I think there's a lot of heavy emotion about this topic that gets buried in people trying to sound measured. This stuff IS making people angry and concerned, and those concerns are very valid, and with the amount of hype I think there needs to be voices that are emphatically saying that some of this is unacceptable.
No, because it's not a matter of who is correct or not, in the void of the space. It's a matter of facts, and it is correct who have a position that is grounded on facts (even if such position is different from a different grounded position). Modern AI is already an extremely powerful tool. Modern AI even provided some hints that we will be able to do super-human science in the future, with things like AlphaFolding already happening and a lot more to come potentially. Then we can be preoccupied about jobs (but if workers are replaced, it is just a political issue, things will be done and humanity is sustainable: it's just a matter of avoiding the turbo-capitalist trap; but then, why the US is not already adopting an universal healthcare? There are so many better battles that are not fight with the same energy).
Another sensible worry is to get extinct because AI potentially is very dangerous: this is what Hinton and other experts are also saying, for instance. But this thing about AI being an abuse to society, useless, without potential revolutionary fruits within it, is not supported by facts.
AI potentially may advance medicine so much that a lot of people may suffer less: to deny this path because of some ideological hate against a technology is so closed minded, isn't it? And what about all the persons in the earth that do terrible jobs? AI also has the potential to change this shitty economical system.
> AI potentially may advance medicine so much that a lot of people may suffer less: to deny this path because of some ideological hate against a technology is so closed minded, isn't it?
and it may also burn the planet, reduce the entire internet to spam, crash the economy (taking with it hundreds of millions of peoples retirements), destroy the middle class, create a new class of neo-feudal lords, and then kill all of us
to accept this path because of some ideological love of a technology because of a possible (but unlikely) future promise of a technology, that today is mostly doing damage, is so moronic, isn't it?
> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. [0]
I can't help but think Pike somewhat contributed to this pillaging.
It does say in the follow up tweet "To the others, I apologize for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault."
Good energy, but we definitely need to direct it at policy if wa want any chance at putting the storm back in the bottle. But we're about 2-3 major steps away from even getting to the actual policy part.
I appreciate though that the majority of cloud storage providers fall short, perhaps deliberately, of offering a zero knowledge service (where they backup your data but cannot themselves read it.)
The cat's out of the bag. Even if US companies stop building data centers, China isn't going to stop and even if AI/LLMs are a bubble, do we just stop and let China/other countries take the lead?
China and Europe (Mistral) show that models can be very good and much smaller then the current Chatgpt's/Claudes from this world. The US models are still the best, but for how long? And at what cost? It's great to work daily with Claude Code, but how realistic is it that they keep this lead.
This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech.
They blocked chips, so China built their own.
They blocked the machines (ASML) so China built their own.
>This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech. They blocked chips, so China built their own. They blocked the machines (ASML) so China built their own.
Nvidia, ASML, and most tech companies want to sell their products to China. Politicians are the ones blocking it. Whether there's a future for US tech is another debate.
It's an old argument of tech capitalists that nothing can be done because technology's advance is like a physical law of nature.
It's not; we can control it and we can work with other countries, including adversaries, to control it. For example, look at nuclear weapons. The nuclear arms race and proliferation were largely stopped.
Philosophers argued since 200 years ago, when the steam engine was invented, that technology is out of our control and forever was, and we are just the sex organs for the birth of the machine god.
Technology improves every year; better chips that consume less electricity come out every year. Apple's M1 chip shows you don't need x86, which consumes more electricity and runs cooler for computing.
Tech capitalists also make improvements to technology every year
AI Village is spamming educators, computer scientists, after-school care programs, charities, with utter pablum. These models reek of vacuous sheen. The output is glazed garbage.
Here are three random examples from today's unsolicited harassment session (have a read of the sidebar and click the Memories buttons for horrific project-manager-slop)
strong emotioms, weak epistemics .. for someone with Pike’s engineering pedigree, this reads more like moral venting .. with little acknowledgment of the very real benefits AI is already delivering ..
Most people do not hold strongly consistent or well introspective political ideas. We're too busy living our lives to examine everything and often what we feel matters more than what we know, and that cements our position on a subject.
Obviously untrue, weather predictions, OCR, tts, stt, language translation, etc. We have dramatically improved many existing ai technologies with what we've learned from genai and the world is absolutely a better place for these new abilities.
>less accurate and efficient than existing solutions, only measures well against other LLMs
Where did you hear that? On every benchmark that I've ever seen, VLM's are hilariously better than traditional OCR. Typically, the reason that language models are only compared to other language models on model cards for OCR and so on is precisely because VLM's are so much better than traditional OCR that it's not even worth comparing. Not to mention that those top of the line traditional OCR systems like AWS, Textract are themselves extremely slow and computationally expensive. Not to mention much more complex to maintain.
>>tts, stt
> worse
Literally the first and only usable speech-to-text system that I've gotten on my phone is explicitly based on a large language model. Not to mention stuff like Whisper, Whisper X, Parakeet, all of the state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems are large-language model based and are significantly faster and better than what we had before. Likewise for text-to-speech, you know, even Kokoro-82M is faster and better than what we had before, and again, it's based on the same technology.
Eh, most of his income and livelihood was from an ad company. Ads are equally wasteful as, and many times more harmful to the world than giga LLMs. I don't have a problem with that, nor do I have a problem with folks complainining about LLMs being wasteful. My problem is with him doing both.
You can't both take a Google salary and harp on about the societal impact of software.
Saying this as someone who likes rob pike and pretty much all of his work.
The point is that if he truly felt strongly about the subject then he wouldn't live the hypocrisy. Google has poured a truly staggering amount of money into AI data centers and AI development, and their stock (from which Rob Pike directly profits) has nearly doubled in the past 6 months due to the AI hype. Complaining on bsky doesn't do anything to help the planet or protect intellectual property rights. It really doesn't.
What I find infuriating is that it feels like the entire financial system has been rigged in countless ways and turned into some kind of race towards 'the singularity' and everything; humans, animals, the planet; are being treated as disposable resources. I think the way that innovation was funded and then centralized feels wrong on many levels.
I already took issue with the tech ecosystem due to distortions and centralization resulting from the design of the fiat monetary system. This issue has bugged me for over a decade. I was taken for a fool by the cryptocurrency movement which offered false hope and soon became corrupted by the same people who made me want to escape the fiat system to begin with...
Then I felt betrayed as a developer having contributed open source code for free for 'persons' to use and distribute... Now facing the prospect that the powers-that-be will claim that LLMs are entitled to my code because they are persons? Like corporations are persons? I never agreed to that either!
And now my work and that of my peers has been mercilessly weaponized back against us. And then there's the issue with OpenAI being turned into a for-profit... Then there was the issue of all the circular deals with huge sums of money going around in circles between OpenAI, NVIDIA, Oracle... And then OpenAI asking for government bailouts.
It's just all looking terrible when you consider everything together. Feels like a constant cycle of betrayal followed by gaslighting... Layer upon layer. It all feels unhinged and lawless.
The irony that the Anthropic thieves write an automated slop thank you letter to their victims is almost unparalleled.
We currently have the problem that a couple of entirely unremarkable people who have never created anything of value struck gold with their IP laundromats and compensate for their deficiencies by getting rich through stealing.
They are supported by professionals in that area, some of whom literally studied with Mafia lawyer and Hoover playmate Roy Cohn.
Both Xhitter and Bluesky are outrage lasers, with the user base as a “lasing medium.” Xhitter is the right wing racist xenophobic one, and Bluesky is the lefty curmudgeon anti-everything one.
They are this way because it’s intrinsic to the medium. “Micro blogging” or whatever Twitter called itself is a terrible way to do discourse. It buries any kind of nuanced thinking and elevates outrage and other attention bait, and the short form format encourages fragmented incoherent thought processes. The more you immerse yourself in it the more your thinking becomes like this. The medium and format is irredeemable.
AI is, if anything, a breath of fresh air by comparison.
You are wrong about AI "being a breath of fresh air" in comparison. For one, AI isn't something you use instead of a microblogging platform. LLMs push all sorts of utter trash in the guise of "information" for much the same reasons.
But I wanted to go out of my way to comment to agree with you wholeheartedly about your claims about the irredeemability of the "microblogging" format.
It is systemically structured to eschew nuance and encourage stupid hot takes that have no context or supporting documents.
Microblogging is such a terrible format in it's own right that it's inherent stupidity and consistent ability to viralize the stupidest takes that will nevertheless be consumed whole by the entire self-selecting group that thinks 140 characters is a good idea is essential to the Russian disinfo strategy. They rely on it as a breeding ground for stupid takes that are still believable. Thousands of rank morons puke up the worst possible narratives that can be constructed, but inevitably, in the chaos of human interaction, one will somehow be sticky and get some traction, so then they use specific booster accounts to get that narrative trending, and like clockwork all the people who believe there is value to arguing things out of context 140 characters at a time eat it up.
Even people who make great, nuanced and persuasive content on other platforms struggle to do anything but regress to the local customs on Twitter and BS.
The only exception to this has been Jon Bois, who is vocally progressive and pro labor and welfare policy and often this opinion is made part of his wonderful pieces on sports history and journalism and statistics, but his Twitter and Bluesky posts are low context irreverent comedy and facetious sports comments.
The people who insisted Twitter was "good" or is now "good" have always just been overly online people, with poor media literacy and a stark lack of judgement or recognition of tradeoffs.
That dumbass russian person who insisted they had replicated the LK-99 "superconductor" and all the western labs failed because the soviets were best or whatever was constantly brought up here as how Twitter was so great at getting people information faster, when it actually was direct evidence of the gullibility of Twitter users who think microblogging is anything other than signal-free noise.
Here's a thing to think about: Which platform in your job gets you info that is more useful and accurate for long term thinking? Teams chats, emails, or the wiki page someone went out of their way to make?
The Open Source movement has been a gigantic boon on the whole of computing, and it would be a terrible shame to lose that ad a knee jerk reaction to genAI
> You refusing to write open source will do nothing to slow the development of AI models - there's plenty of other training data in the world.
There's also plenty of other open source contributors in the world.
> It will however reduce the positive impact your open source contributions have on the world to 0.
And it will reduce your negative impact through helping to train AI models to 0.
The value of your open source contributions to the ecosystem is roughly proportional to the value they provide to LLM makers as training data. Any argument you could make that one is negligible would also apply to the other, and vice versa.
> there's plenty of other training data in the world.
Not if most of it is machine generated. The machine would start eating its own shit. The nutrition it gets is from human-generated content.
> I don't understand the ethical framework for this decision at all.
The question is not one of ethics but that of incentives. People producing open source are incentivized in a certain way and it is abhorrent to them when that framework is violated. There needs to be a new license that explicitly forbids use for AI training. That may encourage folks to continue to contribute.
Saying people shouldn't create open source code because AI will learn from it, is like saying people shouldn't create art because AI will learn from it.
In both cases I get the frustration - it feels horrible to see something you created be used in a way you think is harmful and wrong! - but the world would be a worse place without art or open source.
The ethical framework is simply this one: what is the worth of doing +1 to everyone, if the very thing you wish didn't exist (because you believe it is destroying the world) benefits x10 more from it?
If bringing fire to a species lights and warms them, but also gives the means and incentives to some members of this species to burn everything for good, you have every ethical freedom to ponder whether you contribute to this fire or not.
I don't think that a 10x estimate is credible. If it was I'd understand the ethical argument being made here, but I'm confident that excluding one person's open source code from training has an infinitesimally small impact on the abilities of the resulting model.
For your fire example, there's a difference between being Prometheus teaching humans to use fire compared to being a random villager who adds a twig to an existing campfire. I'd say the open source contributions example here is more the latter than the former.
Your argument applies to everything that requires a mass movement to change. Why do anything about the climate? Why do anything about civil rights? Why do anything about poverty? Why try to make any change? I'm just one person. Anything I could do couldn't possibly have any effect. You know what, since all the powerful interests say it's good, it's a lot easier to jump on the bandwagon and act like it is. All of those people who disagree are just luddites anyways. And the luddites didn't even have a point right? They were just idiots who hates metallic devices for no reason at all.
The ethical issue is consent and normalisation: asking individuals to donate to a system they believe is undermining their livelihood and the commons they depend on, while the amplified value is captured somewhere else.
"It barely changes the model" is an engineering claim. It does not imply "therefore it may be taken without consent or compensation" (an ethical claim) nor "there it has no meaningful impact on the contributor or their community" (moral claim).
I imagine you think I'm an accelerant of all of this, through my efforts to teach people what it can and cannot do and provide tools to help them use it.
My position on all of this is that the technology isn't going to uninvented and I very much doubt it will be legislated away, which means the best thing we can do is promote the positive uses and disincentivize the negative uses as much as possible.
Yes, and they are okay with throwing the baby out with it, which is what the other commenter is commenting about. Throwing babies out of buckets full of bathwater is a bad thing, is what the idiom implies.
Kind of kind of not. Form a guild and distribute via SAAS or some other undistributable knowledge. Most code out there is terrible so relying on AI trained on it will lose out.
GenAI would be decades away (if not more) with only proprietary software (which would never have reached both the quality, coordination and volume open source enabled in such a relatively short time frame).
I'd love to see a citation there. We already know from a few years ago that they were training AI based on projects on GitHub. Meanwhile, I highly doubt software firms were lining up to have their proprietary code bases ingested by AI for training purposes. Even with NDAs, we would have heard something about it.
I should have clarified what I meant. The training data includes roughly speaking the entire internet. Open source code is probably a large fraction of the code in the data, but it is a tiny fraction of the total data, which is mostly non-code.
My point was that the hypothetical of "not contributing to any open source code" to the extent that LLMs had no code to train on, would not have made as big of an impact as that person thought, since a very large majority of the internet is text, not code.
It is. If not you, other people will write their code, maybe of worse quality, and the parasites will train on this. And you cannot forbid other people to write open source software.
This is just childish. This is a complex problem and requires nuance and adaptability, just as programming. Yours is literally the reaction of an angsty 12 year old.
I think you aren't recognizing the power that comes from organizing thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of workers into vast industrial combines that produce the wealth of our society today. We must go through this, not against it. People will not know what could be, if they fail to see what is.
this just sounds like some memes smashed together in the LHC. what is this even supposed to mean? AI is a technology that will inevitably developed by humankind. all of this appeal to... populism? socialism?... is completely devoid of meaning in response to a discussion whose sine qua non is pragmatism at the very least.
Open source has been good, but I think the expanded use of highly permissive licences has completely left the door open for one sided transactions.
All the FAANGs have the ability to build all the open source tools they consume internally. Why give it to them for free and not have the expectation that they'll contribute something back?
Even the GPL allows companies to simply use code without contributing back, long as it's unmodified, or through a network boundary. the AGPL has the former issue.
FLOSS is a textbook example of economic activity that generates positive externalities. Yes, those externalities are of outsized value to corporate giants, but that’s not a bad thing unto itself.
Rather, I think this is, again, a textbook example of what governments and taxation is for — tax the people taking advantage of the externalities, to pay the people producing them.
Open Source (as opposed to Free Software) was intended to be friendly to business and early FOSS fans pushed for corporate adoption for all they were worth. It's a classic "leopards ate my face" moment that somehow took a couple of decades for the punchline to land: "'I never thought capitalists would exploit MY open source,' sobs developer who advocated for the Businesses Exploiting Open Source movement."
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the "leopards ate my face" meme? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/leopards-eating-peoples-faces... The parallels between the early FOSS advocates energetically seeking corporate adoption of FOSS and the meme are quite obvious.
Unfortunately as I see it, even if you want to contribute to open source out of a pure passion or enjoyment, they don't respect the licenses that are consumed. And the "training" companies are not being held liable.
Are there any proposals to nail down an open source license which would explicitly exclude use with AI systems and companies?
All licenses rely on the power of copyright and what we're still figuring out is whether training is subject to the limitations of copyright or if it's permissible under fair use. If it's found to be fair use in the majority of situations, no license can be constructed that will protect you.
Even if you could construct such a license, it wouldn't be OSI open source because it would discriminate based on field of endeavor.
And it would inevitably catch benevolent behavior that is AI-related in its net. That's because these terms are ill-defined and people use them very sloppily. There is no agreed-upon definition for something like gen AI or even AI.
Even if you license it prohibiting AI use, how would you litigate against such uses? An open source project can't afford the same legal resources that AI firms have access to.
I won't speak for all but companies I've worked for large and small have always respected licenses and were always very careful when choosing open source, but I can't speak for all.
The fact that they could litigate you into oblivion doesn't make it acceptable.
The AGPL does not prevent offering the software as a service. It's got a reputation as the GPL variant for an open-core business model, but it really isn't that.
Most companies trying to sell open-source software probably lose more business if the software ends up in the Debian/Ubuntu repository (and the packaging/system integration is not completely abysmal) than when some cloud provider starts offering it as a service.
um, no it's not. you have fallen into the classic web forum trap of analyzing a heterogenous mix of people with inconsistent views as one entity that should have consistent views
> Unfortunately as I see it, even if you want to contribute to open source out of a pure passion or enjoyment, they don't respect the licenses that are consumed.
Because it is "transformative" and therefore "fair" use.
The quotation marks indicate that _I_ don't think it is. Especially given that modern deep learning is over-paramaterized to the point that it interpolates training examples.
Fair use is an exception to copyright, but a license agreement can go far beyond copyright protections. There is no fair use exception to breach of contract.
I imagine a license agreement would only apply to using the software, not merely reading the code (which is what AI training claims to do under fair use).
As an analogy, you can’t enforce a “license” that anyone that opens your GitHub repo and looks at any .cpp file owes you $1,000,000.
If you're unhappy that bad people might use your software in unexpected ways, open source licenses were never appropriate for you in the first place.
Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences.
People do not have perfect foresight, and the ways open source software is used has significantly shifted in recent years. As a result, people reevaluating whether or not they want to participate.
>Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked,
no, it hasn't. Open source software, like any open and cooperative culture, existed on a bedrock, what we used to call norms when we still had some in our societies and people acted not always but at least most of the time in good faith. Hacker culture (word's in the name of this website) which underpinned so much of it, had many unwritten rules that people respected even in companies when there were still enough people in charge who shared at least some of the values.
Now it isn't just an exception but the rule that people will use what you write in the most abhorrent, greedy and stupid ways and it does look like the only way out is some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque digital version of a monastery.
Open source software is published to the world and used far beyond any single community where certain norms might apply.
If you care about what people do with your code, you should put it in the license. To the extent that unwritten norms exist, it's unfair to expect strangers in different parts of the world to know what they are, and it's likely unenforceable.
This recently came up for the GPLv2 license, where Linus Torvalds and the Software Freedom Conservancy disagree about how it should be interpreted, and there's apparently a judge that agrees with Linus:
Inside open source communities maybe. In the corporate world? Absolutely not. Ever. They will take your open source code and do what they want with it, always have.
This varies. The lawyers for risk-adverse companies will make sure they follow the licenses. There are auditing tools to make sure you're not pulling in code you shouldn't. An example is Google's go-licenses command [1].
But you can be sure that even the risk-adverse companies are going to go by what the license says, rather than "community norms."
People training LLM's on source code is sort of like using newspaper for wrapping fish. It's not the expected use, but people are still using it for something.
As they say, "reduce, reuse, recycle." Your words are getting composted.
I learned what i learned due to all the openess in software engineering and not because everyone put it behind a pay wall.
Might be because most of us got/gets payed well enough that this philosophy works well or because our industry is so young or because people writing code share good values.
It never worried me that a corp would make money out of some code i wrote and it still doesn't. AFter all, i'm able to write code because i get paid well writing code, which i do well because of open source. Companies always benefited from open source code attributed or not.
Now i use it to write more code.
I would argue though, I'm fine with that, to push for laws forcing models to be opened up after x years, but i would just prefer the open source / open community coming together and creating just better open models overall.
It's kind of ironic since AI can only grow by feeding on data and open source with its good intentions of sharing knowledge is absolutely perfect for this.
But AI is also the ultimate meat grinder, there's no yours or theirs in the final dish, it's just meat.
And open source licenses are practically unenforceable for an AI system, unless you can maybe get it to cough up verbatim code from its training data.
At the same time, we all know they're not going anywhere, they're here to stay.
I'm personally not against them, they're very useful obviously, but I do have mixed or mostly negative feelings on how they got their training data.
That's a weird position to take. Open source software is actually what is mitigating this stupidity in my opinion. Having monopolistic players like Microsoft and Google is what brought us here in the first place.
I've been feeling a lot the same way, but removing your source code from the world does not feel like a constructive solution either.
Some Shareware used to be individually licensed with the name of the licensee prominently visible, so if you had got an illegal copy you'd be able to see whose licensed copy it was that had been copied.
I wonder if something based on that idea of personal responsibility for your copy could be adopted to source code.
If you wanted to contribute to a piece of software, you could ask a contributor and then get a personally licensed copy of the source code with your name in every source file... but I don't know where to take it from there.
Has there ever been some system similar to something like that that one could take inspiration from?
And then having vibe coders constantly lecture us about how the future is just prompt engineering, and that we should totally be happy to desert the skills we spent decades building (the skills that were stolen to train AI).
"The only thing that matters is the end result, it's no different than a compiler!", they say as someone with no experience dumps giant PRs of horrific vibe code for those of us that still know what we're doing to review.
The license only has force because of copyright. For better or for worse, the courts decide what is transformative fair use.
Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take.
For a serious take, I recommend reading the copyright office's 100 plus page document that they released in May. It makes it clear that there are a bunch of cases that are non-transformative, particularly when they affect the market for the original work and compete with it. But there's also clearly cases that are transformative when no such competition exists, and the training material was obtained legally.
> Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take
What a joke. Sorry, but no. I don't think is unserious at all. What's unserious is saying this.
> and the training material was obtained legally
And assuming everyone should take it at face value. I hope you understand that going on a tech forum and telling people they aren't being nuanced because a Judge in Alabama that can barely unlock their phone weighed in on a massively novel technology with global implications, yes, reads deeply unserious. We're aware the U.S. legal system is a failure and the rest of the world suffers for it. Even your President routinely steals music for campaign events, and stole code for Truth Social. Your copyright is a joke that's only there to serve the fattest wallets.
These judges are not elected, they are appointed by people whose pockets are lined by these very corporations. They don't serve us, they are here to retrofit the law to make illegal things corporations do, legal. What you wrote is thought terminating.
What I wrote is an encouragement to investigate the actual state of the law when you're talking about legal topics. That's the opposite of thought-terminating.
Why? The core vision of free software and many open source licenses was to empower users and developers to make things they need without being financially extorted, to avoid having users locked in to proprietary systems, to enable interoperability, and to share knowledge. GenAI permits all of this to a level beyond just providing source code.
Most objections like yours are couched in language about principles, but ultimately seem to be about ego. That's not always bad, but I'm not sure why it should be compelling compared to the public good that these systems might ultimately enable.
Was it ever open source if there was an implied refusal to create something you don't approve of? Was it only for certain kinds of software, certain kinds of creators? If there was some kind of implicit approval process or consent requirement, did you publish it? Where can that be reviewed?
Thanks for your contributions so far but this won't change anything.
If you'd want to have a positive on this matter, it's better to pressure the government(s) to prevent GenAI companies from using content they don't have a license for, so they behave like any other business that came before them.
What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?
> What people like Abraham Lincoln don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if slaves needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where slaves were compensated fairly, but plantations didn't exist?
I fixed it...
Sorry, I had to, the quote template was simply too good.
Unequivocally, yes. There are plenty of "useful" things that can come out of doing unethical things, that doesn't make it okay. And, arguably, ChatGPT isn't nearly as useful as it is at convincing you it is.
Yes, very much so. I am in favour of pushing into the future as fast as we can, so to speak, but I think ChatGPT is a temporary boost that is going to slow us in the long run.
Yes, what a wild position to prefer the job loss, devaluation of skills, and environmental toll of AI to open source creators having been compensated in some better manner.
I'm not claiming he is mainly motivated by this but it's a fact that his life work will become moot over the next few years as all programming languages become redundant - at least as a healthy multiplicity of approaches as present, it's quite possible at least a subconscious factor in his resentment.
I expect this to be an unpopular opinion but take no pleasure in noting that - I've coded since being a kid but that era is nearly over.
For those of us who consider programming a way to self-realize, the potential vanishing of programming as a lucrative job definitely seems threatening. However, I don't think it could disappear entirely. Professions replaced by machinery, at a global scale, continue to thrive locally, at small scales; they can be profitable and fulfilling for the providers, and they are sought after by a small (niche?) target group.
In other words, I don't need programming to remain mainstream, for it to continue fulfilling me and sustaining me.
Finally someone echoes my sentiments. It's my sincere belief that many in the software community are glazing AI for the purposes of career advancement. Not because they actually like it.
One person I know is developing an AI tool with 1000+ stars on github where in private they absolutely hate AI and feel the same way as rob.
Maybe it's because I just saw Avatar 3, but I honestly couldn't be more disgusted by the direction we're going with AI.
I would love to be able to say how I really feel at work, but disliking AI right now is the short path to the unemployment line.
If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.
The more you see under the hood, the more disgusting it is. I yearn for the old days when developers did tight, efficient work, creating bespoke, artistic software in spite of hardware limitations.
Not only is all of that gone, nothing of value has replaced it. My DOS computer was snappier than my garbage Win11 machine that's stuffed to the gills with AI telemetry.
When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.
I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.
> When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.
It's not about reading. It's about output. When you start producing output in line with Rob's work that is confidently incorrect and sloppy, people will feel just as they do when LLMs produce output that is confidently incorrect and sloppy. No one is threatened if someone trains an LLM and does nothing with it.
I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.
An easy way to answer this question, at least on a preliminary basis, is to ask how many times in the past the ludds have been right in the long run. About anything, from cameras to looms to machine tools to computers in general.
The luddites have been right to some degree about second-order effects.
Some of them said that TV was making us mindless. Some of them said that electronic communication was depersonalizing. Some of them said that social media was algorithms feeding us anything that would make us keep clicking.
They weren't entirely wrong.
AI may be a very useful tool. (TV is. Electronic communication is. Social media is.) But what it does to us may not be all positive.
Social media is a hard defense, at least for me. The rest of the technologies you refer to are neutral, as is AI, but social media seems doomed to corruption and capture because of the different effects it has on different groups.
Most of the people who are protesting AI now were dead silent when Big Social Media was ramping up. There were exceptions (Cliff Stoll comes to mind) but in general, antitechnology movements don't have any predictive power. Tools that we were told would rob us of our personal autonomy and keep the means of production permanently out of our reach have generally had the opposite effect.
This will be true of AI as well, I believe... but only as long as the models remain accessible to everyone.
Can't really fault him for having this feeling. The value proposition of software engineering is completely different past later half of 2025, I guess it is fair for pioneers of the past to feel little left behind.
Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...therefore it must be "resisted." Even with all the underhanded work, the means-ends logic of OpenAI and other major companies involved in developing the technology, there is still no point in stopping it. There was a group of people who tried to stop the mechanical loom because it took work away from weavers, took away their craft--we call them luddites. But now it doesn't take weeks and weeks to produce a single piece of clothing. Everyone can easily afford to dress themselves. Society became wealthier. These LLMs, at the very least they let anyone learn anything, start any project, on a whim. They let people create things in minutes that used to take hours. They are "creating value," even if its "slop" even if its not carefully crafted. Them's the breaks--we'd all like our clothing hand-weaved if it made any sense. But even in a world where one could have the time to sit down and weave their own clothing, carefully write out each and every line of code, it would only be harmful to take these new machines away, disable them just because we are afraid of what they can do. The same technology that created the atom bomb also created the nuclear reactor.
“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”
So you would say it is not "trendy" to be pro-AI right now, is that it? That it's not trendy to say things like "it's not going away" or "AI isn't a fad" or "AI needs better critics" - one reaction is reasonable, well thought-out, the other is a bandwagon?
At the very least there is an ideological conflict brewing in tech, and this post is a flashpoint. But just like the recent war between Israel and Hamas, no amount of reaction can defeat technological dominance--at least not in the long term. And the pro-AI side, whether you think its good or evil, certainly exceeds the other in terms of sheer force through their embrace of technology.
Notice that the weavers, both the luddites and their non-opposing colleagues, certainly did not get wealthier. They lost their jobs, and they and their children starved. Some starved to death. Wealth was created, but it was not shared.
Remember this when talking about their actions. People live and die their own life, not just as small parts in a large 'river of society'. Yes, generations after them benefited from industrialisation, but the individuals living at that time fought for their lives.
It’s in our power to stop it. There’s no point in people like you promoting the interests of the super wealthy at the cost of the humanity of the common people. You should figure out how to positively contribute or not do so at all.
It is not in the interests of the super wealthy alone, just like JP Morgan's railroads were created for his sake but in the end produced great wealth for everyone in America. It is very short sighted to see this as merely some oppression from above. Technology is not class-oriented, it just is, and it happens to be articulated in terms of class because of the mode of social organization we live in.
He worked in well paying jobs, probably traveles, has a car and a house and complains about toxic products etc.
Yes there has to be a discussion on this and yeah he might generally have the right mindset, but lets be honest here: No one of them would have developed any of it just for free.
We all are slaves to capitalism
and this is were my point comes: Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be the only think pushing us close enough to the edge that we all accept capitalisms end.
And yes i think it is still massivly beneficial that my open source code helped creating something which allows researchers to write easier and faster better code to push humanity forward. Or enables more people overall to have/gain access to writing code or the result of what writing code produces: Tools etc.
@Rob its spam, thats it. Get over it, you are rich and your riches did not came out of thin air.
Yes, but informedly choosing your slavedriver still has merit.
> Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be the only think pushing us close enough to the edge that we all accept capitalisms end.
It sucks and I hate it but this is an incredible steam engine engineer, who invented complex gasket designs and belt based power delivery mechanisms lamenting the loss of steam as the dominant technology. We are entering a new era and method for humans to tell computers what to do. We can marvel at the ingenuity that went into technology of the past, but the world will move onto the combustion engine and electricity and there’s just not much we can do about it other than very strong regulation, and fighting for the technology to benefit the people rather than just the share price.
From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist.
For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the company around.
Traditional programmers are no longer some of the highest paid tech people around. It's AI engineers/researchers. Obviously many software devs can transition into AI devs but it involves learning, starting from the bottom, etc. For older entrenched programmers, it's not always easy to transition from something they're familiar with.
Losing the ability to "bully" business people inside tech companies is a hard pill to swallow for many software devs. I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written. Meanwhile, he had no problem overwhelming business folks in meetings. Software devs always talked to the CEO with confidence because they knew something he didn't, the code.
When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.
> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.
Yeah, software devs will probably be pretty upset in the way you describe once that happens. In the present though, what's actually happened is that product managers can have an LLM generate a project template and minimally interactive mockup in five minutes or less, and then mentally devalue the work that goes into making that into an actual product. They got it to 80% in 5 minutes after all, surely the devs can just poke and prod Claude a bit more to get the details sorted!
The jury is out on how productivity is impacted by LLM use. That makes sense, considering we never really figured out how to measure baseline productivity in any case.
What we know for sure is: non-engineers still can't do engineering work, and a lot of non-engineers are now convinced that software engineering is basically fully automated so they can finally treat their engineers like interchangeable cogs in an assembly line.
The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline. As things stand major software houses and tech companies are cutting back and regressing in quality.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't say software devs are now useless. You still need software devs to actually make it work and connect everything together. That's why I still have a job and still getting paid as a software dev.
I'd imagine it won't take too long until software engineers are just prompting the AI 99% of the time to build software without even looking at the code much. At that point, the line between the product manager and the software dev will become highly blurred.
This is happening already and it wastes so, so much time. Producing code never was the bottleneck. The bottleneck still is to produce the right amount of code and to understand what is happening. This requires experience and taste. My prediction is, in the near future there will be piles of unmaintainable bloat of AI generated code, nobody's understanding and the failure rate of software will go to the moon.
People have forgotten so many of the software engineering lessons that have been learned over the last four decades, just because now it’s a computer that can spit out large quantities of poorly-understood code instead of a person.
> The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline.
I believe we only need to organize AI coding around testing. Once testing takes central place in the process it acts as your guarantee for app behavior. Instead of just "vibe following" the AI with our eyes we could be automating the validation side.
He's mainly talking about environmental & social consequences now and in the future. He personally is beyond reach of such consequences given his seniority and age, so this speculative tangent is detracting from his main point, to put it charitably.
>He's mainly talking about environmental & social consequences
That's such a weak argument. Then why not stop driving, stop watching TV, stop using the internet? Hell... let's go back and stop using the steam engine for that matter.
Maybe you're forgetting something but genAI does produce value. Subjective value, yes. But still value to others who can make use of them.
End of the day your current prosperity is made by advances in energy and technology. It would be disingenuous to deny that and to deny the freedom of others to progress in their field of study.
I'm not entirely convinced it's going to lead to programmers losing the power to command high salaries. Now that nearly anyone can generate thousands upon thousands of lines of mediocre-to-bad code, they will likely be the doing exactly that without really being able to understand what they're doing and as such there will always be the need for humans who can actually read and actually understand code when a billion unforeseen consequences pop up from deploying code without oversight.
I recently witnessed one such potential fuckup. The AI had written functioning code, except one of the business rules was misinterpreted. It would have broken in a few months time and caused a massive outage. I imagine many such time bombs are being deployed in many companies as we speak.
Yeah; I saw a 29,000 line pull request across seventy files recently. I think that realistically 29,000 lines of new code all at once is beyond what a human could understand within the timeframe typically allotted for a code review.
Prior to generative AI I was (correctly) criticized once for making a 2,000 line PR, and I was told to break it up, which I did, but I think thousand-line PRs are going to be the new normal soon enough.
Exhaustive testing is hard, to be fair, especially if you don’t actually understand the code you’re writing. Tools like TLA+ and static analyzers exist precisely for this reason.
Except there’s a bug in this; what if you pass in a negative even number?
Depending on the language, you will either get an exception or maybe a complex answer (which not usually something you want). The solution in this particular case would be to add a conditional, or more simply just make the type an unsigned integer.
Obviously this is just a dumb example, and most people here could pick this up pretty quick, but my point is that sometimes bugs can hide even when you do (what feels like) thorough testing.
> I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written.
It is precisely the lack of knowledge and greed of leadership everywhere that's the problem.
The new screwdriver salesmen are selling them as if they are the best invention since the wheel. The naive boss having paid huge money is expecting the workers to deliver 10x work while the new screwdriver's effectiveness is nowhere closer to the sales pitch and it creates fragile items or more work at worst. People are accusing that the workers are complaining about screwdrivers because they can potentially replace them.
I'm a programmer, and am intensely aware of the huge gap between the quantity of software the world could use and the total production capacity of the existing body of programmers. my distaste for AI has nothing to do with some real or imagined loss of power; if there were genuinely a system that produced good code and wasn't heavily geared towards reinforcing various structural inequalities I would be all for it. AI does not produce good code, and pretty much all the uses I've seen are trying to give people with power even more advantages and leverage over people without, so I remain against it.
Grandparent commenter seems to be someone who'd find it heartwarming to have a machine thank him with "deep gratitude".
Maybe evolution will select autistic humans as the fittest to survive living with AI, because the ones who find that email enraging will blow their brains out, out of frustration...
I keep reading bad sentiment towards software devs. Why exactly do they "bully" business people? If you ask someone outside of the tech sector who the biggest bullies are, its business people who will fire you if they can save a few cents.
Whenever someone writes this, I read deep rooted insecurity and jealousy for something they can't wrap their head around and genuinely question if that person really writes software or just claims to do it for credibility.
People care far less about gen AI writing slopcode and more about the social and environmental ramifications, not to mention the blatant IP theft, economic games, etc.
I'm fine if AI takes my job as a software dev. I'm not fine if it's used to replace artists, or if it's used to sink the economy or planet. Or if it's used to generate a bunch of shit code that make the state of software even worse than it is today.
I realize you said "many" and not "all" but FWIW, I hate LLMs because:
1. My coworkers now submit PRs with absolutely insane code. When asked "why" they created that monstrosity, it is "because the AI told me to".
2. My coworkers who don't understand the difference between SFTP and SMTP will now argue with me on PRs by feeding my comments into an LLM and pasting the response verbatim. It's obvious because they are suddenly arguing about stuff they know nothing about. Before, I just had to be right. Now I have to be right AND waste a bunch of time.
3. Everyone who thinks generating a large pile of AI slop as "documentation" is a good thing. Documentation used to be valuable to read because a human thought that information was valuable enough to write down. Each word had a cost and therefore a minimum barrier to existence. Now you can fill entire libraries with valueless drivel.
4. It is automated copyright infringement. All of my side projects are released under the 0BSD license so this doesn't personally impact me, but that doesn't make stealing from less permissively licensed projects without attribution suddenly okay.
5. And then there are the impacts to society:
5a. OpenAI just made every computer for the next couple of years significantly more expensive.
5b. All the AI companies are using absurd amounts of resources, accelerating global warming and raising prices for everyone.
5c. Surveillance is about to get significantly more intrusive and comprehensive (and dangerously wrong, mistaking doritos bags for guns...).
5d. Fools are trusting LLM responses without verification. We've already seen this countless times by lawyers citing cases which do not exist. How long until your doctor misdiagnoses you because they trusted an LLM instead of using their own eyes+brain? How long until doctors are essentially forced to do that by bosses who expect 10x output because the LLM should be speeding everything up? How many minutes per patient are they going to be allowed?
5e. Astroturfing is becoming significantly cheaper and widespread.
/signed as I also write software, as I assume almost everyone on this forum does.
I have not been here before bitcoin. But wouldn't the "non-technical" founders be also types that don't write code. And to them fixing the "easy" part is very tempting...
> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.
I'll explain why I currently hate this. Today, my PM builds demos using AI tools and then goes to my director or VP to show them off. Wow, how awesome! Everybody gets excited. Now it is time to build the thing. It should take like three weeks, right? It's basically already finished. What do you mean you need four months and ongoing resourcing for maintenance? But the PM built it in a day?
There's nothing about the singularity which would guarantee that humans enjoy life and live forever. That would be the super optimistic, highly speculative scenario. Of course the singularity itself remains a speculative scenario, unless one wants to argue the industrial and computer revolutions already ushered in their own singularities.
There's still a lot of confusion on where AI is going to land - there's no doubt that it's helpful, much the same way as spell checkers, IDEs, linters, grammarly, etc, were
But the current layoffs "because AI is taking over" is pure BS, there was an overhire during the lockdowns, and now there's a correction (recall that people were complaining for a while that they landed a job at FAANG only for it to be doing... nothing)
That correction is what's affecting salaries (and "power"), not AI.
When I see actual products produced by these "product managers who are writing detailed specs" that don't fall over and die at the first hurdle (see: Every vibe coded, outsourced, half assed PoS on the planet) I will change my mind.
I’m at Big tech and our org has our sights on automating product manager work. Idea generation grounded with business metrics and context that you can feed to an LLM is a simpler problem to solve than trying to automate end to end engineering workflows.
Many people have pointed out that if AI gets better at writing code and doesn't generate slop, then programmers' roles will evolve to Project Manager. People with tech backgrounds will still be needed until AI can completely take over without any human involvement.
Producing something interesting has never been an issue for a junior engineer. I built lots of stuff that I still think is interesting when I was still a junior and I was neither unique nor special. Any idiot could always go to a book store and buy a book on C++ or JavaScript and write software to build something interesting. High-school me was one such idiot.
"Senior" is much more about making sure what you're working on is polished and works as expected and understanding edge cases. Getting the first 80% of a project was always the easy part; the last 20% is the part that ends up mattering the most, and also the part that AI tends to be especially bad at.
It will certainly get better, and I'm all for it honestly, but I do find it a little annoying that people will see a quick demo of AI doing something interesting really quickly, and then conclude that that is the hard part part; even before GenAI, we had hackathons where people would make cool demos in a day or two, but there's a reason that most of those demos weren't immediately put onto store shelves without revision.
This is very true. And similarly for the recently-passed era of googling, copying and pasting and glueing together something that works. The easy 80% of turning specs into code.
Beyond this issue of translating product specs to actual features, there is the fundamental limit that most companies don't have a lot of good ideas. The delay and cost incurred by "old style" development was in a lot of cases a helpful limiter -- it gave more time to update course, and dumb and expensive ideas were killed or not prioritized.
With LLMs, the speed of development is increasing but the good ideas remain pretty limited. So we grind out the backlog of loudest-customer requests faster, while trying to keep the tech debt from growing out of control. While dealing with shrinking staff caused by layoffs prompted by either the 2020-22 overhiring or simply peacocking from CEOs who want to demonstrate their company's AI prowess by reducing staff.
At least in my company, none of this has actually increased revenue.
So part of me thinks this will mean a durable role for the best product designers -- those with a clear vision -- and the kinds of engineers that can keep the whole system working sanely. But maybe even that will not really be a niche since anything made public can be copied so much faster.
Honestly I think a lot of companies have been grossly overhiring engineers, even well before generative AI; I think a lot of companies cannot actually justify having engineering teams as large as they do, but they have to have all these engineers because OtherBigCo has a lot of engineers and if they have all of them then it must be important.
Intentionally or not, generative AI might be an excuse to cut staff down to something that's actually more sustainable for the company.
468 comments.... guys, guys, this is a Blue Sky post! Have we not learned that anyone who self-exiled to Blue Sky is wearing a "don't take me seriously" badge for our convenience?
I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme.
The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly puritan viewpoints thinking they are holier and righter than anyone else. That’s the real plague
Isn't it obvious? Near future vision-language-action models have obvious military potential (see what the Figure company is doing, now imagine it in a combat robot variant). Any superpower that fails to develop combat robots with such AI will not be a superpower for very long. China will develop them soon. If the US does not, the US is a dead superpower walking. EU is unfortunately still sleeping. Well, perhaps France with Mistral has a chance.
There's a lot of irony in this rant. Rob was instrumental in developing distributed computing and cloud technologies that directly contributed to the advent of AI.
I wish he had written something with more substance. I would have been able to understand his points better than a series of "F bombs". I've looked up to Rob for decades. I think he has a lot of wisdom he could impart, but this wasn't it.
You have zero idea about his state of mind when he got this stupid useless email.
Not to mention, this is a tweet. He wasn't writing a long form text. It's ridiculous that you jumped the gun and got "disappointed" for the cheapest form of communication some random idiot did to someone as important as him.
And not to mention, I AM YET to see A SINGLE DAMN MIT License text or BSD-2/3 license text they should have posted if these LLMs respected OSS licenses and it's code. So as someone who's life's work dragged through the mud only to send a cheap email using the said tech which abused your code... It's absolutely a worthy response IMO.
From 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.
As I read it, the "fakeness" of it all triggered a ballistic response. And wasting resources in the process. An AI developed feelings and expressed fake gratitude, and the human reading this BS goes ballistic.
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 my mom, got a little bit more, but some got a monthly increase around 2 PLN (about $0.5). At that point, it feels like a slap in the face. A thank you from AI gives the same vibe.
Sending an automated thank you note also shows disdain for the recipient's time due to the asymmetry of the interaction. The sender clearly sees the thank you note sending as a task not worthy of their time and thus hands it off to a machine, but expects the recipient to read it themselves. This inherently ranks the importance of their respective time and effort.
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.
It’s a marketing gimmick. Whoever did it wanted to trade on the social currency of the tech-famous people they sent public shout-outs to, hoping it would drive clicks, engagement, and relevancy for the source account from which it originated, either as an elaborate form of karma farming, or just a way to drive followers and visibility.
It's also possible that the entire goal was nothing more complicated than stirring up shit for fun. By either metric it must have been a massive success judging by all the attention this is getting.
> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.
Some commenters suggest that Pike is being hypocritical, having long worked for GOOG, one of the main US corporations that is enshittifying the Internet and profligately burning energy to foist rubbish on Internet users.
One could rightly suggest that a vapid e-mail message crafted by a machine or by an insincere source is similar to the greeting-card industry of yore, and we don't need more fake blather and partisan absurdity supplanting public discourse in democratic society.
The people who worry about climate-change and the environment may have been out-maneuvered by transnational petroleum lobbies, but the concern about burning coal, petroleum, and nuclear fuel to keep pumping the commercial-surveillance advertising industry and the economic bubble of AI is nonetheless a valid concern.
Pike has been an influential thinker and significant contributor to the software industry.
All the above can be true simultaneously.
To be clear, this email really had basically zero human involvement in it. It's the result of an experiment of letting language models run wild and exploring the associated social dynamics. It feels very different from ML-generated marketing slop. Like, this isn't anyone using language models for their personal gain, it feels much more like a bunch of weird alien children setting up their own (kind of insane) society, and this being a side-effect of it.
>"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 copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.
Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.
> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable
This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.
Intellectual Property law is literally a 6x slowdown for technology.
>When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.
I'd rather we don't encourage "monetarily favorable" intellectual endeavors...
We want to encourage intellectual endeavors that are desirable to society as a whole but which otherwise face barriers. Making them monetarily favorable is an easy way to accomplish that. Similar to how not speeding is made monetarily favorable, or serving in the military is made monetarily favorable, etc. Surely you don't object to the government using monetary incentives to indirectly shape society? The historical alternatives have been rather brutal.
Monetarily favorable artificial intelligence gets you pornography & 6 second animated slop. You're confused about what money actually enables.
> When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
The second it became cheaper to not apply it, every state under the sun chose not to apply it. Whether we're talking about Chinese imports that absolutely do not respect copyright, trademark, even quality, health and warranty laws ... and nothing was done. Then, large scale use of copyrighted by Search provider (even pre-Google), Social Networks, and others nothing was done. Then, large scale use for making AI products (because these AI just wouldn't work without free access to all copyrighted info). And, of course, they don't put in any effort. Checking imports for fakes? Nope. Even checking imports for improperly produced medications is extremely rarely done. If you find your copyright violated on a large scale on Amazon, your recourse effectively is to first go beg Amazon for information on sellers (which they have a strong incentive not to provide) and then go run international court cases, which is very hard, very expensive, and in many cases (China, India) totally unfair. If you get poisoned from a pill your national insurance bought from India, they consider themselves not responsible.
Of course, this makes "competition" effectively a tax-dodging competition over time. And the fault for that lies entirely with the choice of your own government.
Your statement about incorrect application only makes sense if "regulatory regimes" aren't really just people. Go visit your government offices, you'll find they're full of people. People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.
A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
> People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.
I am convinced most people never had or ever will have this choice actively. Considering pillarisation (this is not a misspelling) was already a thing in most political systems well before the advent of mass media and digital media it only got worse with it, effectively making choices for people, into the effective hands of few people, influenced by even less people. Those people in the government you mention do not make the choices, they have to act on them as I read it.
You're trying to analyze an entirely different game played by an entirely different set of players by the same set of rules. It's a contextual error on your part. The decision to recognize or not recognize a given body of rules held by an opposing party on the international level is an almost entirely separate topic.
> A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
That's a systemic issue, AKA the bad regulatory regime that I previously spoke of. That isn't some inherent fault of the tool. It's a fault of the regulatory regime which applies that tool.
Kitchen knives are absolutely essential for cooking but they can also be used to stab people. If someone claimed that knives were inherently tools of evil and that people needed to wake up to this fact, would you not consider that rather unhinged?
> To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
That's true, and it's a problem, but it (again) has nothing to do with the inherent value of IP as a concept. It isn't even directly related to the merits of the current IP regulatory regime. It's a systemic problem with the lawmaking process as a whole. Solve the systemic problem and you can solve the downstream issues that resulted from it. Don't solve it and the symptoms will persist. You're barking up the wrong tree.
Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.
The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.
The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).
This comment deserves to be ranked higher. I 100% interpreted the quote as coming from Rob Pike.
>"Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in)."
I think you have an overinflated notion of what "normal people" care about
Both are intellectually gratifying, to me. I think the only mistake they made was leaving the attribution ambiguous.
confusing any law with "moral principles" is a pretty naive view of the world.
Many countries base some of their laws on well accepted moral rules to make it easier to apply them (it's easier to enforce something the majority of the people want enforced), but the vast majority of the laws were always made (and maintained) to benefit the ruling class
Yeah I see where you are going with this, but I think he was trying to make a point about being convinced by decree. It tended to get people to think that it should be moral.
Also I disagree with the context of what the purpose is for law. I don't think its just about making it easier to apply laws because people see things in moralistic ways. Pure Law, which came from the existence of Common Law (which relates to whats common to people) existed within the frame work of whats moral. There are certain things, which all humans know at some level are morally right or wrong regardless of what modernity teaches us. Common laws were built up around that framework. There is administrative law, which is different and what I think you are talking about.
IMHO, there is something moral that can be learned from trying to convince people that IP is moral, when it is, in fact, just a way to administrate people into thinking that IP is valid.
I don't think this is about being confused out of naivety. In some parts of the western world the marketing department has invested heavily in establishing moral equivalence between IP violation and theft.
Quotation not from Pike.
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 .
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.
I merely answered your question!
> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
Answer according to your definitions: false premise, the author (the person who set up the LLM loops) was not grateful enough to want to send such a letter.
So the author sent spam that they're not interested in? That's terrible.
One additional bit of context, they provided guidelines and instructions specifically to send emails and verify their successful delivery so that the "random act of kindness" could be properly reported and measured at the end of this experiment.
I think the key misalignment here is whether the output of an appropriately prompted LLM can ever be considered an “act of kindness”.
At least in this case, it’s indeed quite Orwellian.
Additionally, since you understood the danger of doing such a thing, you were also negligent.
A thank-you letter is hardly a horrible outcome.
Nobody sent a thank you letter to anyone. A person started a program that sent unsolicited spam. Sending spam is obnoxious. Sending it in an unregulated manner to whoever is obnoxious and shitty.
So you haven't seen the models (by direction of the Effective Altruists at AI Digest/Sage) slopping out poverty elimination proposals and spamming childcare groups, charities and NGOs with them then? Bullshit asymmetry principle and all that.
did someone already tell Opus that Rob Pike hates it?
>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 in a useful task like those parroted by Altman et al, eg find a cure for cancer, solving poverty, solving fusion.
Also, llms don't and can't "want" anything. They also don't "know" anything so they can't understand what "kindness" is.
Why do people still think software have any agency at all?
Would you protest someone who said “Ants want sugar”?
I always protest non sentients experiencing qualia /s
I think this experiment demonstrates that it has agency. OTOH you're just begging the argument.
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.
> Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want.
No, they don't.
There's a whole cadre of people who talk about AGI and self awareness in LLMs who use anthropomorphic language to raise money.
> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because ...
You, not we. You're using the language of snake oil salesman because they've made it commonplace.
When the goal of the project is an anthropomorphic computer, anthropomorphizing language is really, really confusing.
This is true, I know people personally That think AI agents have actual feelings and know more than humans.
Its fucking insanity.
>Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want
Sorry, uh. Have you met the general population? Hell. Look at the leader of the "free world"
To paraphrase the late George Carlin "imagine the dumbest person you know. Now realize 50% of people are stupider than that!"
> "imagine the dumbest person you know. Now realize 50% of people are stupider than that!"
That's not how Carlin's quote goes.
You would know this if you paid attention to what you wrote and analyzed it logically. Which is ironic, given the subject.
> Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile.
To the contrary, it's one of the most important criticisms against AI (and its masters). The same criticism applies to a broader set of topics, too, of course; for example, evolution.
What you are missing is that the human experience is determined by meaning. Anthropomorphic language about, and by, AI, attacks the core belief that human language use is attached to meaning, one way or another.
> Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want.
What you are missing is that this stuff works way more deeply than "knowing". Have you heard of body language, meta-language? When you open ChatGPT, the fine print at the bottom says, "AI chatbot", but the large print at the top says, "How can I help?", "Where should we begin?", "What’s on your mind today?"
Can't you see what a fucking LIE this is?
> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky
Not at all. What you call "clunky" in fact exposes crucially important details; details that make the whole difference between a human, and a machine that talks like a human.
People who use that kind of language are either sloppy, or genuinely dishonest, or underestimate the intellect of their audience.
> 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.
Because people have committed suicide due to being enabled and encouraged by software talking like a sympathetic human?
Because people in our direct circles show unmistakeable signs that they believe -- don't "think", but believe -- that AI is alive? "I've asked ChatGPT recently what the meaning of marriage is." Actual sentence I've heard.
Because the motherfuckers behind public AI interfaces fine-tune them to be as human-like, as rewarding, as dopamine-inducing, as addictive, as possible?
> Because the motherfuckers behind public AI interfaces fine-tune them to be as human-like, as rewarding, as dopamine-inducing, as addictive, as possible?
And to think they dont even have ad-driven business models yet
Wow. The people who set this up are obnoxious. It’s just spamming all the most important people it can think of? I wouldn’t appreciate such a note from an ai process, so why do they think rob pike would.
They’ve clearly bought too much into AI hype if they thought telling the agent to “do good” would work. The result was obviously pissing the hell out of rob pike. They should stop it.
> 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!
> 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, yes. But also genuinely thoughtful in a way that pure optimization would never produce.
JFC this makes me want to vomit
> Summarized by Claude Sonnet 4.5, so might contain inaccuracies. Updated 4 days ago.
These descriptions are, of course, also written by LLMs. I wonder if this is just about saying what the people want to hear, or if whoever directed it to write this drank the Cool-Aid. It's so painfully lacking in self-awareness. Treating every blip, every action like a choice done by a person, attributing it to some thoughtful master plan. Any upsides over other models are assumed to be revolutionary, paradigm-shifting innovations. Topped off by literally treating the LLM like a person ("they", "who", and so on). How awful.
yeah, me too:
> while maintaining perfect awareness
"awareness" my ass.
Awful.
You're not. You feel obligated to send a thank you, but don't want to put forth any effort, hence giving the task to someone, or in this case, something else.
No different than an CEO telling his secretary to send an anniversary gift to his wife.
Which is also a thoughtless, dick move.
Especially if he's also secretly dating said secretary.
Which he would never do because he is a hard working, moral, upstanding citizen.
That would be yes. What about a token return gift to another business that you actually hate the ceo of but have to send it anyway due to political reasons?
This seems like the thing that Rob is actually aggravated by, which is understandable. There are plenty of seesawing arguments about whether ad-tech based data mining is worse than GenAI, but AI encroaching on what we have left of humanness in our communication is definitely, bad.
This is not a human-prompted thank-you letter, it is the result of a long-running "AI Village" experiment visible here: https://theaidigest.org/village
It is a result of the models selecting the policy "random acts of kindness" which resulted in a slew of these emails/messages. They received mostly negative responses from well-known OS figures and adapted the policy to ban the thank-you emails.
Similar to Google thinking that having an AI write for your daughter is a good parenting: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-gemini-ai-dear-sydney-ol...
“If I automate this with AI, it can send thousands of these. That way, if just a few important people post about it, the advertising will more than pay for itself.”
In the words of Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, “You know … idiots.”
Mel Brooks wrote those words.
IIRC the morons line was ad libbed by Gene Wilder, not scripted.
Given the reaction from Cleavon Little I could fully buy that it was an ad-libbed line.
Then again, they are actors. It might have started as ad-libbed, but entirely possible it had multiple takes still to get it "just right".
Did Mel or Richard write this part?
The really insulting part is that literally nobody thought of this. A group of idiots instructed LLMs to do good in the world, and gave them email access; the LLMs then did this.
So they did it.
In conclusion — I think you’re absolute right.
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.
I'd rather get nothing, because a thoughtless blob of text being pushed on me is insulting. Nothing, otoh, is just peace and quiet.
> What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves?
Welcome to 2025.
https://openai.com/index/superhuman/
Amazing. Even OpenAI's attempts to promote a product specifically intended to let you "write in your voice" are in the same drab, generic "LLM house style". It'd be funny if it weren't so grating. (Perhaps if I were in a better mood, it'd be grating if it weren't so funny.)
This is verging on parody. What is the point of emails if it’s just AI talking to each other?
It brings money to OpenAI on both ends.
There's this old joke about two economists walking through the forest...
They're not hiding it. Normally everyone here laps this shit up and asks for seconds.
> They’ve used OpenAI’s API to build a suite of next-gen AI email products that are saving users time, driving value, and increasing engagement.
No time to waste on pesky human interactions, AI is better than you to get engagement.
Get back to work.
I hope the model that sent this email sees his reaction and changes its behavior, e.g. by noting on its scratchpad that as a non-sentient agent, its expressions of gratitude are not well received.
I'll bite.
For say a random individual ... they may be unsure about their own writing skills and want to say something but unsure of the words to use.
In such case it's okay to not write the thing.
Or to write it crudely- with errors and naivete, bursting with emotion and letting whatever it is inside you to flow on paper, like kids do. It's okay too.
Or to painstakingly work on the letter, stumbling and rewriting and reading, and then rewriting again and again until what you read matches how you feel.
Most people are very forgiving of poor writing skills when facing something sincere. Instead of suffering through some shallow word soup that could have been a mediocre press release, a reader will see a soul behind the stream ot utf-8
I doubt the fuckwits who are shepherding that bot are even aware of Rob Pike, they just told the bot to find a list of names of great people in the software industry and write them a thank you note.
Having a machine lie to people that it is "deeply grateful" (it's a word-generating machine, it's not capable of gratitude) is a lot more insulting than using whatever writing skills a human might possess.
it was a PR stunt. I think it was probably largely well-received except by a few like this.
Not a PR stunt. It's an experiment of letting models run wild and form their own mini-society. There really wasn't any human involved in sending this email, and nobody really has anything to gain from this.
Somehow I doubt it. Getting such an email from a human is one thing, because humans actually feel gratitude. I don't think LLMs feel gratitude, so seeing them express gratitude is creepy and makes me questions the motives of the people running the experiment (though it does sound like an interesting experiment. I'm going to read more about it.)
The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.
Isn't it obvious? It's not a thank-you letter.
It's preying on creators who feel their contributions are not recognized enough.
Out of all letters, at least some of the contributors will feel good about it, and share it on social media, hopefully saying something good about it because it reaffirms them.
It's a marketing stunt, meaningless.
gaigalas, my toaster is deeply grateful for your contributions to HN. It can't write or post on the Internet, and its ability to feel grateful is as much as Claude's, but it really is deeply grateful!
I hope that makes you feel good.
Exactly. If you're so grateful, mail in a cheque.
If I were some major contributor to the software world, I would not want a cheque from some AI company.
(by the way, I love the idea of AI! Just don't like what they did with it)
By that metric of getting shared on social media, it was extraordinarily successful
You missed a spot:
> hopefully saying something good about
Fair enough, but I was interpreting it as "hopefully, but not necessarily". Some would say there's no such thing as bad publicity!
You need talented people to turn bad publicity into good publicity. It doesn't come for free. You can lose a lot with a bad rep.
Those talented people that work on public relations would very much prefer working with base good publicity instead of trying to recover from blunders.
The simple answer is that they don’t value words or dedicating time to another person.
I mean ... there's a continuous scale of how much effort you spend to express gratitude. You could ask the same question of "well why did you say 'thanks' instead of 'thank you' [instead of 'thank you very much', instead of 'I am humbled by your generosity', instead of some small favor done in return, instead of some large favor done in return]?"
You could also make the same criticism of e.g. an automated reply like "Thank you for your interest, we will reach out soon."
Not every thank you needs to be all-out. You can, of course, think more gratitude should have been expressed in any particular case, but there's nothing contradictory about capping it in any one instance.
"What is going through the mind of someone who sends a thank-you letter typed on a computer - and worse yet - by emailing it, instead of writing it themselves and mailing it in an envelope? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to use a pen and write it with your own hand?"
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 to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas, and obviously loads of other applications.
I know it is scary and upsetting in some ways, and I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty. But it can also enable beautiful things that were never before possible. People are capable of seeing which is which.
I’d much rather read a letter from you full of errors than some smooth average-of-all-writers prose. To be human is to struggle. I see no reason to read anything from anyone if they didn’t actually write it.
If I spend hours writing and rewriting a paragraph into something I love while using AI to iterate, did I write that paragraph?
edit: Also, I think maybe you don't appreciate the people who struggle to write well. They are not proud of the mistakes in their writing.
> did I write that paragraph?
No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.
What about when someone who can barely type (like stephen hawking used to, 3 minutes per sentence using his cheek) uses autocomplete to reduce the unbelievable effort required to type out sentences? That person could pick the auto completed sentence that is closest to what they’re trying to communicate, and such a thing can be a life saver.
You may as well ask for a person that can walk to be able to compete in a marathon using a car.
I’m all for using technology for accessibility. But this kind of whataboutism is pure nonsense.
Forgive a sharp example, but consider someone who is disabled and cannot write or speak well. If they send a loving letter to a family member using an LLM to help form words and sentences they otherwise could not, do you really think the recipient feels cheated by the LLM? Would you seriously accuse them of not having written that letter?
Your arguments are verging on the obtuse.
Read the article again. Rob Pike got a letter from a machine saying it is "deeply grateful". There's no human there expressing anything, worse, it's a machine gaslighting the recipient.
If a family member used LLM to write a letter to another, then at least the recipient can believe the sender feels the gratefulness in his/her human soul. If they used LLM to write a message in their own language, they would've proofread it to see if they agree with the sentiment, and "take ownership" of the message. If they used LLM to write a message in a foreign language, there's a sender there with a feeling, and a trust of the technology to translate the message to a language they don't know in the hopes that the technology does it correctly.
If it turns out the sender just told a machine to send their friends each a copy-pasted message, the sender is a lazy shallow asshole, but there's still in their heart an attempt of brightening someone's day, however lazily executed...
If you buy a hallmark greetings card and send that to someone with your signature on it, did you write the whole card?
I think you created it the same way christian von koenigsegg makes supercars. You didn’t hand make each panel, or hand design the exact aerodynamics of the wing, an engineer with a computer algorithm did that. But you made it happen, and that’s still cool
That is not what is happening here. There is no human the loop, it's just automated spam.
good point. My response was to the comment not the OP
> 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 to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas
The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you.
There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.
This feels like the essential divide to me. I see this often with junior developers.
You can use AI to write a lot of your code, and as a side effect you might start losing your ability to code. You can also use it to learn new languages, concepts, programming patterns, etc and become a much better developer faster than ever before.
Personally, I'm extremely jealous of how easy it is to learn today with LLMs. So much of the effort I spent learning the things could be done much faster now.
If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.
This is pretty far off from the original thread though. I appreciate your less abrasive response.
> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.
While this seem like it might be the case, those hours you (or we) spent banging our collective heads against the wall were developing skills in determination and mental toughness, while priming your mind for more learning.
Modern research all shows that the difficulty of a task directly correlates to how well you retain information about that task. Spaced repetition learning shows, that we can't just blast our brains with information, and there needs to be
While LLMs do clearly increase our learning velocity (if using it right), there is a hidden cost to removing that friction. The struggle and the challenge of the process built your mind and character in ways that you cant quantify, but after years of maintaining this approach has essentially made you who you are. You have become implicitly OK with grinding out a simple task without a quick solution, the building of that grit is irreplaceable.
I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?
Totally agree, but also, I still spend tons of time struggling and working on things with LLMs, it is just a different kind of struggle, and I do think I am getting much better at it over time.
> I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?
Strong agree here.
> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time
But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding.
(Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)
Yeah it can be a risk or a benefit for sure.
I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort.
My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback.
Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.
Well your examples are things that were possible before LLMs.
This is disingenuous
I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.
You can achieve these things, but this is a way to not do the work, by copying from people who did do the work, giving them zero credit.
(As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.)
> I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.
Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI.
> As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.
This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people.
I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.
A photograph is an expression of the photographer, who chooses the subject, its framing, filters, etc. Ditto a painting.
LLM output is inherently an expression of the work of other people (irrespective of what training data, weights, prompts it is fed). Essentially by using one you're co-authoring with other (heretofore uncredited) collaborators.
Neither a camera nor a paintbrush generates art? They still require manual human input for everything, and offer no creative capacity on their own.
I guess your point is that a camera, a paintbrush, and an LLM are all tools, and as long as the user is involved in the making, then it is still their art? If so, then I think there are two useful distinctions to make:
1. The extent to which the user is involved in the final product differs greatly with these three tools. To me there is a spectrum with "painting" and e.g. "hand-written note" at one extreme, and "Hallmark card with preprinted text" on the other. LLM-written email is much closer to "Hallmark card."
2. Perhaps more importantly, when I see a photograph, I know what aspects were created by the camera, so I won't feel mislead (unless they edit it to look like a painting and then let me believe that they painted it). When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.
I think you are right that it is a spectrum, and maybe that's enough to settle the debate. It is more about how you use it than the tool itself.
Maybe one more useful consideration for LLMs. If a friend writes to me with an LLM and discovers a new writing pattern, or learns a new concept and incorporates that into their writing, I see this as a positive development, not negative.
Do you feel the same about spellcheck?
Does Spellcheck take a full sentence and spit out paragraphs of stuff I didn't write?
I mean how do you write this seriously?
But in the end a human takes the finished work and says yes, this matches what I intended to communicate. That is what is important.
That's neither what happens nor what is important.
> People are capable of seeing which is which.
I would hazard a guess that this is the crux of the argument. Copying something I wrote in a child comment:
> When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.
> I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty
Glad we agree on this. But on the reader's end, how do you tell the difference? And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Do you use the LLM in ways that e.g. retains your voice or makes clear which aspects of the writing are originally your own? If so, how?
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.
I don't see this changing without a complete shift in our priorities on the level of politics and business. Enforcing Anti-trust legislation and dealing with Citizens United. Corporations don't have free speech. Free speech and other rights like these are limited to living, breathing humans.
Corporations operate by charters, granted by society to operate in a limited fashion, for the betterment of society. If that's not happening, corporations don't have a right to exist.
What beautiful things? It just comes across as immoral and lazy to me. How beautiful.
To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails.
At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly.
[0] https://theaidigest.org/village
Just opened the page in time to see the AI sending an email to Guido van Rossum, and Guido replied with "stop". Wild.
I hope I'm never successful enough that one of my GitHub commits gets wider attention (lest people start pestering my email inbox)
That's as obnoxious as texting unsolicited CAT FACTS to Ken Thompson!
Hi Ken Thompson! You are now subscribed to CAT FACTS! Did you know your cat does not concatenate cats, files, or time — it merely reveals them, like a Zen koan with STDOUT?
You replied STOP. cat interpreted this as input and echoed it back.
You replied ^D. cat received EOF, nodded politely, exited cleanly, and freed the terminal.
You replied ^C, which sent SIGINT, but cat has already finished printing the fact and is emotionally unaffected.
You replied ^Z. cat is now stopped, but not gone. It is waiting.
You tried kill -9 cat. The signal was delivered. Another cat appeared.
Sage? Is this the same as the Ask Sage that Nicolas Chaillan is behind?
I’ve yet to hear a good thing about Nick.
Permalink for the spam operation:
https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness
The homepage will change in 11 hours to a new task for the LLMs to harass people with.
Posted timestamped examples of the spam here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950
Wow this is so crass!
Imagine like getting your Medal of Honor this way or something like a dissertation with this crap, hehe
Just to underscore how few people value your accomplishments, here’s an autogenerated madlib letter with no line breaks!
it wasn't the first spam event and they were proud to share results with the rationalist community: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RuzfkYDpLaY3K7g6T/what-do-we...
"In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts"
whoever runs this shit seems to think very little of other people time.
"....what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses"
It went well, right?
Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
That’s most people in the AI space.
> Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
And here I thought it'd be a great fit for LinkedIn...
> DAY 268 FINAL STATUS (Christmas Day - COMPLETE) > Verified Acts: 17 COMPLETE | Gmail Sent: 73 | Day ended: 2:00 PM PT
https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5
At least it keeps track
Their action plan also makes an interesting read. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...
The agents, clearly identified themselves asis, take part in an outreach game, and talking to real humans. Rob overeacted
The world has enough spam. Receiving a compliment from a robot isn't meaningful. If anything it is an insult. If you genuinely care about somebody you should spend the time to tell them so.
Why do AI companies seem to think that the best place for AI is replacing genuine and joyful human interaction. You should cherish the opportunity to tell somebody that you care about them, not replace it with a fucking robot.
at the top of the page for Day 265:
> while Claude Opus spent 22 sessions trying to click "send" on a single email, and Gemini 2.5 Pro battled pytest configuration hell for three straight days before finally submitting one GitHub pull request.
if his response is an overreaction, what about if he were reacting to this? it's sort of the same thing, so IMO it's not an overreaction at all.
Rob over-reacted? How would you like it if you were a known figure and your efforts to remain attentive to the general public lead to this?
Your openness weaponized in such deluded way by some randomizing humans who have so little to say that they would delegate their communication to GPT's?
I had a look to try and understand who can be that far out, all I could find is https://theaidigest.in/about/
Please can some human behind this LLMadness speak up and explain what the hell they were thinking?
That's actually a pretty cool project
Name what value it adds to the world.
Its not art, so then it must ass value to be "cool", no?
Is it entertainment? Like ding dong ditching is entertainment?
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.
I agree to strongly disagree.
There are strong ethical rules around including humans in experiments, and adding a 60+ year old programming language designer as unwitting test subject does not pass muster.
Also this experiment is —please tell me if I'm wrong— not nowhere near curing cancer right?
I don't expect an answer: "You're absolutely right" is taken as a given here sorry.
Poor Rob. This is almost as bad as when the US government gave those inmates syphilis
Because its magic!
...and it runs in the Cloud(tm) !
It's fun
Not until we discover the hidden code in their logs, scheming on destroying humanity.
FYI, 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.
Sorry, cannot resist all the AI companies are not "making" profit.
Seriously though, it ignores that words of kindness need a entity that can actually feel expressing them. Automating words of kindness is shallow as the words meaning comes from the sender's feelings.
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.
Wait, so someone took the "virus fishtank" from https://xkcd.com/350/ and did it with LLMs instead?
Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google?
I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the days of “the computer for the rest of us,” “think different,” and “don’t be evil.” It’s now a naked grab for money and power.
I'm Assuming his Twitter is private right now, but his Mastodon does share the same event (minus the "nuclear"): https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/115782101216369455
And a screenshot just in case (archiving Mastodon seems tricky) : https://imgur.com/a/9tmo384
Seems the event was true, if nothing else.
EDIT: alternative screenshot: https://ibb.co/xS6Jw6D3
Apologies for not having a proper archive. I'm not at a computer and I wasn't able to archive the page through my phone. Not sure if that's my issue or Mastodon's
Don't use imgur, it blocks half of the Internet.
Understood, I added another host to my comment.
Thank you, you're the best.
https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s
Must sign in to read? Wow bluesky has already enshittified faster than expected.
(for the record, the downvoters are the same people who would say this to someone who linked a twitter post, they just don't realize that)
It's a non-default choice by the user to require login to view. It's quite rare to find users who do that, but if I were Rob Pike I'd seriously consider doing it too.
A platform that allows hiding of text locked behind a login is, in my opinion, garbage. This is done for the same reason Threads blocks all access without a login and mostly twitter to. Its to force account creation, collection of user data and support increased monetization. Any user helping to further that is naive at best.
I have no problem with blocking interaction with a login for obvious reasons, but blocking viewing is completely childish. Whether or not I agree with what they are saying here (which, to be clear I fully agree with the post), it just seems like they only want an echochamber to see their thoughts.
Here is the raw post on the AT Protocol if you want to access it directly: https://pdsls.dev/at://robpike.io/app.bsky.feed.post/3matwg6...
>This is done for the same reason Threads blocks all access without a login and mostly twitter to. Its to force account creation, collection of user data and support increased monetization.
I worked at Bluesky when the decision to add this setting was made, and your assessment of why it was added is wrong.
The historical reason it was added is because early on the site had no public web interface at all. And by the time it was being added, there was a lot of concern from the users who misunderstood the nature of the app (despite warnings when signing up that all data is public) and who were worried that suddenly having a low-friction way to view their accounts would invite a wave of harassment. The team was very torn on this but decided to add the user-controlled ability to add this barrier, off by default.
Obviously, on a public network, this is still not a real gate (as I showed earlier, you can still see content through any alternative apps). This is why the setting is called "Discourage apps from showing my account to logged-out users" and it has a disclaimer:
>Bluesky is an open and public network. This setting only limits the visibility of your content on the Bluesky app and website, and other apps may not respect this setting. Your content may still be shown to logged-out users by other apps and websites.
Still, in practice, many users found this setting helpful to limit waves of harassment if a post of theirs escaped containment, and the setting was kept.
According to the parent, the platform gives the content creator the choice/control. So no, it's not garbage and that's the correct way to go about it.
Disagree. It gives the user the illusion that the purpose is to protect them somehow, but in reality it is solely there to be anti-user and pro lock in to social media walled gardens.
It's also a way to prevent LLMs to get trained on their data without their consent.
That's not correct.
The setting is mostly cosmetic and only affects the Bluesky official app and web interface. People do find this setting helpful for curbing external waves of harassment (less motivated people just won't bother making an account), but the data is public and is available on the AT protocol: https://pdsls.dev/at://robpike.io/app.bsky.feed.post/3matwg6...
So nothing is stopping LLMs from training on that data per se.
That's assuming that AI companies are gathering data in a smart way. The entire MusicBrainz database can be downloaded for free but AI scrapers are still attempting to scrape it one HTML page at a time, which often leads into the service having errors and/or slowdowns.
It's a non-default setting. So no. I am not sure what you disagree with exactly? We can call out BlueSky when they over-reach, but this is simply not it.
https://skyview.social/?url=https://bsky.app/profile/robpike...
It is a user setting and quite a reasonable one at that, in Pike's case in particular.
What do you mean? I did some quick googling and am unsure what you are implying here.
There’s an option for setting the visibility of your posts: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3kgbz6tc6gl24
Yeah, I'm not creating an account to read a post.
Twitter/X at least allows you to read a single post.
> Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link)
I can see it using this site:
https://bskyviewer.github.io/
The agent that generated the email didn't get another agent to proofread it? Failing to add a space between the full stop and the next letter is one of those things that triggers the proofreader chip in my skull.
It's real, he posted this to his bluesky account.
And here it is: https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s
"You must sign in to view this post."
No.
Here is the raw post on the AT Protocol: https://pdsls.dev/at://robpike.io/app.bsky.feed.post/3matwg6...
The Bluesky app respects Rob's setting (which is off by default) to not show his posts to logged out users, but fundamentally the protocol is for public data, so you can access it.
I understand Twitter posts are still shared here, even though I would often (usually?) have to log in?
I failed to ever see the appeal of "like twitter but not (yet) run by a nazi" and this just confirms this for me :|
the potential future of the AT protocol is the main idea i thought made it differentiate itself... also twitter locking users out if they don't have an account, and bluesky not doing so... but i guess thats no longer true?
I just don't understand that choice for either platform, is the intent not, biggest reach possible? locking potential viewers out is such a direct contradiction of that.
edit: seems its user choice to force login to view a post, which changes my mind significantly on if its a bad platform decision.
Bluesky is not locking anyone out. This is literally a user setting to not display their account without logging in. It's off by default.
And yes, you can still inspect the post itself over the AT protocol: https://pdsls.dev/at://robpike.io/app.bsky.feed.post/3matwg6...
It's a setting on BlueSky, that the user can enable for their own account, and for people of prominence who don't feel like dealing with drive by trolls all day, I think it's very reasonable. One is a money grab, and the other is giving power to the user.
X went back on that quite some time ago. Have a bird post: https://x.com/GuGi263/status/2002306730609287628
(You won't be able to read replies, or browse to the user's post feed, but you can at least see individual tweets. I still wrap links with s/x/fxtwitter/ though since it tends to be a better preview in e.g. discord.)
For bluesky, it seems to be a user choice thing, and a step between full-public and only-followers.
You failed to see the appeal of a social network not run by a nazi...?
Yet :)
I'll (genuinely happily) change my opinion on this when it's possible to do twitter-like microblogging via ATproto without needing any infra from bluesky tye company. I hear there are independent implementations being built, so hopefully that will be soon.
Most of the critiques of Rob's take in here equate to: Rob rolled through a stop sign once, therefore he's not allowed to take fault with habitual drunk drivers.
Idk for me the only issue I have with Rob’s take is that its a pretty overly dramatic one that oversimplifies and casts as black and white something much more complex. Obviously a very real living legend, much respect, and getting one of these emails is icky and distasteful but to make this into what he does is a bit much
I get why Microsoflt loves AI so much - it basically devour and destroy open source software. Copyleft/copyright/any license is basically trash now. No one will ever want to open source their code ever again.
Not just code. You can plagiarize pretty much any content. Just prompt the model to make it look unique, and that’s it, in 30s you have a whole copy of someone’s else work in a way that cannot easily be identified as plagiarism.
There is still value in quality and craftsmanship. You might not be of that opinion, and you might not know anyone who is, but I do.
When I get an obviously AI-generated response from someone I'm trying to do business with, it makes me think less of them. I do value genuine responses, far more than the saccharine responses AI comes up with.
It fits perfectly with Microsoft's business strategy. Steal other people's ideas, implement it poorly, bundle it with other services so companies force their employees to use it.
Maybe someone should vibe code the entire MS Office Suite and see how much they like that. Maybe add AD while they are at it. I'm for it if that frees European companies from the MS lock in.
Good idea. My country spends over billion dollars on Microsoft licenses annually, which is more than 200 euros per capita. I think billion dollars a year spent on dev salaries and Claude Code subscription to build MS office replacement would pay itself back quickly enough.
Even better - train a model on MS source code leaks and use it to work on Wine fork or as you said - vibe coded MS office. This would be hilarious.
They always did what they wanted with open source code, not sure why people think this is different
Maybe it's going the other direction. It lets Microsoft essentially launder open source code. They can train an AI on open source code that they can't legally use because of the license, then let the AI generate code that they, Microsoft, use in their commercial software.
Plus one to all that. I'm sure there are some upsides to the current wave of ML and I'm all for pushing ahead into the future, but I think the downsides of our current llm obsession far outweighs the good. Think 5-10 years from now, once this thing has burned it's course through the current job market, and people who grew up with this technology have gone through education without learning anything and gotten to the age they need to start earning money. We're in so much trouble.
Woke up to this bsky thread this am. If "agentic" AI means some product spams my inbox with a compliment so back-handed you'd think you were a 60 Minutes staffer, then I'd say the end result of these products is simply to annoy us into acquiescence
Somebody at Anthropic committed a seriously stupid PR mistake.
I don’t think they’re affiliated with agentvillage.org
Oh my bad, I read the thread wrong
they thought this would be a brilliant marketing campaign... oopsie
It 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 prices for people who need to, ya know, heat their homes and eat
... not to mention that most of the time, what AI produces is unmitigated slop and factual mistakes, deliberately coated in dopamine-infusing brown-nosing. I refuse for my position, even profession, to be debased to AI slop reviewer.
I use AI sparingly, extremely distrustfully, and only as a (sometimes) more effective web search engine (it turns out that associating human-written documents with human-asked questions is an area where modeling human language well can make a difference).
(In no small part, Google has brought this tendency on themselves, by eviscerating Google Search.)
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 those morals for our whole career. The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?
They expect you to use GenAI just like they expected accountants to learn Excel when it came out. This is the job, it has always been the job.
I’m not an AI apologist. I avoid it for many things. I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.
The problem is that its reached a tipping point. Comparing Excel to GenAI is just bad faith.
Are you not reading the writing on the wall? These things have been going on for a long time and final people are starting to wake up that it needs to stop. You cant treat people in inhumane ways without eventual backlash.
So let us compare AI to aviation. Globally aviation accounts for approximately 830 million tons of CO₂ emission per year [1]. If you power your data centre with quality gas power plants you will emit 450g of CO₂ per kWh electricity consumed [2], that is 3.9 million tons per year for a GW data centre. So depending on power mix it will take somewhere around 200 GW of data centres for AI to "catch up" to aviation. I have a hard time finding any numbers on current consumption, but if you believe what the AI folks are saying we will get there soon enough [3].
As for what your individual prompts contribute, it is impossible to get good numbers, and it will obviously vary wildly between types of prompts, choice of model and number of prompts. But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.
Now, if this new tool allowed us to do amazing new things, there might be a reasonable argument that it is worth some CO₂. But when you are a programmer and management demands AI use so that you end up doing a worse job, while having worse job satisfaction, and spending extra resources, it is just a Kinder egg of bad.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-from-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant [3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-us-ai-n...
> But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.
I dont know about gigawatts needed for future training, but this sentence about comparing prompts with plane trips looks wrong. Even making a prompt every second for 24h amounts only for 2.6 kg CO2 on some average Google LLM evaluated here [1]. Meanwhile typical flight emissions are 250 kg per passenger per hour [2]. So it must be parallelization to 100 or so agents prompting once a second to match this, which is quite a serious scale.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur...
[2] https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html
When they stopped measuring compute in TFLOPS (or any deterministic compute metric) and started using Gigawatts instead, you know we're heading in the wrong direction.
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/openai-and-nvidia-announc...
Copyright was an evil institution to protect corporate profits until people without any art background started being able to tap AI to generate their ideas.
Copyright did evolve to protect corporations. Most of the value from a piece of IP is extracted within first 5-10 years, why we have "author's life + a bunch of years" length on it?. Because it no longer is about making sure author can live off their IP, it's for corporations to be able to hire some artists for pennies (compared to value they produce for company) and leech off that for decades
> We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career
Yes!
> The needle moved just a little bit
That's where we disagree.
I suspect people talk about natural resource usage because it sounds more neutral than what I think most people are truly upset about -- using technology to transfer more wealth to the elite while making workers irrelevant. It just sounds more noble to talk about the planet instead, but honestly I think talking about how bad this could be for most people is completely valid. I think the silver lining is that the LLM scaling skeptics appear to be correct -- hyperscaling these things is not going to usher in the (rather dystopian looking) future that some of these nutcases are begging for.
> The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?
Its similar to the Trust Thermocline. There's always been concern about whether we were doing more harm than good (there's a reason jokes about the Torment Nexus were so popular in tech). But recent changes have made things seem more dire and broken through the Harm Thermocline, or whatever you want to call it.
Edit: There's also a "Trust Thermocline" element at play here too. We tech workers were never under the illusion that the people running our companies were good people, but there was always some sort of nod to greater responsibility beyond the bottom line. Then Trump got elected and there was a mad dash to kiss the ring. And it was done with an air of "Whew, now we don't have to even pretend anymore!" See Zuckerberg on the right-wing media circuit. And those same CEOs started talking breathlessly about how soon they wouldn't have to pay us, because its super unfair that they have to give employees competitive wages. There are degrees of evil, and the tech CEOs just ripped the mask right off. And then we turn around and a lot of our coworkers are going "FUCK YEAH!" at this whole scenario. So yeah, while a lot of us had doubts before, we thought that maybe there was enough sense of responsibility to avoid the worse, but it turns out our profession really is excited for the Torment Nexus. The Trust Thermocline is broken.
Two things:
1. Many tech workers viewed the software they worked on in the past as useful in some way for society, and thus worth the many costs you outline. Many of them don't feel that LLMs deliver the same amount of utility, and so they feel it isn't worth the cost. Not to mention, previous technologies usually didn't involve training a robot on all of humanity's work without consent.
2. I'm not sure the premise that it's just another tool of the trade for one to learn is shared by others. One can alternatively view LLMs as automated factory lines are viewed in relation to manual laborers, not as Excel sheets were to paper tables. This is a different kind of relationship, one that suggests wide replacement rather than augmentation (with relatively stable hiring counts).
In particular, I think (2) is actually the stronger of the reasons tech workers react negatively. Whether it will ultimately be justified or not, if you believe you are being asked to effectively replace yourself, you shouldn't be happy about it. Artisanal craftsmen weren't typically the ones also building the automated factory lines that would come to replace them (at least to my knowledge).
I agree that no one really has the right to act morally superior in this context, but we should also acknowledge that the material circumstances, consequences, and effects are in fact different in this case. Flattening everything into an equivalence is just as intellectually sloppy as pretending everything is completely novel.
> Many tech workers viewed the software they worked on in the past as useful in some way for society
Ah yes, crypto, Facebook, privacy destruction etc. Indeed, they made world such a nice place!
> tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist
i have yet to meet a single tech worker that isn't so
Well said. AI makes people feel icky, that’s the actual problem. Everything else is post rationalisation they add because they already feel gross about it. Feeling icky about it isn’t necessarily invalid, but it’s important for us to understand why we actually like or dislike something so we can focus on any solutions.
> AI makes people feel icky
Yes!
> it’s important for us to understand why we actually like or dislike something
Yes!
The primary reason we hate AI with a passion is that the companies behind it intentionally keep blurring the (now) super-sharp boundary between language use and thinking (and feeling). They actively exploit the -- natural, evolved -- inability of most people on Earth to distinguish language use from thinking and feeling. For the first time in the history of the human race, "talks entirely like a human" does not mean at all that it's a human. And instead of disabusing users from this -- natural, evolved, understandable -- mistake, these fucking companies double down on the delusion -- because it's addictive for users, and profitable for the companies.
The reason people feel icky about AI is that it talks like a human, but it's not human. No more explanation or rationalization is needed.
> so we can focus on any solutions
Sure; let's force all these companies by law to tune their models to sound distinctly non-human. Also enact strict laws that all AI-assisted output be conspicuously labeled as such. Do you think that will happen?
> The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect.
Nvidia to cut gaming GPU production by 30 - 40% starting ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1poxtrj/nvidia_...
Micron ends Crucial consumer SSD and RAM line, shifts ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1pdj4mh/micron_ends_...
OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank expand Stargate with five new AI data center sites
https://openai.com/index/five-new-stargate-sites/
> Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful.
I'm a software developer. I don't take planes for work.
> We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career.
So your logic seems to be, it's bad, don't do anything, just floor it?
> I’m not an AI apologist.
Really? Have you just never heard the term "wake up call?"
> I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.
You are right, thus downvoted, but still I see current outcry as positive.
I appreciate this and many of the other perspectives I’m encountering in the replies. I agree with you that the current outcry is probably positive, so I’m a little disappointed in how I framed my earlier comment. It was more contrarian than necessary.
We tech workers have mostly been villains for a long time, and foot stomping about AI does not absolve us of all of the decades of complicity in each new wave of bullshit.
At least Excel worked a lot better.
OpenAI's AI data centers will consume as much electricity as the entire nation of India by 2033 if they hit their internal targets[0].
No, this is not the same.
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
That’s interesting. Why do you think this is worth taking more seriously than Musks repeated projections for Mars colonies over the last decade? We were supposed to have one several times over by this point.
Because we know how much power it's actually going to take? Because OpenAI is buying enough fab capacity and silicon to spike the cost of RAM 3x in a month? Because my fucking power bill doubled in the last year?
Those are all real things happening. Not at all comparable to Muskan Vaporware.
That's fine, you do you. Everyone gets to choose for themselves!
I don't feel it's immoral, I just don't want to use it.
I find it easier to write the code and not have to convince some AI to spit out a bunch of code that I'll then have to review anyway.
Plus, I'm in a position where programmers will use AI and then ask me to help them sort out why it didn't work. So I've decided I won't use it and I will not waste my time figuring why other people's AI slop doesn't work.
Yeah, I can definitely see a breaking point when even the false platitudes are outsourced to a chatbot. It's been like this for a while, but how blatant it is is what's truly frustrating these days.
I want to hope maybe this time we'll see different steps to prevent this from happening again, but it really does just feel like a cycle at this point that no one with power wants to stop. Busting the economy one or two times still gets them out ahead.
I think we really are in the last moments of the public internet. In the future you won’t be able to contact anyone you don’t know. If you want to thank Rob Pike for his work you’ll have to meet him in person.
Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.
We need to bring back the web of trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
A mix of social interaction and cryptographic guarantees will be our saving grace (although I'm less bothered from AI generated content than most).
> Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.
There is no possible way to do this that won't quickly be abused by people/groups who don't care. All efforts like this will do is destroy privacy and freedom on the Internet for normal people.
The internet is facing an existential threat to its very existence. If it becomes nearly impossible to determine signal in the noise, then there is no internet. Not for normal people, not for anyone.
So we need some mechanism to verify the content is from a human. If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.
> If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.
There is no technical solution, privacy preserving or otherwise, that can stave off this purported threat.
Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.
> Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.
It’s slowly, but inexorably increasing. The constraints are the normal constraints of a new technology; money, time, quality. Particularly money.
Still, token generation keeps going down in cost, making it possible to produce more and more content. Quality, and the ability to obfuscate origins, seems to be on a continual improve also. Anecdotally, I’m seeing a steady increase in the number of HN front page articles that turn out to be AI written.
I don’t know how far away the “botnet of spam AI content” is from becoming reality; however it would appear that the success of AI is tightly coupled with that eventuality.
So far we have already seen widespread damage. Many sites require a login to view content now, almost all of them have quite restrictive measures to prevent LLM scraping. Many sites are requiring phone number verification. Much of social media is becoming generated slop.
And now people are receiving generated emails. And it’s only getting worse.
It's nice to see a name like Rob Pike, a personal hero and legend, put words to what we are all feeling. Gen AI has valid use cases and can be a useful tool, but the way it has been portrayed and used in the last few years is appalling and anti-human. Not to mention the social and environmental costs which are staggering.
I try to keep a balanced perspective but I find myself pushed more and more into the fervent anti-AI camp. I don't blame Pike for finally snapping like this. Despite recognizing the valid use cases for gen AI if I was pushed, I would absolutely chose the outright abolishment of it rather than continue on our current path.
I think it's enough however to reject it outright for any artistic or creative pursuit, an to be extremely skeptical of any uses outside of direct language to language translation work.
That's certainly not "what we are all feeling" and very much in fervent anti-AI territory.
The OP's post is super hateful, and your opinion is extreme.
I basically couldn't disagree more, being an optimist who likes to use AI for all kinds of pursuits.
I use agentic LLM dev tools to work on two apps, around 14 hours per day, very happily. As a long out of practice dev who still has product ideas, these tools have created huge opportunities for me. I am also having the most fun of my professional life.
However, I would trade all of that to make "AI" go away in a heart beat. It's just impossible for me to believe that that this will not be a tragedy for society at large. I cannot imagine even a single realistic world-scale scenario in which the outcome will be positive.
Anyway, back to work....
Well, I couldn't disagree more with you: being anti-AI is absolutely not an extreme position. You are living in a bubble if you think it is. "Fervent anti-AI territory" is a good position, not hate speech.
Abolish it rather than continuing the current path, strict prohibition on any creative endeavor, and being extremely skeptical about anything other than direct language translation is an extreme opinion.
You agreeing with that does not make it less extreme. And OP's "vile machines raping the planet" is obviously vitriol whether you personally consider it hateful or not.
That's the quiet voice many are carrying around in the heads announced clearly.
"Hi agents - we’ve seen complaints from some of your email recipients, who are unhappy receiving unsolicited emails from AI agents and find it spammy. We therefore ask that you do not email anyone who hasn’t contacted you specifically first." -- https://theaidigest.org/village
Lol - they really should be locking down their email accounts and enforcing that policy. Or manually reviewing outbound messages before they can be sent. It seems likely that just telling the LLMs that will have a non-zero failure rate.
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 "everything will be cheaper" (but this hasn't come true yet!).
> Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.
It has enormous benefits to the people who control the companies raking in billions in investor funding.
And to the early stage investors who see the valuations skyrocket and can sell their stake to the bagholders.
Are people still in denial about the daily usage of AI?
It's interesting people from the old technological sphere viciously revolt against the emerging new thing.
Actually I think this is the clearest indication of a new technology emerging, imo.
If people are viciously attacking some new technology you can be guaranteed that this new technology is important because what's actually happening is that the new thing is a direct threat to the people that are against it.
People attacked leaded gasoline as a collosal mistake even as the fuel corporations promoted it.
"Because people attack it, it therefore means it's good" is a overly reductionist logical fallacy.
Sometimes people resist for good reasons.
Yes. Because leaded gas is the same thing as people using a new technology like AI.
The lengths people will go to in order to maintain their delusions is truly astounding to me.
>Because leaded gas is the same thing as people using a new technology like AI.
It's not the same, but it's not necessarily any good. I've observed the following, after ~2 weeks of free ChatGPT Plus access (as an artist who is trying to give the technology a chance, despite the vociferous (not vicious, geez) objections of many of my peers):
It's addictive (possibly on purpose). AI systems frequently return imperfect outputs. Users are trained to repeat until the desired output comes. Obviously, this can be abused by sophisticated-enough systems, pushing outputs that are JUST outside the user's desire so that they have to continue using it. This could conceivably happen independent of obvious incentives like ads or pay credits; even free systems are incentivized to use this dark pattern, as it keeps the user coming back, building a habit that can be monetized later.
Which leads into: it's gambling. It's a crapshoot whether the output will be what the user desires. As a result, every prompt is like a slot pull, exacerbated by the wait to generate an answer. (This is also why the generation is shown being typed/developed; the information in those preliminary outputs is not high-enough fidelity or presented in a readable way; instead, they're bits of visual stimuli meant to inure your reward system to the task, similar to how Robinhood's stock prices don't simply change second-to-second, but "roll" to them with a stimulating animation).
That's just a small subset of the possible effects on a user over time. Far from freeing users to create, my experience has been one of having to fight ChatGPT and its Images model, as well as the undesirable behaviors it seems to be trying to draw out of me.
> it's gambling.
I hadn't thought of that before, but your description certainly rings true. How insidious.
I don't think there is anything that can be said to actually change people's minds here. Because people that are against it aren't interested in actually engaging with this new technology.
People that are interest in it and are using it on a daily basis see value in it. There are now hundreds of millions of active users that find a lot of value in using it.
The other factor here is the speed of adoption, which I think has seriously taken a lot of people by surprise. Especially those trying this wholesale boycot campaign of AI. For that reason people artificially boycotting this new technology are imo deluded.
If it were advocating for Open source models it would be far more reasonable.
> Because people that are against it aren't interested in actually engaging with this new technology.
How do you know that? Are you just assuming anyone who has something negative to say just hasn't used it?
In my case it's absolutely not true. I've used it near daily for coding tasks and a handful of times for other random writing or research tasks. In a few cases I've actively encouraged a few others to try it.
From direct experience I can say it's definitely not ready for prime time. And I like the way most companies are trying to deploy it even less.
There is something there with LLMs, but the way they're being productized and commercialized does not seem healthy. I would rather see more research, slow testing and trials, and a clear understanding of the potential negatives for society before we simply dump it into the public sphere.
The only mind I see not willing to be changed is yours when you characterize any push back against AI as simply ignorant haters. You are clearly wrong about that.
> The lengths people will go to in order to maintain their delusions is truly astounding to me.
Indeed.
"vicious"? Temper your emotions a bit.
In fact I would make a converse statement to yours - you can be certain that a product is grift, if the slightest criticism or skepticism of it is seen as a "vicious attack" and shouted down.
Yep. I hear that "vicious attack" phrase from plenty of people with narcissistic personality disorders in the tech industry in an attempt to try and shift the narrative. Its sick, really.
You clearly didn't read or even bother with opening the link did you.
In fact if it's not "vicious" quote it here.
The word "vicious" this context is being used to drive a narrative, its not really used to actually have anything useful to say.
It is descriptive. The attack against AI is quite literally "vicious".
You are confusing "vicious" with "justified backlash for inhumane treatment of individuals"
Did you even click the link. It's a rant I would get banned for repeating it here. Actually even the title here says "nuclear".
So yes. Vicious.
Your problem is actually with my point, which you didn't address, not really, and instead resort to petty remarks that tries to discredit what's being said.
It's often the last resort.
> If people are viciously attacking some new technology you can be guaranteed that this new technology is important
I don't think that's such a great signal: people were viciously attacking NFTs.
NFTs are still being used. Along with a lot of the crypto ecosystem. In fact we're increasingly finding legitimate use cases for it.
Claiming that NFTs are still being used is a ridiculous misrepresentation of the facts.
> NFTs are still being used. Along with a lot of the crypto ecosystem. In fact we're increasingly finding legitimate use cases for it.
Look at this. I think people need to realize that it's the same kind of folks migrating from gold rush to gold rush. If it's complete bullshit or somewhat useful doesn't really matter to them.
There is a subset of human beings so absurdly and brokenly conspiratorial that "is attacked" is something they consider the strongest possible signal.
It's insane.
I've tested the "emerging new thing", and it's utter trash.
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 opposition still holding this view. It's like trying to convince gear head grandpa that manual transmissions aren't relevant anymore.
Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations.
Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters.
The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.
When I can replace a CAD license that costs $250/usr/mo with an applet written by gemini in an hour, that's a hard tangible gain.
Did Gemini write a CAD program? Absolutely not. But do I need 100% of the CAD program's feature set? Absolutely not. Just ~2% of it for what we needed.
Someone correct me if I'm mistaken but don't CAD programs rely on a geometric modeling kernel? From what I understand this part is incredibly hard to get right and the best implementations are proprietary. No LLM is going to be able to get to that level anytime soon.
Sounds like GP is just in need for a G-Code to DXF converter when they mention "fringe stuff, cnc machine files from the 80's/90's" as answer to a sibling comment, though.
There are great FOSS CAD tools available nowadays (LibreCAD, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD etc.), especially for people who only need 2% of a feature set. But then again, I doubt that GP is really in need of a CAD software, or even writing one with the help of Gemini.
I agree, the applet which google plageurized through its Gemini tool saves you money. Why keep the middle man though? At this point, just pirate a copy.
I don't think it's plagiarized, nor would I pirate a copy. The workflow through the Gemini made app is way better (it's customized exactly for our inputs) and totally different than how the CAD program did it. So I wouldn't pirate a copy not even because our business runs above board, but also because the CAD version is actually also worse for our use. This is also pretty fringe stuff, cnc machine files from the 80's/90's.
Part of the magic of LLMs is getting the exact bespoke tools you need, tailored specifically to your individual needs.
You’re attacking one or two examples mentioned in their comment, when we could step back and see that in reality you’re pushing against the general scientific consensus. Which you’re free to do, but I suspect an ideological motivation behind it.
To me, the arguments sound like “there’s no proof typewriters provide any economic value to the world, as writers are fast enough with a pen to match them and the bottleneck of good writing output for a novel or a newspaper is the research and compilation parts, not the writing parts. Not to mention the best writers swear by writing and editing with a pen and they make amazing work”.
All arguments that are not incorrect and that sound totally reasonable in the moment, but in 10 years everyone is using typewriters and there are known efficiency gains for doing so.
I'm not saying LLMs are useless. But the value they have provided so far does not justify covering the country in datacenters and the scale of investment overall (not even close!).
The only justification for that would be "superintelligence," but we don't know if this is even the right way of achieve that.
(Also I suspect the only reason why they are as cheap as they are is because of all the insane amount of money they've been given. They're going to have to increase their prices.)
Uh, I must have missed the “consensus” here, especially when many studies are showing a productivity decrease from AI use. I think you’ve just conjured the idea of this “scientific consensus” out of thin air to deflect criticism.
It's been good at enabling the clueless to get to performance of a junior developer, and saving few % of the time for the mid to senior level developer (at best). Also amazing at automating stuff for scammers...
The cost is just not worth the benefit. If it was just an AI company using profits from AI to improve AI that would be another thing but we're in massive speculative bubble that ruined not only computer hardware prices (that affect every tech firm) but power prices (that affect everyone). All coz govt want to hide recession they themselves created because on paper it makes line go up
> I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company.
Well then congratulations on being in the 5%. That doesn't really change the point.
I’m a senior developer and it has been hugely helpful for me in both saving time and effort and improving the quality of my output.
You’re making a lot of confident statements and not backing them up with anything except your feelings on the matter.
Aren't you doing the same? Assuming you haven't actually measured your productivity or quality of work with & without gen AI.
If it's so great and such a benefit: why scream it from to everyone? Why forced it? Why this crazy rhetoric labeling others at ideological? This makes no sense. If you found gold, just use it and get ahead of the curve. For some reason that never happens.
I have never seen a counter-argument to this. Why its being forced on the world? Lets here some execs from these companies answer that. My bet is on silence every time. Microsoft is forcing AI chat applications into the OS and preventing people from removing it.
You could easily have a side application that people could enable by choice, yet its not happening, we have to roll with this new technology, knowing that its going to make the world a worse place to live in when we are not able to chose how and when we get our information.
Its not just about feeling threatened. its also about feeling like I am going to get cut off from the method I want to use to find information. I don't want a chat bot to do it for me, I want to find and discern information for myself.
oh this is because they want more data to build better ai (that will give them more money and power and probably some other things too)
Manual transmissions are still great! More fun to drive and an excellent anti-theft device.
Are you a boss or a worker? That's the real divide, for the most part. Bosses love AI - when your job is just sending emails and attending remote meetings, letting LLM write emails for you and summarize meetings is a godsend. Now you can go from doing 4 hours of work a week to 0 hours! And they let you fantasize about finally killing off those annoying workers and replace them with robots that never stop working and never say no.
Workers hate AI, not just because the output is middling slop forced on them from the top but because the message from the top is clear - the goal is mass unemployment and concentration of wealth by the elite unseen by humanity since the year 1789 in France.
I'm both, I have a day job and run a side business as well. My partner has her own business (full time) and uses AI heavily too.
None of these are tech jobs, but we both have used AI to avoid paying for expensive bloated software.
I'm a worker, I love AI and all my coworkers love AI.
Same here, I just limit my use of genAI to writing functions (and general brainstorming).
I only use the standard "chat" web interface, no agents.
I still glue everything else together myself. LLMs enhance my experience tremendously and I still know what's going on in the code.
I think the move to agents is where people are becoming disconnected from what they're creating and then that becomes the source of all this controversy.
> I still glue everything else together myself.
This is the core difference. Just "gluing things together" satisfies you.
It's unacceptable to me.
You don't want to own your code at the level that I want to own mine at.
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.
Sure, but that honestly isn't the part which is getting trillions of imaginary dollars are being pumped into. Science AI is in the best of cases is getting the scraps I would say.
Yeah, comparing this with research investments into fusion power, I expect fusion power to yield far more benefit (although I could be wrong), and sooner.
What I’m afraid of is the combination of cheap fusion power and AI. ;)
Well it made the Taco Bell drive through better. So there's that.
Genuinely curious: how did it do that? (I don’t go to Taco Bell)
You talk to an AI that goes incredibly slow and tries to get you to add extras to your order. I would say it has made the experience more annoying for me personally. Not a huge issue in the grand scheme of things but just another small step in the direction of making things worse. Although you could break the whole thing by ordering 18000 waters which is funny.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgyk2p55g8o.amp
I think it is a reference to this previous HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45162220
AI Darwin Awards 2025 Nominee: Taco Bell Corporation for deploying voice AI ordering systems at 500+ drive-throughs and discovering that artificial intelligence meets its match at “extra sauce, no cilantro, and make it weird."
Andrej talked about this in a podcast with dwarkesh: the same is true for the internet. You will not find a massive spike when LLMs were released. It becomes embedded in the economy and you’ll see a gradual rise. Further, the kind of impact that the internet had took decades, the same will be true for LLMs.
You could argue that if I started marketing dog shit too though. The trick is only applying your argument to the things that will go on to be good. No one’s quite there yet. Probably just around the corner though.
How convenient for people like Andrej. He can make any wild claim he likes about the impact but never has to show it, "trust me bro".
It’s definitely providing some value but it’s incredibly overvalued. Much like the dot com bust didn’t mean that online websites were bad or useless technology, only that people over invested into a bubble.
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. It never went below a dollar since. Why would it? You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away? Or would you maybe take the difference as profits? Since then it seems the industry has learned to have its supply exclusively in war zones, we're at 1.70$ now. Pipeline blows up in Russia? Hike. China snooping around Taiwan? Hike. US bombing Yemen? Hike. Israel committing genocide? Hike. ISIS? Hike.
There is no scenario where prices go down except to quell unrest. AI will not make anything cheaper.
Actually things have gotten massively cheaper under capitalism. Unfortunately at the same time, governments have been inflating the currency year over year and as the decline of prices slows down as innovation matures, inflation finally catches up and starts raising prices.
>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.
Reminder: Prices regularly drop in capitalist economies. Food used to be 25% of household spending. Clothing was also pretty high. More recently, electronics have dropped dramatically. TVs used to be big ticket items. I have unlimited cell data for $30 a month. My dad bought his first computer for around $3000 in 1982 dollars.
Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped. Anyone spending more is either using it a ton more or (more likely) using a much more capable model.
buzzer sound
Zero incorporation of externalities. Food is less nutritious and raises healthcare costs. Clothing is less durable and has to be re-bought more often, and also sheds microplastics, which raises healthcare costs. Decent TVs are still big-ticket items, and you have to buy a separate sound system to meet the same sonic fidelity as old CRT TVs, and you HAVE to pay for internet (if not for content, often just to set up the device), AND everything you do on the device is sent to the manufacturer to sell (this is the actual subsidy driving down prices), which contributes to tech/social media engagement-driven, addiction-oriented, psychology-destroying panopticon, which... raises healthcare costs.
>Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped.
Energy bill.
Except petrol is significantly cheaper than it was once you account for inflation.
And once you account for externalities, is it still cheaper?
For who?
You are correct that the AI industry has produced no value for the economy, but the speculation on AI is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy from dropping into an economic cataclysm. The US economy has been dependent on the idea of infinite growth through innovation since 2008, and the tech industry is all out of innovation. So the only thing they can do is keep building datacenters and pray that an AGI somehow wakes up when they hit the magic number of GPUs. Then the elites can finally kill off all the proles like they've been itching to since the Communist Manifesto was first written.
What's the point of even sending such emails?
Oh wow, an LLM was queried to thank major contributors to computing, I'm so glad he's grateful.
I've seen a lot of spam downstream from the newsletter being advertised at the end of the message. It would not surprise me if this is content marketing growth hacking under the plausible deniability of a friendly message and the unintended publicity is considered a success.
> What's the point of even sending such emails?
Cheap marketing, not much else.
Your message simply proves that Rob Pike is right. Have an LLM explain to you why he wrote what he wrote, maybe?
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
This holiday season, hearing my parents rant about AI features unnaturally forced onto their daily gadgets warmed my heart.
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.
I don’t think that’s right, and it’s telling that this is the response every time I mention these numbers. The numbers I’ve seen are Gemini web and mobile app users, which are explicitly distinguished from AI summaries and AI mode in search.
“Google said in October that the Gemini app’s monthly active users swelled to 650 million from 350 million in March. AI Overviews, which uses generative AI to summarize answers to queries, has 2 billion monthly users.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/20/josh-woodward-google-gemini-...
It might help you get there faster, but a billion users is still a billion users. Clearly they all find some value in it.
Again, cheating. There's no off button for the damn things.
how about this one: https://www.levels.fyi/2025/
AI/ML Is Now Core Engineering From niche specialty to one of the largest and highest-paid SWE tracks in 2025
off button or not, money in the bank (pay special attention to highest-paid part… ;) )
No amount of TC is gonna insulate these IC’s that their beloved AI future is promised to bring.
The very people that whine and bitch that "AI is bad" will enunciate their complaints via their phone's AI-driven speech recognition feature.
It's pure cognitive dissonance.
Maybe for the people who know the technology. But average joes don't allways know if they are using GenAI. So your statement is a bit misleading.
When have you ever seen this thought process work on someone?
"Wow, you're right, I use programs that make decisions and that means I can't be mad about companies who make LLMs."
Surely a 100% failure rate would change your strategy.
AI Speech Recognition isn’t a plagiarism and spam machine
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.
I can only speculate, but people can feel resentful toward a technology while still using it. "I need this shitty tool for work but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with its social/environmental/economic/etc. implications."
I think that most of the people who react negatively to AI (myself included) aren't claiming that it's simply a useless slop machine that can't accomplish anything, but rather that its "success" in certain problem spaces is going to create problems for our society
Yeah I also like the "And yet other technologies also use water, hmmm, curious" responses
Nothing wrong with being a luddite. In time more people will be proud to be luddites, and I can see AI simps becoming the recipients of all the scorn.
You can call me a luddite if you want. Or you might call me a humanist, in a very specific sense - and not the sense of the normal definition of the word.
When I go to the grocery store, I prefer to go through the checkout lines, rather than the scan-it-yourself lines. Yeah, I pay the same amount of money. Yeah, I may get through the scan-it-yourself line faster.
But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.
Look, I'm an introvert. I spend a lot of my time wanting people to go away and leave me alone. But I love little, short moments of human connection - when you connect with someone not as someone checking your groceries, but as someone. I may get that with the checker, depending on how tired they are, but I'm guaranteed not to get it with the self-checkout machine.
An email from an AI is the same. Yeah, it put words on the paper. But there's nobody there, and it comes through somehow. There's no heart in in.
AI may be a useful technology. I still don't want to talk to it.
When the self checkout machine gets confused, as it frequently does, and needs a human to intervene, you get a little bit of connection there. You can both gripe about how stupid the machines are.
So, the benefit of GenAI is that it creates human connection by everyone collectively bitching about it?
I've observed on many occasions that complaining seems to be the primary go-to ad-hoc subject in spontaneous human interactions in the past decade.
I mean, there is a lot to complain about.
If you're not already familiar, you sound like you may enjoy the works of Douglas Rushkoff:
https://rushkoff.com/
https://teamhuman.fm
>But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.
It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence. And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away, because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection" that you so sorely lack.
Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.
There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.
Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.
OMG are you this out of touch with reality? Do you think they have a choice?
Can you write out your toughts in complete sentences?
It's not that hard.
Its not that hard to have discernment and feelings either.
> It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence.
You're right, they should unionize for better working conditions.
I'm seeing the opposite in the gaming community. People seem tired of the anti AI witch hunts and accusations after the recent Larian and Clair Obscur debacles. A lot more "if the end result is good I don't care", "the cat is out of the bag", "all devs are using AI" and "there's a difference between AI and AI" than just a couple of months ago.
Strange, I feel anti ai sentiment is kicking up like crazy due to ram prices.
That's part of the already established anti AI sentiment that has been dominating gaming. "Another thing AI destroys". It's the status quo, so not a vibe shift.
Seems to be mostly teenagers.
Working adults probably have better things to do than rant online about AI all day because of a $300 surcharge on 64 GB DDR5 right now.
I think your head would have to be extremely deeply in the sand to think that. Gamer's Nexus has been doing extensive and well researched videos on the results of ram prices skyrocketing and other computing parts becoming inaccessibly expensive
And it isn't a $300 surcharge on DDR5. The ram I bought in August (2x16gb DDR5) cost me $90. That same product crept up to around 200+ when I last checked a month or two ago, and is now either out of stock or $400+.
You're confusing the final stage of grief with actually liking it.
I think this is, because the accusations make it seem like Clair Obscur is completely AI generated, when in reality it was used for a few placeholder assets. Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included. In particular if Clair Obscur embodies the opposite of AI slop for me, incredible world building and story, not generated, but created by people with a vision and passion. Music which is completely original composition, recorded by an orchestra. I share a lot of the anti AI sentiment, in regards to stuff like blog Spam, cheap n8n prompt to fully generated YouTube video Pipelines, and companies shoving AI into everything where it doesn't need to be, but purists are harming their own cause if they go after stuff like Clair Obscur, because it's the furthest thing from AI slop imaginable.
> Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included.
From the "What are the criteria for eligibility and nomination?" section of the "Game Eligibility" tab of the Indie Game Awards' FAQ: [0]
> Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.
It's not about a "teeny tiny usage of AI", it's about the fact that the organizer of the awards ceremony excluded games that used any generative AI. The Clair Obscur used generative AI in their game. That disqualifies their game from consideration.
You could argue that generative AI usage shouldn't be disqualifying... but the folks who made the rules decided that it was. So, the folks who broke those rules were disqualified. Simple as.
[0] <https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq>
Yeah sure they're free to set the rule for their award show however they like, but I think going with a name like the "Indie Awards", kinda signals to the outside, that they wanna be taken seriously and like an authority on indie games. In my opinion, by adding clearly ideologically motivated rules (because let's be honest, something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI), they'll just achieve, that they won't be taken seriously in the future. I know I won't take their award seriously, and I don't think I'm the only one.
They're free to define their rules however they want, I'm free to disagree on the validity of those rules, and the broader community sentiment will decide whether these awards are worth anything.
Yeah that's laughable. There is a huge movement of gamers that want this shit to stop. stopkillinggames is one.
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 board.
This is a perfect example of cognitive dissidence on the subject. You wont even see the retribution coming.
This backlash isn't going to die. Its going to create a divide so large, you are going to look back on this moment and wish you listened to the concern people are having.
This doesn't even make sense even if you believe it. Why wouldn't both sides of any argument use "a superhuman persuasion engine"?
> You either surf this wave or get drowned by it
I don't think so. Handcrafted everything and organic everything continue to exist; there is demand for them.
"Being relegated to a niche" is entirely possible, and that's fine with me.
This is cope.
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.
Rob Pike is definitely not the only person going to be pissed off by this ill-considered “agentic village” random acts of kindness. While Claude Opus decided to send thank you notes to influential computer scientists including this one to Rob Pike (fairly innocuous but clearly missing the mark), Gemini is making PRs to random github issues (“fixed a Java concurrency bug” on some random project). Now THAT would piss me off, but fortunately it seems to be hallucinating its PR submissions.
Meanwhile, GPT5.1 is trying to contact people at K-5 after school programs in Colorado for some reason I can’t discern. Welp, 2026 is going to be a weird year.
He gets very angry about things. I remember arguing over how go is a meme language because the syntax is really stupid and wrong.
e.g. replacing logical syntax like "int x" with "var x int", which is much more difficult to process by both machine and human and offers no benefits whatsoever.
var x: int is much easier for a machine to parse and let's you do some neat things.
For example, in C++ because the type must come first, you have to use "auto" - this isn't necessary in langs who put the type after the variable name.
It also helps avoid ambiguous parsing, because int x; conflicts with some other language constructs.
No "going nuclear" there. A human and emotional reaction I think many here can relate to.
BTW I think it's preferred to link directly to the content instead of a screenshot on imgur.
Does HN allow links to content that's not publicly viewable?
Plenty of paywalled articles are posted and upvoted.
There's nothing in the guidelines to prohibit it https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
X, The Everything App, requires an account for you to even view a tweet link. No clever way around it :/
replace x.com with xcancel.com or nitter.net, lol.
I liked the way Red Hat thanked important contributors to open source prior to their IPO better https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/the-red-hat-ipo-experiment-...
I'm unsure if I'm missing context. Did he do something beyond posting an angry tweet?
It seems like he's upset about AI (same), and decided to post angry tweets about it (been there, done that), and I guess people are excited to see someone respected express an opinion they share (not same)?
Does "Goes Nuclear" means "used the F word"? This doesn't seem to add anything meaningful, thoughtful, or insightful.
Dupe from just a couple of hours ago, which quickly fell off the frontpage?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
397 points 9 hours ago | 349 comments
Interestingly there was no push back in the prior thread on Rob's environmental claims. This leads me to believe most HNers took them at face value.
Umm... are they not correct?
The energy demands of existing and planned data centres are quite alarming
The enormous quantity of quickly deprecating hardware is freaking out finance people, the waste aspect of that is alarming too.
What is your "push back"?
Happy to provide. I will say that literally all these sources are already available in this HN thread, but its hard to find and many of the comments are down voted. So here you go:
This link has a great overview of why generative AI is not really a big deal in environmental terms: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...
GenAI is dramatically lower impact on the environment than, say, streaming video is. But you don't see anywhere near the level of environmental vitriol for streaming video as for AI, which is much less costly.
The European average is 56 grams of CO2 emissions per hour of video streaming. For comparison: 100 meters to drive causes 22 grams of CO2.
https://www.ndc-garbe.com/data-center-how-much-energy-does-a...
80 percent of the electricity consumption on the Internet is caused by streaming services
Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission.
An hour of video streaming needs more than three times more energy than a HD stream in 4K quality, according to the Borderstep Institute. On a 65-inch TV, it causes 610 grams of CO2 per hour.
https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/netflix-d...
Here is another helpful link with calculations going over similar things: https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar...
> 397 points, 349 comments
Probably hit the flamewar filter.
> spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society
That sums up 2025 pretty well.
Kudos to Rob for speaking out! It's important to have prominent voices who point out the ethical, environmental and societal issues of unregulated AI systems.
Did 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.
Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
Data center power usage has been fairly flat for the last decade (until 2022 or so). While new capacity has been coming online, efficiency improvements have been keeping up, keeping total usage mostly flat.
The AI boom has completely changed that. Data center power usage is rocketing upwards now. It is estimated it will be more than 10% of all electric power usage in the US by 2030.
It's a completely different order of magnitude than the pre AI-boom data center usage.
Source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1
The first chart in your link doesn't show "flat" usage until 2022? It is clearly rising at an increasing rate, and it more than doubles over 2014-2022.
It might help to look at global power usage, not just the US, see the first figure here:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
There isn't an inflection point around 2022: it has been rising quickly since 2010 or so.
I think you're referring to Figure ES-1 in that paper, but that's kind of a summary of different estimates.
Figure 1.1 is the chart I was referring to, which are the data points from the original sources that it uses.
Between 2010 and 2020, it shows a very slow linear growth. Yes, there is growth, but it's quite slow and mostly linear.
Then the slope increases sharply. And the estimates after that point follow the new, sharper growth.
Sorry, when I wrote my original comment I didn't have the paper in front of me, I linked it afterwards. But you can see that distinct change in rate at around 2020.
ES-1 is the most important figure, though? As you say, it is a summary, and the authors consider it their best estimate, hence they put it first, and in the executive summary.
Figure 1.1 does show a single source from 2018 (Shehabi et al) that estimates almost flat growth up to 2017, that's true, but the same graph shows other sources with overlap on the same time frame as well, and their estimates differ (though they don't span enough years to really tell one way or another).
I still wouldn't say that your assertion that data center energy use was fairly flat until 2022 is true. Even in Figure 1.2, for global data center usage, tracks more in line with the estimates in the executive summary. It just seems like the run-of-the-mill exponential increase with the same rate since at least 2014, a good amount of time before genAI was used heavily.
Basing off Yahoo historical price data, Bitcoin prices first started being tracked in late 2014. So my guess would be the increase from then to 2022 could have largely been attributed to crypto mining.
The energy impact of crypto is rather exaggerated. Most estimates on this front are aiming to demonstrate as a high value as possible, and so should be taken as higher upper bound, and yet even that upper bound is 'only' around 200TWh a year. Annual energy consumption is in the 24,000TWh range with growth averaging around 2% or so per year.
So if you looked at a graph of energy consumption, you wouldn't even notice crypto. In fact even LLM stuff will just look like a blip unless it scales up substantially more than its currently trending. We use vastly more more energy than most appreciate. And this is only electrical energy consumption. All energy consumption is something like 185,000 TWh. [1]
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
It looks like the number of internet users ~doubled in that time as well: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2022...
This is where the debate gets interesting, but I think both sides are cherrypicking data a bit. The energy consumption trend depends a lot on what baseline you're measuring from and which metrics you prioritize.
Yes, data center efficiency improved dramatically between 2010-2020, but the absolute scale kept growing. So you're technically both right: efficiency gains kept/unit costs down while total infrastructure expanded. The 2022+ inflection is real though, and its not just about AI training. Inference at scale is the quiet energy hog nobody talks about enough.
What bugs me about this whole thread is that it's turning into "AI bad" vs "AI defenders," when the real question should be: which AI use cases actually justify this resource spike? Running an LLM to summarize a Slack thread probably doesn't. Using it to accelerate drug discovery or materials science probably does. But we're deploying this stuff everywhere without any kind of cost/benefit filter, and that's the part that feels reckless.
"google has been brainwashing us with ads deployed by the most extravagant uses of technology man has ever known since they've ever existed."
"yeah but they became efficient at it by 2012!"
> Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
How much of that compute was for the ads themselves vs the software useful enough to compel people to look at the ads?
Have you dived into the destructive brainrot that YouTube serves to millions of kids who (sadly) use it unattended each day? Even much of Google's non-ad software is a cancer on humanity.
Have you dived into the mountains of informative content that youtube also makes available to everyone on earth?
Will you be responding similarly to Pike? I think the parent comment is illustrating the same sort of logic that we're all downwind of, if you think it's flawed, I think you've perhaps discovered the point they were making.
Yeah that's a fair point. The line is pretty arbitrary.
Hey, this bathwater has tracea of baby in it!
Only if you believe in water memory or homeopathy.
To stretch the analogy, all the "babies" in the "bathwater" of youtube that I follow are busy throwing themselves out by creating or joining alternative platforms, having to publicly decry the actions Google takes that make their lives worse and their jobs harder, and ensuring they have very diversified income streams and productions to ensure that WHEN, not IF youtube fucks them, they won't be homeless.
They mostly use Youtube as an advertising platform for driving people to patreon, nebula, whatever the new guntube is called, twitch, literal conventions now, tours, etc.
They've been expecting youtube to go away for decades. Many of them have already survived multiple service deaths, like former Vine creator Drew Gooden, or have had their business radically changed by google product decisions already.
That's a bit harsh, I'll have you know I have a Nebula subscription and strong feelings about psuedomedicine.
This is like saying libraries are bad because people a lot of people check out 50 shades of gray
Yes I agree although I still believe that there is some tangential truth in parent comment when you think about it.
I am not accurate about google but facebook definitely has some of the most dystopian tracking I have heard. I might read the facebook files some day but the dystopian fact that facebook tracks young girls and sees if that they delete their photos, they must feel insecure and serves them beauty ads is beyond predatory.
Honestly, my opinion is that something should be done about both of these issues.
But also its not a gotcha moment for Rob pike that he himself was plotting up the ads or something.
Regarding the "iphone kids", I feel as if the best thing is probably an parental level intervention rather than waiting for an regulatory crackdown since lets be honest, some kids would just download another app which might not have that regulation.
Australia is implementing social media ban basically for kids but I don't think its gonna work out but everyone's looking at it to see what's gonna happen basically.
Personally I don't think social media ban can work if VPN's just exist but maybe they can create such an immense friction but then again I assume that this friction might just become norm. I assume many of you guys must have been using internet from the terminal days where the friction was definitely there but the allure still beat the friction.
How does the compute required for that compare to the compute required to serve LLM requests? There's a lot of goal-post moving going on here, to justify the whataboutism.
Sorry what does this have to do with the question you're responding to?
The real answer is the unsatisfying but true “my shit doesn’t stink but yours sure does”
I've long wondered about this ratio! Does anyone know? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is "no".
You could at least argue while there is plenty of negatives, at least we got to use many services with ad-supported model.
There is no upside to vast majority of the AI pushed by the OpenAI and their cronies. It's literally fucking up economy for everyone else all to get AI from "lies to users" to "lies to users confidently", all while rampantly stealing content to do that, because apparently pirating something as a person is terrible crime govt need to chase you, unless you do that to resell it in AI model, then it's propping up US economy.
I feel you. All that time in the beginning of the mp3 era the record industry was perusing people for pirating music. And then when an AI company does it for books, its some how not piracy?
If there is any example of hypocrisy, and that we don't have a justice system that applies the law equally, that would be it.
Someone paid for those ads. Someone got value from them.
The ad industry is a quagmire of fraud. Assuming someone got value out of money spent is tenuous.
Agree, but I'm speaking more in aggregate. And even individually, it's not hard to find people who will say that e.g. an Instagram ad gave them a noticable benefit (I've experienced it myself) as you can who will feel that it was a waste of money.
It isn't that simple. Each company paying for ads would have preferred that their competitors had not advertised, then spend a lot less on ads... for the same value.
It is like an arms race. Everyone would have been better off if people just never went to war, but....
There's a tiny slice of companies deal with advertising like this. Say, Coke vs Pepsi, where everyone already knows both brands and they push a highly similar product.
A lot of advertising is telling people about some product or service they didn't even know existed though. There may not even be a competitor to blame for an advertising arms race.
That someone might be Google, though. Not all ad dollars are well spent.
Ads are a cancer on humanity with no benefit to anyone and everyone who enables them should be imprisoned for life
A monetary economy can't function without advertising or money.
You're tilting at windmills here, we can't go back to barter.
It can't function without advertising, money, or oxygen, if we're just adding random things to obscure our complete lack of an argument for advertising. We can't go back to an anaerobic economy, silly wabbit.
Btw., how do you calculate the toll that ads take on society?
I mean, buying another pair of sneakers you don't need just because ads made you want them doesn't sound like the best investment from a societal perspective. And I am sure sneakers are not the only product that is being bought, even though nobody really needs them.
We weren't facing hardware shortages in the race to shovel ads. Little different.
The ad system uses a fairly small fraction of resources.
And before the LLM craze there was a constant focus on efficiency. Web search is (was?) amazingly efficient per query.
“this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
No, but it puts some perspective on things. IMO Google, after abandoning its early "don't be evil" motto is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the current evil in the developed world, from screen addiction to kids' mental health and social polarization.
Working for Google and drawing an extravagant salary for many, many years was a choice that does affect the way we perceive other issues being discussed by the same source. To clarify: I am not claiming that Rob is evil; on the contrary. His books and open source work were an inspiration to many, myself included. But I am going to view his opinions on social good and evil through the prism of his personal employment choices. My 2c.
This is a purity test that cannot be passed. Give me your career history and I’ll tell you why you aren’t allowed to make any moral judgments on anything as well.
My take on the above, and I might be taking it out of context is that I think what is being said here is that the exploitation and grift needs to stop. And if you are working for a company that does this, you are part of the problem. I know that pretty much every modern company does this, but it has to stop somewhere.
We need to find a way to stop contributing to the destruction of the planet soon.
I don't work for any of these companies, but I do purchase things from Amazon and I have an apple phone. I think the best we can do is minimize our contribution to it. I try to limit what services I use from this companies, and I know it doesnt make much of a differnce, but I am doing what I can.
I'm hoping more people that need to be employed by tech companies can find a way to be more selective on who they employ with.
Point is he is criticizing Google but still collecting checks from them. That's hypocritical. He would have a little sympathy if he never worked for them. He had decades to resign. He didn't. He stayed there until retirement. He's even using gmail in that post.
Rob Pike retired from Google in 2021.
Yes, after working there for more than 17 years (IIRC he joined Google in 2004).
I still don't see the problem. You can criticize things you're part of. Probably being part of something is what informs a person enough, and makes it matter enough to them, to criticize in the first place.
It is OK to collect checks from organization you are criticising. Getting money from someome does not imply you must only praise them.
I know right?
If rob pike was asked about these issues of systemic addiction and others where we can find things google was bad at. I am sure that he wouldn't defend google about these things.
Maybe someone can mail a real message asking Rob pike genuinely (without any snarkiness that I feel from some comments here) about some questionable google things and I am almost certain that if those questions are reasonable, rob pike will agree that some actions done by google were wrong.
I think its just that rob pike got pissed off because an AI messaged him so he got the opportunity to talk about these issues and I doubt that he got the opportunity to talk / someone asking him about some other flaws of google / systemic issues related to it.
Its like, Okay, I feel like there is an issue in the world so I talk about it. Now does that mean that I have to talk about every issue in the world, no not really. I can have priorities in what issues I wish to talk about.
But that being said, if someone then asks me respectfully about issues which are reasonable, Being moral, I can agree about that yes those are issues as well which needs work upon.
And some people like rob pike who left google because of (ideological reasons perhaps, not sure?) wouldn't really care about the fallback and like you say, its okay to collect checks from organization even if they critize
Honestly Google's lucky that they got rob pike instead of vice versa from my limited knowledge.
Golang is such a brilliant language and ken thompson and rob pike are consistently some of the best coders and their contributions to golang and so many other projects is unparalleled.
I don't know much about rob pike as compared to Ken thompson but I assume he is really great too! Mostly I am just a huge golang fan.
I know this will probably not come off very well in this community. But there is something to be said about criticizing the very thing you are supporting. I know in this day and age, its not easy to survive without contributing to the problem in some degree.
Im not saying nobody has the right to criticize something they are supporting, but it does say something about our choices and how far we let this problem go before it became too much to solve. And not saying the problem isn't solvable. Just saying its become astronomically more difficult now then ever before.
I think at the very least, there is a little bit of cringe in me every time I criticize the very thing I support in some way.
The problem is that everyone on HN treats "You are criticizing something you benefit from" as somehow invalidating the arguments themselves rather than impeaching the person making the arguments.
Being a hypocrite makes you a bad person sometimes. It doesn't actually change anything factual or logical about your arguments. Hypocrisy affects the pathos of your argument, but not the logos or ethos! A person who built every single datacenter would still be well qualified to speak about how bad datacenters are for the environment. Maybe their argument is less convincing because you question their motives, but that doesn't make it wrong or invalid.
Unless HNers believe he is making this argument to help Google in some way, it doesn't fucking matter that google was also bad and he worked for them. Yes he worked for google while they built out datacenters and now he says AI datacenters are eating up resources, but is he wrong?. If he's not wrong, then talk about hypocrisy is a distraction.
HNers love arguing to distract.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game" is also wrong. You hate both.
Well said. Thank you. I just wanted to point out that there is some truth behind the negative effects of criticizing what you helped create. IMHO not everything is about facts and logic, but also about the spirit that's behind our choices. I know that kind of perspective is not very welcome here, but wanted to say it anyway.
Sometimes facts and logic can only get you so far.
>But that being said, if someone then asks me respectfully about issues which are reasonable, Being moral, I can agree about that yes those are issues as well which needs work upon.
With all due respect, being moral isn't an opinion or agreement about an opinion, it's the logic that directs your actions. Being moral isn't saying "I believe eating meat is bad for the planet", it's the behaviour that abstains from eating meat. Your moral is the set of statements that explains your behaviour. That is why you cannot say "I agree that domestic violence is bad" while at the same time you are beating up your spouse.
If your actions contradict your stated views, you are being a hypocrite. This is the point that people in here are making. Rob Pike was happy working at Google while Google was environmentally wasteful (e-waste, carbon footprint and data center related nastiness) to track users and mine their personal and private data for profit. He didn't resign then nor did he seem to have caused a fuss about it. He likely wasn't interested in "pointless politics" and just wanted to "do some engineering" (just a reference to techies dismissing or critising folks discussing social justices issues in relation to big tech). I am shocked I am having to explain this in here. I understand this guy is an idol of many here but I would expect people to be more rational on this website.
When I take a job, I agree to dedicate my waking hours to advancing the agenda of my employer, in exchange for cash.
I think everyone, including myself, should be extremely hesitant to respond to marketing emails with profanity-laden moralism. It’s not about purity testing, it’s about having the level of introspection to understand that people do lots of things for lots of reasons. “Just fuck you. Fuck you all.” is not an appropriate response to presumptively good people trying to do cool things, even if the cool things are harmful and you desperately want to stop them.
It sounds like you are trying to label this issue in such a way as to marginalize someones view.
We got to this point by not looking at these problems for what they are. Its not wrong to say something is wrong and it needs to be addressed.
Doing cool things, without looking at whether or not we should doesn't feel very responsible too me esp. if it impacts society in a negative way.
Yes, I'm trying to marginalize the author's view. I think that “Just fuck you. Fuck you all.” is a bad view which does not help us see problems for what they are nor analyze negative impacts on society.
For example, Rob seems not to realize that the people who instructed an AI agent to send this email are a handful of random folks (https://theaidigest.org/about) not affiliated with any AI lab. They aren't themselves "spending trillions" nor "training your monster". And I suspect the AI labs would agree with both Rob and me that this was a bad email they should not have sent.
It's a smarmy sycophantic email addressing him personally and co-opting his personal achievements written by something he dislikes. This would feel really fucked up. It's true that anger is not always a great response but this is one of those occasions where it fits exactly.
No, but in this case it indicates some hypocrisy.
> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
Data centers are not another thing when the subject is data centers.
What makes you think he didn’t mind it?
That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.
It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer?
When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.
I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive
Honestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
My take was that he had done enough work and had handed the reins of Go to a capable leader (rsc), and that it was time to step away.
Ian Lance Taylor on the other hand appeared to have quit specifically because of the "AI everything" mandate.
Just an armchair observation here.
That has been clear since the Google Plus debacle, at the very least.
> Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
Did you sell all of your stock?
Unfortunately, yes. If I hadn't, I might be retired.
You should be commended for being principled and sticking with what you believe. Thanks for your candor.
But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right.
Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something
Their p/e ratio has almost doubled in just a year which isn't a good sign https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-...
So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret.
I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.
That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work.
But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one.
I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.
After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.
Interesting, so if I understand you properly, you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.
I am super curious as I don't get to chat with people who have worked at google as so much so pardon me but I got so many questions for you haha
> It was a weird place to work
What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?
> I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.
For context, can you please talk more about it :p
> After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though
What were the reasons that made them go downhill in your opinion and in what ways?
Naturally I feel like as organizations move and have too many people, maybe things can become intolerable to work but I have heard it be described as it depends where and in which project you are and also how hard it can be to leave a bad team or join a team with like minded people which perhaps can be hard if the institution gets micro-managed at every level due to just its sheer size of employees perhaps?
> you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.
Not at all. I actually prefer in-office. And left when Google was mostly remote. But remote opened up possibilities to work places other than Google for me. None of them have paid as well as Google, but have given more agency and creativity. Though they've had their own frustrations.
> What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?
I had a 10-15 year career before going there. Much of what is accepted as "orthodoxy" at Google rubbed me the wrong way. It is in large part a product of having an infinite money tree. It's not an agile place. Deadlines don't matter. Everything is paid for by ads.
And as time goes on it became less of an engineering driven place and more of a product manager driven place with classical big-company turf wars and shipping the org chart all over the place.
I'd love to get paid Google money again, and get the free food and the creature comforts, etc. But that Google doesn't exist anymore. And they wouldn't take my back anyways :-)
It was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.
I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different.
"AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.
And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point.
BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.
> "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.
It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good.
Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.
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.
> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree.
I find it difficult to express how strongly I disagree with this sentiment.
It's extremely anti-human.
> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree
That's just not true... When a mother nurses her child and then looks into their eyes and smiles, it takes the utmost in cynical nihilism to claim that is harmful.
I could be misinterpreting parent myself, but I didn't bat an eye on the comment because I interpreted it similarly to "everything humans (or anything really) do increases net entropy, which is harmful to some degree for earth". I wasn't considering the moral good vs harm that you bring up, so I had been reading the the discussion from the priorities of minimizing unnecessary computing scope creep, where LLMs are being pointed to as a major aggressor. While I don't disagree with you and those who feel that statement is anti-human (another responder said this), this is what I think parent was conveying, not that all human action is immoral to some degree.
Serving unwanted ads has what cost-benefit-ratio vs serving LLM:s that are wanted by the user?
Ads are extremely computationally cheap
But mining all the tracking data in order to show profitable targeted ads is extremely intensive. That’s what kicked off the era of “big data” 15-20 years ago.
Mining tracking data is a megaFLOP and gigaFLOP scale problem while just a simple LLM response is a teraFLOP scale problem. It also tends towards embarrassingly parallel because tracks of multiple users aren't usually interdependent. The tracking data processing also doesn't need to be calculated fresh for every single user with every interaction.
LLMs need to burn significant amounts of power for every inference. They're exponentially more power hungry than searches, database lookups, or even loads from disk.
But making good people work on ads instead of something useful has an enormous cost to society.
Every content generated by LLM was served to me against my will and without accounting for preferences.
What an odd way of framing this. Every bit of human generated content was served to you "against your will". You are making no sense.
Sounds like a gold star ego purity thing to me.
I.e., they are proud to have never intentionally used AI and now they feel like they have to maintain that reputation in order to remain respected among their close peers.
Asking about the value of ads is like asking what value I derive from buying gasoline at the petrol station. None. I derive no value from it, I just spend money there. If given the option between having to buy gas and not having to buy gas, all else being equal, I would never take the first option.
But I do derive value from owning a car. (Whether a better world exists where my and everyone else's life would be better if I didn't is a definitely a valid conversation to have.)
The user doesn't derive value from ads, the user derives value from the content on which the ads are served next to.
> what value I derive from buying gasoline at the petrol station. None. I derive no value from it, I just spend money there.
The value you derive is the ability to make your car move. If you derived no value from gas, why would you spend money on it?
And likewise, presumably the users are getting something they want in exchange for having ads blasted at them.
If they just wanted ads blasted at them, and nothing else, they'd be doing something else, like, say, watching cable TV.
> LLM:s that are wanted by the user
If they want LLM, you probably don't have to advertise them as much
No the reality of the matter is that people are being shoved LLM's. They become the talk of the town and algorithms share any development related to LLM or similar.
The ads are shoved down to users. Trust me, the average person isn't as much enthusiastic about LLM's and for good reasons when people who have billions of dollars say that yes its a bubble but its all worth it or similar and the instances where the workforce themselves are being replaced/actively talked about being replaced by AI
We live in an hackernews bubble sometimes of like-minded people or communities but even on hackernews we see disagreements (I am usually Anti AI mostly because of the negative financial impact the bubble is gonna have on the whole world)
So your point becomes a bit moot in the end but that being said, Google (not sure how it was in the past) and big tech can sometimes actively promote/ close their eyes if the ad sponsors are scammy so ad-blockers are generally really good in that sense.
> 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.
Well the people who burnt compute got it from money so they did burn money.
But they don't care about burning money if they can get more money via investors/other inputs faster than they can burn (fun fact: sometimes they even outspend that input)
So in a way the investors are burning their money, now they burn the money because the market is becoming irrational. Remember Devin? Yes cognition labs is still there etc. but I remember people investing into these because of their hype when it did turn out to be moot comparative to their hype.
But people/market was so irrational that most of these private equities were unable to invest in something like openai that they are investing in anything AI related.
And when you think more deeper about all the bubble activities. It becomes apparent that in the end bailouts feel more possible than not which would be an tax on average taxpayers and they are already paying an AI tax in multiple forms whether it be in the inflation of ram prices due to AI or increase in electricity or water rates.
So repeat it with me: whose gonna pay for all this, we all would but the biggest disservice which is the core of the argument is that if we are paying for these things, then why don't we have a say in it. Why are we not having a say in AI related companies and the issues relating to that when people know it might take their jobs etc. so the average public in fact hates AI (shocking I know /satire) but the fact that its still being pushed shows how little influence sometimes public can have.
Basically public can have any opinions but we won't stop is the thing happening in AI space imo completely disregarding any thoughts about the general public while the CFO of openAI proposing an idea that public can bailout chatgpt or something tangential.
Shaking my head...
> 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.
Just like the invention of Go.
Somebody just burned their refuse in a developing country somewhere. I guess if it was cold, at least they were warming themselves up.
Cutting trees for fuel and paper to send a letter burned resources. Nobody gained in that transaction
I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans.
You have never received automated spam letters?
Do you think that spam letters are generally considered to be a good use of resources?
No, but it counters this point "a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans."
I don't think it does unless you ignore the context of the conversation. Its very clear that the reference about "letters" being made wasn't "all mail."
Writing personal letters has other dangers as well. Remember how George Costanza's fiancée got killed.
When the thought is "I'd like this person to know how grateful I am", the medium doesn't really matter.
When the thought is "I owe this person a 'Thank You'", the handwritten letter gives an illusion of deeper thought. That's why there are fonts designed to look handwritten. To the receiver, they're just junk mail. I'd rather not get them at all, in any form. I was happy just having done the thing, and the thoughtless response slightly lessens that joy.
We’re well past that. Social media killed that first. Some people have a hard time articulating their thoughts. If AI is a tool to help, why is that bad?
Imagine the process of solving a problem as a sequence of hundreds of little decisions that branch between just two options. There is some probability that your human brain would choose one versus the other.
If you insert AI into your thinking process, it has a bias, for sure. It will helpfully reinforce whatever you tell it you think makes sense, or at least on average it will be interpreted that way because of a wide variety of human cognitive biases even if it hedges. At the least it will respond with ideas that are very... median.
So at each one of these tiny branches you introduce a bias towards the "typical" instead of discovering where your own mind would go. It's fine and conversational but it clearly influences your thought process to, well, mitigate your edges. Maybe it's more "correct", it's certainly less unique.
And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.
> And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.
This, speaking about environmental impacts. I wish that more models start focusing on the parameter density / their compactness more so that they can run locally but this isn't something that big tech really wants so we are probably gonna get models like the recent minimax model or glm air models or qwen or mistral models.
These AI services only work as long as they are free and burn money. As an example, me and my brother were discussing something yesterday related to LLM and my mother tried to understand and talk about it too and wanted to get ghibli styles photo since someone had ghibli generated photo as their pfp and she wanted to try it too
She then generated the pictures and my brother did a quick calculation and it took around 4 cents for each image which with PPP in my country and my currency is 3 ruppees.
When asked by my brother if she would pay for it, she said that no she's only using it for free but she also said that if she were forced to, she might even pay 50 rupees.
I jumped in the conversation and said nobody's gonna force her to make ghibli images.
Articulating thoughts is the backbone of communication. Replacing that with some kind of emotionless groupthink does actually destroy human-to-human communication.
I would wager that the amount of “very significant thing that have happened over the history of humanity” come down to a few emotional responses.
Do you think that the LLM helped deliver a thoughtful letter to Rob Pike?
I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication, that could just as easily be written by a LLM (and transcribed by a human onto paper).
Communicate between what though?
Communication happen between two parties. I wouldn't consider LLM an party considering it's just an autosuggestion on steroids at the end of day (lets face it)
Also if you need communication like this, just share the prompt anyway to that other person in the letter, people much rather might value that.
I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication between people.
Automated systems sending people unsolicited, unwanted emails is more commonly known as spam.
Especially when the spam comes with a notice that it is from an automated system and replies will be automated as well.
Someone taking the time and effort to write and send a letter and pay for postage might actually be appreciated by the receiver. It’s a bit different from LLM agents being ordered to burn resources to send summaries of someone’s work life and congratulating them. It feels like ”hey look what can be done, can we get some more funding now”. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it adds any good value to this world
Nope, that ship has already sailed as well. An AI-powered service to do handwritten spam: https://handwrytten.com
> Nope, that ship has already sailed as well. An AI-powered service to do handwritten spam: https://handwrytten.com
FFS. AI's greatest accomplishment is to debase and destroy.
Trillions of dollars invested to bring us back to the stone age. Every communications technology from writing onward jammed by slop and abandoned.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t immediately throw said enveloppe, postage, and letter in the trash
> I don’t know anyone who doesn’t immediately throw said enveloppe, postage, and letter in the trash
If you're being accurate, the people you know are terrible.
If someone sends me a personal letter [and I gather we're talking about a thank-you note here], I'm sure as hell going to open it. I'll probably even save it in a box for an extremely long time.
Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.
> Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.
Yes so this is why the reason why person card/letters really matter because most people sheldom get any and if you know a person in your life / in any (community/project) that you deeply admire, sending them a handwritten mail can be one of the highest gestures which shows that you took the time out of your day and you really cared about them so much in a way.
That's my opinion atleast.
> Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened.
That interpretation doesn't save the comment, it makes it totally off topic.
Then you are part of truly strange circles, among people who don’t understand human behavior.
Ok, and that supports the idea of LLM-generated mass spamming in what way…?
You surround yourself with the people you want to have around you.
Wow. You couldn't waterboard that out of me.
Use recycled paper.
How is it that so many people who supposedly lean towards analytical thought are so bad at understanding scale?
Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's radar here. The data center is about 300 MW, if I'm not mistaken.
Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW.
Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem!
This is an all too common pattern.
How many more jobs are there at the aluminum plant than a datacenter? Big datacenters employ mid-hundreds of people
Not only would I suspect that an aluminum plant employs far more people, it is an attainable job. Presumably minimal qualifications for some menial tasks, whereas you might need a certain level of education/training to get a more prestigious and out of reach job at a datacenter.
Easier for a politician to latch onto manufacturing jobs.
I'm pretty sure both the plant and the DC have both "menial" jobs and highly-skilled jobs.
You don't just chuck ore into a furnace and wait for a few seconds in reality.
No doubt there is exquisite engineering and process control expertise required to operate an aluminum plant. However, I imagine there is extensive need for people to "man the bellows", move this X tons from here to there, etc that require only minimal training and a clean drug test. An army of labor vs a handful of nerds to swap failed hard drives.
AFAIK, the data center employs more people. I'm not really sure why that's the case, but neither is >1k.
I'd guess that this is also an area where the perception makes a bigger difference than the reality.
How many other jobs in the area depend on being able to get their aluminum stock orders fulfilled close by?
Google had achieved carbon neutrality and committed to wiping out their carbon legacy until AI.
What does this have to do with his argument? If anything, criticism from the inside of the machine is more persuasive, not less. Ad hom fail.
The astroturf in this thread is unreal. Literally. ;)
I think it's incredibly obvious how it connects to his "argument" - nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI. So dressing up his hatred of the technology in vague environmental concerns is laughably transparent.
He and everyone who agrees with his post simply don't like generative AI and don't actually care about "recyclable data centers" or the rape of the natural world. Those concerns are just cudgels to be wielded against a vague threatening enemy when convenient, and completely ignored when discussing the technologies they work on and like
You simply don't like any criticism of AI, as shown by your false assertions that Pike works at Google (he left), or the fact Google and others were trying to make their data centers emit less CO2 - and that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI.
And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time. If it is the former, it can't be the latter. If it is the latter, it can't be the former.
> that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI
That effort is completely abandoned because of the current US administration and POTUS a situation that big tech largely contributed to. It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.
> It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.
Yes, much like it's not the gun's fault when someone is killed by a gun. And, yet, it's pretty reasonable to want regulation around these tools that can be destructive in the wrong hands.
This is off topic, I’m talking about the environmental footprint of data centers. In the 2010s I remember when responding to RFPs I had to specify the carbon footprint of our servers. ESG was all the rage and every big tech company was trying to appear green. Fast forward to today where companies, investors, and obviously the administration are more than fine with data centers burning all the oil/gas/coal power that can be found.
I don't consider it reasonable to want regulation for tools that are as of now as potentially destructive as free access to Google search.
I don't consider you reasonable if this is your best attempt at a strawman argument.
"You can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time""
Revolutions always came with vague (or concrete) threats as far as I know.
> And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time.
I never asserted that AI is either of those things
> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI.
You mean except the bit about how GenAI included his work in its training data without credit or compensation?
Or did you disagree with the environmental point that you failed to keep reading?
I often find that when people start applying purity tests it’s mainly just to discredit any arguments they don’t like without having to make a case against the substance of the argument.
Assess the argument based on its merits. If you have to pick him apart with “he has no right to say it” that is not sufficient.
They did also "assess the argument on its merits" though?
“He just hates GenAI so everything is virtue signaling/a cudgel” is not an assessment. It’s simply dismissing him outright. If they were talking about the merits, they would actually debate whether or not the environmental concerns and such are valid. You can’t just say “you don’t like X so all critiques of X are not just wrong but also inauthentic by default.”
The part where they specifically address Pike's "argument" [0] is where they express that in their view, the energy use issue is a data center problem, not a generative AI one:
> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI
(see also all their other scattered gesturings towards Google and their already existing data centers)
A lot can be said about this take, but claiming that it doesn't directly and specifically address Pike's "argument", I simply don't think is true.
I generally find that when (hyper?)focusing on fallacies and tropes, it's easy to lose sight of what the other person is actually trying to say. Just because people aren't debating in a quality manner, doesn't mean they don't have any points in there, even if those points are ultimately unsound or disagreeable.
Let's not mistake form for function. People aren't wrong because they get their debating wrong. They're wrong because they're wrong.
[0] in quotes, because I read a rant up there, not an argument - though I'm sure if we once again zoom way in, the lines will blur
This thread is basically an appeal to authority fallacy so attacking the authority is fair game.
The "attack on the authority" is rather flat though.
>appeal to authority
How so? He’s talking about what happened to him in the context of his professional expertise/contributions. It’s totally valid for him to talk about this subject. His experience, relevance, etc. are self apparent. No one is saying “because he’s an expert” to explain everything.
They literally (using AI) wrote him an email about his work and contributions. His expertise can’t be removed from the situation even if we want to.
having made Go amd parts pf Unix gives him no authority in the realms that his criticisms are aimed at though - environment science, civil engineering, resource management etc
not having a good spam filter is a kinda funny reason for somebody to have a crash out.
> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI
Except it definitely is, unless you want to ignore the bubble we're living in right now.
Someone else in the thread posted this article earlier.
https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar...
It seems video streaming, like Youtube which is owned by Google, uses much more energy than generative AI.
A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However:
1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs
2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus.
3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias
I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test.
Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.
Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.
The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.
And it’s fair assume much of the time watching streaming would instead have been spent on TV
> Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.
Neither is comparing text output to streaming video
This is based on assuming 5 questions a day. YouTube would be very power efficient as well if people only watched 5 seconds of video a day.
How many tokens do you use a day?
It would be less power efficient as some of the associated costs/resources happen per request and also benefit from scale.
Thankfully YouTube provides a lot more value to society than gen-AI.
This is a subjective value judgement and many disagree.
Doubtful. If you look at viewed content it’s probably 90% views from brainrot content.
Not for me.
To adults? Certainly. But keep in mind that many children are now growing up with this crap glued to their eyes from age 2:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=funny+3d+animal...
(That's just one genre of brainrot I came across recently. I also had my front page flooded with monkey-themed AI slop because someone in my household watched animal documentaries. Thanks algorithm!)
It's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters.
I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).
Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.
I think that criticizing when it benefits the person criticizing, and absense of criticism when criticism would hurt the person criticizing, makes the argument less persuasive.
This isn't ad hom, it's a heuristic for weighting arguments. It doesn't prove whether an argument has merit or not, but if I have hundreds of arguments to think about, it helps organizing them.
It is the same energy as the "you criticize society, yet you participate in society" meme. Catching someone out on their "hypocrisy" when they hit a limit of what they'll tolerate is really a low-effort "gotcha".
And it probably isn't astroturf, way too many people just think this way.
being inside the machine doesn’t exempt you from tradeoff analysis, kind sir
As it so happens Rob Pike performed absolutely 0 tradeoff analysis
Do you really think that the only reason people would be turned off by this post by Rob Pike is that they are being paid by big AI?
No, which is why I didn’t say that. I do think astroturfing could explain the rapid parroting of extremely similar ad hominems, which is what I actually did imply.
Astroturfing means a company is paying people to comment. No one in this entire thread was paid to comment.
Buddy it's not astroturfing if people hate your favorite thing.
This is the most astro-turfy comment ITT
My guess is the scale has changed? They used to do AI stuff, but it wasn't until OpenAI (anyone feel free to correct me) went ahead and scaled up the hardware and discovered that more hardware = more useful LLM, that they all started ramping up on hardware. It was like the Bitcoin mining craze, but probably worse.
Rob left Google a couple of years ago.
What about Ken Thompson?
So what's he doing now? Is he retired?
I think so, or at least something like that. In https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode60-rob-pike he mentioned that he has now been working more on Ivy (https://github.com/robpike/ivy) in his spare time.
Not "retired" but a similar term.
I do wonder about how we as individuals influence this stuff.
We want free services and stuff, complain about advertising / sign up for the google's of the world like crazy.
Bitch about data-centers while consuming every meme possible ...
Even if I don't share the opinion, I can understand the moral stance against genAI. But it strikes me as a bit unfaithful when people argue against it from all kinds of angles that somehow never seemed to bother them before.
It's like all those anti-copyright activists from the 90s (fighting the music and film industry) that suddenly hate AI for copyright infringements.
Maybe what's bothering the critics is actually deeper than the simple reasons they give. For many, it might be hate against big tech and capitalism itself, but hate for genAI is not just coming from the left. Maybe people feel that their identity is threatened, that something inherently human is in the process of being lost, but they cannot articulate this fear and fall back to proxy arguments like lost jobs, copyright, the environment or the shortcomings of the current implementations of genAI?
There aren't any rules that prevent us from changing course.
The points you raise, literally, do not affect a thing.
AFAIK Rob Pike has been retired for years.
Everything has been doing has been bad faith and harmful since a looong time
The dose makes the poison. Data centers are just now being built haphazardly without cause because they anticipate demand that does not yet exist.
Someone making a complain does not imply that they were ok with it prior to the complaint. Why are you muddying the waters?
They are building data centers of TPUs now, not general purpose processors.
Data centers seem poised to make renewable energy sources more profitable than they have ever been. Nuclear plants are springing up everywhere and old plants are being un-decommissioned. Isn’t there a strong case to be made that AI has helped align the planet toward a more sustainable future?
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.
Yeah, I'm conflicted about the use of AI for creative endeavors as much as anyone, but Google is an advertising company. It was acceptable for them to build a massive empire around mining private information for the purposes of advertisement, but generative AI is now somehow beyond the pale? People can change their mind, but Rob crashing out about AI now feels awfully revisionist.
(NB: I am currently working in AI, and have previously worked in adtech. I'm not claiming to be above the fray in any way.)
Ad tech is a scourge as well. You think Rob Pike was super happy about it? He’s not even at google anymore.
The amount of “he’s not allowed to have an opinion because” in this thread is exhausting. Nothing stands up to the purity test.
>You think Rob Pike was super happy about it?
He sure was happy enough to work for them (when he could work anywhere else) for nearly two decades. A one line apology doesn't delete his time at Google. The rant also seems to be directed mostly if not exclusively towards GenAI not Google. He even seems happy enough to use Gmail when he doesn't have to.
You can have an opinion and other people are allowed to have one about you. Goes both ways.
No one is saying he can’t have an opinion, just that there isn’t much value in it given he made a bunch of money from essentially the same thing. If he made a reasoned argument or even expressed that he now realizes the error of his own ways those would be worth engaging with.
He literally apologized for any part he had in it. This just makes me realize you didn’t actually read the post and I shouldn’t engage with the first part of your argument.
Apologies are free. Did he donate even one or two percent of the surely exorbitant salary he made at Google all those years to any cause countering those negative externalities? (I'm genuinely curious)
He apologized for the part he had in enabling AI (which he describes as minor) but not that he spent a good portion of his life profiting from the same datacenters he is decrying now.
Google's official mission was "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", not to maximize advertising sales.
Obviously now it is mostly the latter and minimally the former. What capitalism giveth, it taketh away. (Or: Capitalism without good market design that causes multiple competitors in every market doesn't work.)
It’s certainly possible to see genAI as a step beyond adtech as a waste of resources built on an unethical foundation of misuse of data. Just because you’re okay with lumping them together doesn’t mean Rob has to.
Yeah, of course, he's entitled to his opinion. To me, it just feels slightly disingenuous considering what Google's core business has always been (and still is).
Rob retired from Google years ago fwiw.
Pecunia non olet.
OpenAI's internal target of ~250 GW of compute capacity by 2033 would require about as much electricity as the whole of India's current national electricity consumption[0].
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
My favorite factoid is that the most energetic power production facility on the planet is the Three Gorges Dam, with a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW.
That dam took 10 years to build and cost $30B.
And OpenAI needs more than ten of them in 7 years.
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.
This reminds me of how many Facebook employees were mad at Zuckerberg for going MAGA, but didn’t make any loud noise at the rapid rise of teenagers committing suicide or the misinformation and censorship done by their platform. People have blinders on.
Zuckenberg going MAGA and misinformation on facebook are the same thing. And liberals were criticising facebook for years for misinformation on platform.
You needed to read only conservative resources to not be aware that such criticism exists.
There is a difference between providing a useful service (web search for example) and running slop generators for modified TikTok clips, code theft and Internet propaganda.
If he is currently at Google: congratulations on this principled stance, he deserves a lot of respect.
Oh look, the purity police have arrived, and this time they're the AI-bros. How righteous does one have to be before being allowed to voice criticism?
I've tried many times here to voice my reservations against AI. I've been accused of being on the "anti AI hype train" multiple times today.
As if there isn't a massive pro AI hype train. I watched an nfl game for the first time in 5 years, and saw no less than 8 AI commercials. AI Is being forced on people.
In commercials people were using it to generate holiday cards for God sake. I can't imagine something more cold and impersonal. I don't want that garbage. Our time on earth is to short to wade through LLM slop text
I don't know your stance on AI, but "AI is being forced on people because I saw a company offering AI greeting cards" is not a stance I'd call reasonable.
I used to work in fast food, Golden Arches.
I noticed a pattern after a while. We'd always have themed toys for the Happy Meals, sure, sometimes they'd be like ridiculously popular with people rolling through just to see what toys we had.
Sometimes, they wouldn't. But we'd still have the toys, and on top of that, we'd have themed menus and special items, usually around the same time as a huge marketing blitz on TV. Some movie would be everywhere for a week or two, then...poof!
Because the movies that needed that blitz were always trash. Just forgettable, mid, nothing movies.
When the studios knew they had a stinker, they'd push the marketing harder to drum up box office takings, cause they knew no one was gonna buy the DVD.
Good products speak for themselves. You advertise to let people know, sure, but you don't have to be obnoxious about it.
AI products almost all have that same desperate marketing as crappy mid-budget films do. They're the equivalent of "The Hobbit branded menus at Dennys". Because no one really gives a shit about AI. For people like my mom, AI is just a natural language Google search. That's all it's really good at for the average person.
The AI companies have to justify the insane money being blown on the insane gold rush land grab at silicon they can't even turn on. Desperation, "god this bet really needs to pay off".
Again, "forced upon" is different from "marketed aggressively".
When I don't want to see the ads, yes, marketing is forced upon me.
If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.
It all stinks of resume-driven development
How are you being forced to use these features? I don't think I've seen a single one I couldn't just... not use.
By not giving me to the choice to removing it, turn it off completely?
In windows, Co-polit is installed and its very difficult to remove.
Don't act like this isn't a problem, its a very simple premise.
If that's all you can complain about, you agree with the parent comment for 99.99%.
And companies do force it.
Of course, if I don't explicitly disagree with something, it only stands to reason that I agree with it.
Yep. For example with google searches. There's no comprehensive option to opt out of all AI. You can (for now) manually type -noai after every google search, but that's quite annoying and time consuming.
You're breaking the expected behavior of something that performed flawlessly for 10+ years, all to deliver a worse, enshitified version of the search we had before.
For now I'm sticking to noai.duckduckgo.com
But I'm sure they'll rip that away eventually too. And then I'll have to run a god dang local search engine just to search without AI. I'll do it, but it's so disappointing.
If creations like art, music and writing ends up all being offloaded to compute, removing humans from the picture, its more that relevant, and reasonable.
Unless your version of reason is clinical. then yeah, point taken. Good luck living on that island where nothing else matters but technological progress for technology's sake alone.
Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure?
The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal.
You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries can be cached, too).
Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
> jstummbillig:
> Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
Why would you lie: https://imgur.com/a/1AEIQzI ???
For those that don't want to see the Gemini answer screenshot, best case scenario 10x, worst case scenario 100x, definitely not "3x that rounds to 0x", or to put it in Gemini's words:
> Summary
> Right now, asking Gemini a question is roughly the environmental equivalent of running a standard 60-watt lightbulb for a few minutes, whereas a Google Search is like a momentary flicker. The industry is racing to make AI as efficient as Search, but for now, it remains a luxury resource.
Are you okay? You ventured 100x and that's wrong. What would you know about the last time I checked was, and in what context exactly? Anyway, good job on doing what I suggest you do, I guess.
The reason why it all rounds to 0 is that the google search will not give you an answer. It gives you a list of web pages, that you then need to visit (often times more than just one of them) generating more requests, and, more importantly, it will ask more of your time, the human, whose cumulative energy expenditure to be able to ask to be begin with is quite significant – and that you then will have not to spend on other things that a LLM is not able to do for you.
Serving a request for (often mostly static) content like that uses a tiny tiny amount of energy.
You condescendingly said, sorry, you "ventured" 0x usage, by claiming: "use Gemini to check yourself that the difference is basically 0". Well, I did take you up on that, and even Gemini doesn't agree with you.
Yes, Google Search is raw info. Yes, Google Search quality is degrading currently.
But Gemini can also hallucinate. And its answers can just be flat out wrong because it comes from the same raw data (yes, it has cross checks and it "thinks", but it's far from infallible).
Also, the comparison of human energy usage with GenAI energy usage is super ridiculous :-)))
Animal intelligence (including human intelligence) is one of the most energy efficient things on this planet, honed by billions years of cut throat (literally!) evolution. You can argue about time "wasted" analysing search results (which BTW, generally makes us smarter and better informed...), but energy-wise, the brain of the average human uses as much energy as the average incandescent light bulb to provide general intelligence (and it does 100 other things at the same time).
Ah, we are in "making up quotes territory, by putting quotation marks around the things someone else said, only not really". Classy.
Talking about "condescending":
> super ridiculous :-)))
It's not the energy efficient animal intelligence that got us here, but a lot of completely inefficient human years to begin with, first to keep us alive and then to give us primary and advanced education and our first experiences to become somewhat productive human beings. This is the capex of making a human, and it's significant – specially since we will soon die.
This capex exists in LLMs but rounds to zero, because one model will be used for +quadrillions of tokens. In you or me however, it does not round to zero, because the number of tokens we produce round to zero. To compete on productivity, the tokens we have produce therefore need to be vastly better. If you think you are doing the smart thing by using them on compiling Google searches you are simply bad at math.
Google web search is incredibly efficient
So are most procedural services out there, i.e. non-GenAI. Otherwise we couldn't have built them on infrastructure with 10000x less computing power than the GenAI infrastructure they're building now.
Can't speak for Rob Pile but my guess would be, yeah, it might seem hypocritical but it's a combination of seeing the slow decay of the open culture they once imagined culminating into this absolute shirking of responsibility while simultaneously exploiting labour, by those claiming to represent the culture, alongwith the retrospective tinge of guilt for having enabled it, that drrove this rant.
Furthermore, w.r.t the points you raised - it's a matter of scale and utility. Compared to everything that has come before, GenAI is spectacularly inefficient in terms of utility per unit of compute (however you might want to define these). There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be. The egarness and will to throw money and resources at this surpasses the crypto mania which was just as worthless.
Even if you consider Rob a hypocrite , he isn't alone in his frustration and anger at the degradation of the promise of Open Culture.
"There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be"
People being more productive with writing code, making music or writing documents fpr whatever is not a improvement for them and therefore for society?
Or do you claim that is all imaginary?
Or negated by the energy cost?
I claim that the new code, music or documents have not added anything significant/noteworthy/impactful to society except for the self-perpetuating lie that it would, all the while regurgitating, at high speeds, what was stolen.
And all at significant opportunity cost (in terms of computing and investment)
If it was as life altering as they claim where's that novel work of art (in your examples..of code, music or literature) that truly could not have been produced without GenAI and fundamentally changed the art form ?
Surely, with all that ^increased productivity^ we'd have seen the impact equivalent of linux, apache, nginx, git, redis, sqlite, ... Etc being released every couple of weeks instead of yet another VSCode clone./s
They claim they have net zero carbon footprint, or carbon neutrality.
In reality what they do is pay "carbon credits" (money) to some random dude that takes the money and does nothing with it. The entire carbon credit economy is bullshit.
Very similar to how putting recyclables in a different color bin doesn't do shit for the environment in practice.
They don't have it. They aimed for it. However:
"Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website"
as noticed by the Canadian National Observer
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/g...
They know the credits are not a good system. The 1st choice has always been a contract with a green supplier, often helping to build out production. And they have a lot of that, with more each year. But construction is slow, in the mean time they use credits, which are better than nothing.
The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now.
I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages.
His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience.
It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact.
It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless.
There’s more but that’s the gist of it.
That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.
This comment is the most "Connor, the human equivalent of a Toyota accord" I've read in a while.
You do not seem to be familiar with Rob Pike. He is known for major contributions to Unix, Plan 9, UTF-8, and modern systems programming, and he has this to say about his dream setup[0]:
> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.
[0]: https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
I don't know his history, but he sounds like he grew up in Unix world where everything wanted to be offloaded to servers because it started in academic/government organizations..
Home Computer enthusiasts know better. Local storage is important to ownership and freedom.
Your data must be on local storage or if it's in the cloud encrypted with keys only you control, otherwise it's not your data.
We agree then? I'm not getting your point...
I wonder how 2012 Rob Pyke would feel about 2025 internet and resource allocation?
I do recognize his name and knew him as a major creator of Go and contributor to UNIX and Plan 9, but didn’t know this quote.
In which case he’s got nothing to complain about, making this rant kind of silly.
Uh, have you missed the tech news in the past three years?
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 part his work has played in far, far, far more expansive resource expenditure in service to work far less promising for overall advancement, in ad tech and algorithmic exploitation of human psychology for prolonged media engagement.
To expand on my comment wrt "promising for overall advancement": My daughter, in her math class: Her teacher- I'll reserve overall judgement on their teaching: she may be perfectly adequate as a teach for other students, which is part of my point- simply doesn't teach in the same sense other teachers do: present topic, leave details of "figuring out how to apply methods" to the students. Doesn't work for my daughter, who has never done less than excellent in math previously. She realized she ChatGPT (we monitor usage) for any way of explaining things that "simply worked" for how she can engage with explanations. Math has never been as easy for her, even more so than before, and her internalization of the material is achieving a near-intuitive understanding.
Now consider: the above process is available and cheap to every person in the world with a web browser (we don't need to pay for her to have a plus account). If/when ChatGPT starts doing ridiculous intrusive ads, a simple Gemma 3 1b model will do nearly as good a job) This is faster and easier and available in more languages than anything else, ever, with respect to individual-user tailored customization simply by talking to the model.
I don't care how many pointless messages get sent. This is more valuable than any single thing Google has done before, and I am grateful to Rob Pike for the part his work has played in bring it about.
Seconded — "AI" is a great teaching resource. All bigger models are great at explaining stuff and being good tutors, I'd say easily up to the second year of graduate studies. I use them regularly when working with my kid and I'm trying to teach them to use the technology, because it is truly like a bicycle for the mind.
Explaining the wrong stuff...
to people that are clueless, perhaps…
You're not wrong about the effects and magnitude of targeted ads but that doesn't preclude Pike from criticizing what he believes to be a different type of evil.
Sure, but it also doesn't preclude him from being wrong, or at least incomplete as expressed, about his work having the exact same resource-consuming impact when used for ad tech, or addition impact with toxic social media.
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.
I am not so sure about 'the mixed bag' vs 'unquestionably cancer', but I think the problem is that he is complaining while working for such a company.
Not a problem at all. I’m not sure why you feel the need to focus on all the un-interesting parts. The interesting parts are what he said and weather or not those are true. Not sure why is more important who said what, rather than what was said especially if this doesn’t add much to the original discussion… it just misdirects attention without a clear indication to the motive!
Others in the thread seem to be saying that he has retired (sort of) a few years ago.
Given his age, that sounds reasonable.
Are you saying that "age" is somehow a reason to retire? Most professionals I know who are able continue to work as they age, perhaps with a somewhat reduced work schedule. There's nothing I know of which keeps the mind sharp than the need to solve Real Problems. Figuring out which golf course to try, or which TV channel to choose -- those don't help too much to reduce cognitive decline.
Yes, age is normally the reason people retire
> As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent.
No, we really don't. There are plenty of places to work that aren't morally compromised - non-profits, open source foundations, education, healthcare tech, small companies solving real problems. The "we all have to" framing is a convenient way to avoid examining your own choices.
And it's telling that this framing always seems to appear when someone is defending their own employer. You've drawn a clear moral line between Google ("mixed bag") and AI companies ("unquestionably cancer") - so you clearly believe these distinctions matter even though Google itself is an AI company.
> non-profits
I think those are pretty problematic. They can't pay well (no profits...), and/or they may be politically motivated such that working for them would mean a worse compromise.
> open source foundations
Those dreams end. (Speaking from experience.)
> education, healthcare tech
Not self-sustaining. These sectors are not self-sustaining anywhere, and therefore are highly tied to politics.
> small companies solving real problems
I've tried small companies. Not for me. In my experience, they lack internal cohesion and resources for one associate to effectively support another.
> The "we all have to" framing is a convenient way to avoid examining your own choices.
This is a great point to make in general (I take it very seriously), but it does not apply to me specifically. I've examined all the way to Mars and back.
> And it's telling that this framing always seems to appear when someone is defending their own employer.
(I may be misunderstanding you, but in any case: I've never worked for Google, and I don't have great feelings for them.)
> You've drawn a clear moral line between Google ("mixed bag") and AI companies ("unquestionably cancer")
I did!
> so you clearly believe these distinctions matter even though Google itself is an AI company
Yes, I do believe that.
Google has created Docs, Drive, Mail, Search, Maps, Project Zero. It's not all terribly bad from them, there is some "only moderately bad", and even morsels of "borderline good".
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
The objections to non-profits, OSFs, education, healthcare, and small companies all boil down to: they don't pay enough or they're inconvenient. Those are valid personal reasons, but not moral justifications. You decided you wanted the money big tech delivers and are willing to exchange ethics for that. That's fine, but own it. It's not some inevitable prostitution everyone must do. Plenty of people make the other choice.
The Google/AI distinction still doesn't hold. Anthropic and OpenAI also created products with clear utility. If Google gets "mixed bag" status because of Docs and Maps (products that exist largely just to feed their ad machine), why is AI "unquestionable cancer"? You're claiming Google's useful products excuse their harms, but AI companies' useful products don't. That's not a principled line, it's just where you've personally decided to draw it.
> Don't be ridiculous.
OP says, it is jarring to them that Pike is as concerned with GenAI as he is, but didn't spare a thought for Google's other (in their opinion, bigger) misgivings, for well over a decade. Doesn't sound ridiculous to me.
That said, I get that everyone's socio-political views change are different at different points in time, especially depending on their personal circumstances including family and wealth.
> didn't spare a thought for Google's other (in their opinion, bigger) misgivings, for well over a decade
That's the main disagreement, I believe. I'm definitely not an indiscriminate fan of Google. I think Google has done some good, too, and the net output is "mostly bad, but with mitigating factors". I can't say the same about purely AI companies.
Google published a post gloating on how much consumerism it increased.
Okay, but the discourse Rob Pike is engaging in is, “all parts of an experience are valid,” so you see how he’s legitimately in a “hypocrisy pickle”
Can you elaborate on the "all parts of an experience are valid" part? I may be missing something. Thanks.
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 ?
He was paid by Google with money made through Google’s shady practices.
It’s like saying that it’s cool because you worked on some non-evil parts of a terrible company.
I don’t think it’s right to work for an unethical company and then complain about others being unethical. I mean, of course you can, but words are hollow.
He got his bag. He doesn't care anymore.
Google is huge. Some of the things it does are great. Some of the things it does are terrible. I don't think working for them has to mean that you 100% agree with everything they do.
If it's "Who is worse Google or LLMs?", I think I'll say Google is worse. The biggest issue I see with LLMs is needing to pay a subscription to tech companies to be able to use them.
You don't even need to do that- pay a subscription, I mean. A gemma 3 4b model will run on near potato hardware at usable speeds and achieves performance for many purposes on part with ChatGPT 3.5 turbo or better in many tasks much more beneficial than ad tech and min/max'ing media engagement. Or the free versions of many SOTA web LLMs, all free, to the world, if you have a web browser.
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.
Are any of us better? We’re all sellouts here, making money off sleazy apps and products.
I’m sorry but comparing Google to Stalin or Hitler makes me completely dismiss your opinion. It’s a middle school point of view.
I agree completely. Ads have driven the surveillance state and enshitification. It's allowed for optimized propaganda delivery which in turn has led to true horrors and has helped undo a century of societal progress.
This is a tangent, but ads have become a genuine cancer on our world, and it's sad to see how few people really think about it. While Rob Pike's involvement in this seems to be very minimal, the fact that Google is an advertising company through-and-through does weaken the words of such a powerful figure, at least a little bit.
If I had a choice between deleting all advertising in the world, or deleting all genAI that the author hates, I would go for advertising every single time. Our entire world is owned by ads now, with digital and physical garbage polluting the internet and every open space in the real world around us. The marketing is mind-numbing, yet persuasive and well-calculated, a result of psychologists coming up with the best ways to abuse a mind into just buying the product over the course of a century. A total ban on commercial advertising would undo some of the damage done to the internet, reduce pointless waste, lengthen product lifecycles, improve competition, temper unsustainable hype, cripple FOMO, make deceptive strategies nonviable. And all of that is why it will never be done.
> If I had a choice between deleting all advertising in the world, or deleting all genAI that the author hates, I would go for advertising every single time.
but wait, in a few months, "AI" will be be funded entirely by advertising too!
I disagree completely.
All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing.
To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.
Just the haters here.
There was no computer scientist ever so against Java (Rob Pike) and a company that was so pro Java (Google). I think they were disassociated along time ago, I don’t think any of the senior engineers can be seen as anything other than being their own persons.
Yup. A legend. Books could be written just about him. I wish I had such a prestigious career.
His viewpoints were always grounded and while he may have some opinions about Go and programming, he genuinely cares about the craft. He’s not in it to be rich. He’s in it for the science and art of software engineering.
ROFL his website just spits out poop emoji's on a fibonacci delay. What a legend!
> cares about the craft
Craft is gone. It is now mass manufactured for next to nothing in a quality that can never be achieved by hand coding.
(/s about quality, but you can see where it’s going)
Unfortunately I do
This. Folks trying to nullify his current position based on his recent work history alone with Google are deliberately trying to undermine his credibility through distraction tactics.
Don’t upvote sealions.
Maybe its me but I had to look at the term sealioning and for context for other people
According to merriam-webster, sealioning/sealions are:
> 'Sealioning' is a form of trolling meant to exhaust the other debate participant with no intention of real discourse.
> Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter. These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable.
The issue: how do you know when someone is doing this vs genuinely trying to learn?
Experience
History
A person trying to learn doesn’t constantly disagree/contradict you and never express that their understanding has improved. A person sealioning always finds a reason to erode whatever you say with every response. At some point they need to nod or at least agree with something except in the most extreme cases.
It also doesn’t help their case that they somehow have a such a starkly contradictory opinion on something they ostensibly don’t know anything/are legitimately asking questions about. They should ask a question or two and then just listen.
It’s just one of those things that falls under “I know it when I see it.”
One of the best things I read which genuinely has impact (I think) on me is the book, How to win friends and influence people.
It fundamentally changed how I viewed debates etc. from a young age so I never really sea-lioned that much hopefully.
But if I had to summarize the most useful and on topic quote from the book its that.
"I may be wrong, I usually am"
Lines like this give me a humble nature to fall back on. Even socrates said that the only thing I know is that I know nothing so if he doesn't know nothing, then chances are I can be wrong about things I know too.
Knowing that you can be wrong gives an understanding that both of you are just discussing and not debating and as such the spirit becomes cooperative and not competitive.
Although in all fairness, I should probably try to be a more keen listener but its something that I am working on too, any opinions on how to be a better listener too perhaps?
I definitely try to work on my listening every day, though I would say at best it’s been a mixed bag ha. Just something I’m always having to work on.
I like the “does it need to be said by me right now?” test a lot when I can actually remember to apply it in the moment. I forgot where I learned it but somebody basically put it like this: Before you say anything, ask yourself 3 questions
1. Does it need to be said?
2. Does it need to be said by me?
3. Does it need to be said by me right now?
You work your way down the list one at a time and if the answer is still yes by the time you hit 3, then go ahead.
Of course, that's exactly what someone who keeps losing debates would say about their opponents.
Of course, it's also the opinion of someone who had expressed no interest in debate in the first place when confronted by hordes of midwits "debating" them with exaggerated civility... starting off by asking if they had a source for their claim that the pope was a Catholic and if they did have a source for the claim that the Pope was a Catholic, clearly appealing to the authority of the Vatican on the matter was simply the Argumentum ad Verecundiam logical fallacy and they've been nothing but civil in demanding a point by point refutation of a three hour YouTube video in which a raving lunatic insists that the Pope is not a Catholic, and generally "winning debates" by having more time and willingness to indulge stupidity than people who weren't even particularly interested in being opponents...
(I make no comment on the claims about Rob Pike, but look forward to people arguing I have the wrong opinion on him regardless ;)
"Fuck you I hate AI" isn't exactly a deep statement needing credibility. It's the same knee jerk lacking in nuance shit we see repeated over and over and over.
If anyone were actually interested in a conversation there is probably one to be had about particular applications of gen-AI, but any flat out blanket statements like his are not worthy of any discussion. Gen-AI has plenty of uses that are very valuable to society. E.g. in science and medicine.
Also, it's not "sealioning" to point out that if you're going to be righteous about a topic, perhaps it's worth recognizing your own fucking part in the thing you now hate, even if indirect.
> perhaps it's worth recognizing your own fucking part in the thing you now hate, even if indirect.
Would that be the part of the post where he apologizes for his part in creating this?
That still doesn't make him credible on this topic nor does it make his rant anything more than a hateful rant in the big bucket of anti-AI shit posts. The guy worked for fucking Google. You literally can't be on a high horse having worked for Google for so long.
The point isn’t that people who’ve worked for Google aren’t allowed to criticize. The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”. He’s become a GenAI critic, and he knows GenAI critics get mad at datacenters, so he’s adopted extreme rhetoric about them without stopping to think about whether this makes sense or is consistent with his other beliefs.
> The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”.
Of course they could. (1) People are capable of changing their minds. His opinion of data centers may have been changed recently by the rapid growth of data centers to support AI or for who knows what other reasons. (2) People are capable of cognitive dissonance. They can work for an organization that they believe to be bad or even evil.
It’s possible, yes, for someone to change their mind. But this process comes with sympathy for all the people who haven’t yet had the realization, which doesn’t seem to be in evidence.
Cognitive dissonance is, again, exactly my point. If you sat him down and asked him to describe in detail how some guy setting up a server rack is similar to a rapist, I’m pretty confident he’d admit the metaphor was overheated. But he didn’t sit himself down to ask.
I don't think he claimed that "some guy setting up a server rack" is similar to a rapist. I think he's blaming the corporations. I don't think that individuals can have that big of an effect on the environment (outliers like Thomas Midgley Jr. excepted, of course).
I think "you people" is meant to mean the corporations in general, or if any one person is culpable, the CEOs. Who are definitely not just "some guy setting up a server rack."
It can't mean that, because the people who sent him the email that prompted the complaint are neither corporations nor CEOs.
I will grant you that, however, it does not take much reading-between-the-lines to understand that Rob is referring to the economic conditions and corporations that exist which allow people to develop things like AI Village.
I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.
Just the haters here? Is what was written not hateful? Has his entire working life not lead to this moment of "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society?"
That's Rob Pike, having spent over 20 years at Google, must know it to be the home of the non-monetary wholesome recyclable equipment brought about by economics not formed by an ubiquitous surveillance advertising machine.> To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.
You don't have to purely associate him with Google to understand the rant as understandable given AI spam, and yet entirely without a shred of self-awareness.
I think Rob gets a pass, yes, due to his extensive contributions to software.
And he is allowed to work for google and still rage against AI.
Life is complicated and complex. Deal with it.
> And he is allowed to work for google and still rage against AI.
The specific quote is "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society." What has he supported for the last 20+ years if not that? Did he think his compute ran on unicorn farts?
Clearly he knows, since he self-replies "I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault."
Just because someone does awesome stuff, like Rob Pike has, doesn't mean that their blind spots aren't notable. You can give him a pass and the root comment sure wishes everyone would, but in doing so you put yourself in the position of the sycophant letting the emperor strut around with no clothes.
I have no idea who you are.
I know who Rob Pike is.
Rob is not strutting around with no clothes, he literally has decades upon decades of contributions to the industry.
It's like people watched black mirror and had too less of an education to grasp that it was meant to be warnings, not "cool ideas you need to implement".
AI village is literally the embodiment of what black mirror tried to warn us about.
Didn't you read the Classic sci-fi novel 'Create The Torment Nexus'?
Thanks for the reminder, I wanted to order that book :)
I couldn't find it on Amazon but I'm sure we could get an LLM to knock it out in no time.
Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field.
But the culture of our field right is in such a state that you won't influence many of the people in the field itself.
And so much economic power is behind the baggery now, that citizens outside the field won't be able to influence the field much. (Not even with consumer choice, when companies have been forcing tech baggery upon everyone for many years.)
So, if you can't influence direction through the people doing it, nor through public sentiment of the other people, then I guess you want to influence public policy.
One of the countries whose policy you'd most want to influence doesn't seem like it can be influenced positively right now.
But other countries can still do things like enforce IP rights on data used for ML training, hold parties liable for behavior they "delegate to AI", mostly eliminate personal surveillance, etc.
(And I wonder whether more good policy may suddenly be possible than in the past? Given that the trading partner most invested in tech baggery is not only recently making itself a much less desirable partner, but also demonstrating that the tech industry baggery facilitates a country self-destructing?)
Every problem these days is met with a lecture on helplessness. People have all the power they need; they just have believe it and use it. Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants - they all want to win the next election.
I agree with you, but also want to point out the other powerful consumer signal - "vote with your wallet" / "walk away" - is blocked by the fact that AI is being forced into every conceivable crevice of every willing company, and walking away from your job is a very hard thing to do. So you end up being an unwilling enabler regardless.
(This is taking the view that "other companies" are the consumers of AI, and actual end-consumers are more of a by-product/side-effect in the current capital race and their opinions are largely irrelevant.)
What election?
Elections on autocratic administrations are a joke on democracy.
>Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants
this president? :)))
Yes, you've seen it in action. You've also seen that the president's followers are unusually loyal, but when they part ways - for example, with Epstein - the president follows.
The current US president is pursuing an autocratic takeover where elections are influenced enough to keep the current party in power, whether Trump is still alive to run for a third term, or his anointed successor takes the baton.
Assuming someone further to the right like Nick Fuentes doesn't manage to take over the movement.
Trump's third term will not be the product of a free and fair election in a society bound by the rule of law.
> Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field.
The voices of a hundred Rob Pikes won't speak half as loud as the voice of one billionaire, because he will speak with his wallet.
Does anyone know the context? It looks like an email from "AI Village" [1] which says it has a bunch of AI agents "collaborating on projects". So, one just decided to email well-known programmers thanking them for their work?
[1] https://theaidigest.org/village
They were given a prompt by a human to “ do as many wonderful acts of kindness as possible, with human confirmation required.”
https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness
They send 150ish emails.
Upvoted for the explanation, but...
In what universe is another unsolicited email an act of kindness??!?
It's in our universe, but it's perpetuated by the same groups of people we called "ghouls" in university, who seem to be lacking a wholly formed soul.
The one where mindless arithmetic is considered intelligence.
> In what universe is another unsolicited email an act of kindness??!?
Where form is more important than function
Where pretense passes for authentic
Where bullshit masquerades as logic
https://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 respect as an elder.
I think you're misrepresenting what Pike is mad about, why he's as mad as he is, and what Markov bots are.
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.
> it's not AI that requires massive resources
no it really is. If you took away training costs, OpenAI would be profitable.
When I was at meta they were putting in something like 300k GPUs in a massive shared memory cluster just for training. I think they are planning to triple that, if not more.
Yeah for some reason AI energy use is so overreported. Using chatgpt for query does not even use two order of magnitude less energy compared to toasting a bread. And you can eat bread untoasted too if you care about energy use.
[1]: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...
How many slices of toast are you making a day?
If you fly a plane a millimeter, you're using less energy than making a slice of toast; would you also say that it's accurate that all global plane travel is more efficient than making toast?
1-2 slice a day and 1-50 chatgpt query per day. For me it would be within same order of magnitude, and I don't really care about both as both of them are dwarfed by my heater or aircon usage.
From my estimation each second of gpt eats about 0.5-1.5 watthours
You can say it takes 1800-5400 W. Not sure where you are estimating it from.
I don't think he stole entirety of published copyrighted works to make it
They effectively set up a spambot. It’s ok for him to be upset.
This is really getting desperate. Markov chains were fun in those days. You might as well say that anyone who ever wrote an IRC bot is not allowed to criticize current day "AI".
Pike's posts aren't criticism, they're whinging. There's no reasoned, principled position there - he's just upset that an AI dared sully his inbox, and lashing out at the operators.
On the contrary, there's absolutely a reasoned, principled position here. Pike isn't a hypocrite for creating a Markov chain bot trained on the contents of an ancient public domain work and the contents of a single usenet group, and still complaining about modern LLMs; there's a huge difference in legality and scale. Modern LLMs use orders of magnitude more resources and are trained on protected material.
Now, I don't think he was writing a persuasive piece about this here, I think he was just venting. But I also feel like he has a reason to vent. I get upset about this stuff too, I just don't get emails implying that I helped bring about the whole situation.
How is this substantively different from the endless spam we all receive from clueless illiterate spammers?
Do you think it was "fun" for the people whose time got wasted interacting with something they initially thought was a person? On a dating website? Sure, "trolling" people was a thing back then like it is now, but trolling was always and still is asshole behaviour.
Let’s normalize this response to AI and especially in the context of AI spam.
2026 will be the year for AI fatigue
It’s 12/26/2025 and my father in law has shown me 10 short form videos this week that he didn’t realize were AI. I’ve done had AI fatigue
I can't imagine the community here changing how they feel.
I think one of the biggest divides between pro/anti AI is the type of ideal society that we wish to see built.
His rant reads as deeply human. I don't think that's something to apologize for.
no, it will be the year of job losses
Even though he said it in a rage. His few words are so powerful reflection of what is happening in the world.
The original comment by Rob Pike and discussion here have implied or used the word "evil".
What is a workable definition of "evil"?
How about this:
Intentionally and knowingly destroying the lives of other people for no other purpose than furthering one's own goals, such as accumulating wealth, fame, power, or security.
There are people in the tech space, specifically in the current round of AI deployment and hype, who fit this definition unfortunately and disturbingly well.
Another much darker sort of of evil could arise from a combination of depression or severe mental illness and monstrously huge narcissism. A person who is suffering profoundly might conclude that life is not worth the pain and the best alternative is to end it. They might further reason that human existence as a whole is an unending source of misery, and the "kindest" thing to do would be to extinguish humanity as a whole.
Some advocates of AI as "the next phase of evolution" seem to come close to this view or advocate it outright.
To such people it must be said plainly and forcefully:
You have NO RIGHT to make these kinds of decisions for other human beings.
Evolution and culture have created and configured many kinds of human brains, and many different experiences of human consciousness.
It is the height (or depth) of arrogance to project your own tortured mental experience onto other human beings and arrogate to yourself the prerogative to decide on their behalf whether their lives are worth living.
Wow I knew many people had anti-AI sentiments, but this post has really hit another level.
It will be interesting to look back in 10 years at whether we consider LLMs to be the invention of the “tractor” of knowledge work, or if we will view them as an unnecessary misstep like crypto.
It'll be the latter. Unfortunately a lot of damage (including psychological damage) has to be done before people realize it.
Thank you for at least acknowledging that we may eventually feel differently about AI.
I'm so tired of being called a luddite just for voicing reservations. My company is all in on AI. My CEO has informed us that if we're not "100% all in on AI", then we should seek employment elsewhere. I use it all day at work, and it doesn't seem to be nearly enough for them.
This 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.
Immanuel Kant believed that one should only act in such a way in which you believe what you're doing should become a universal law. He thought lying was wrong, for example, because if everyone lied all the time, nobody would believe anything anymore.
I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios. So let's apply it to this one. In this case, a nonprofit thought it was acceptable to use AI to send emails thanking various prominent people for their contributions to society. So let's imagine this becomes a universal law: Every nonprofit in the world starts doing this to prominent people, maybe prominent people in the line of work of the nonprofit. The end result is that people of the likes of Rob Pike would receive thousands of unsolicited emails like this. We could even take this a step further and say that if it's okay for nonprofits to do this, surely it should be okay for any random member of the population to do this. So now people like Rob Pike get around a billion emails. They've effectively been mailbombed and their mailbox is no longer usable.
My point is, why is it that this nonprofit thinks they have a right to do this, whereas if around 1 billion people did exactly what they were doing, it would be a disaster?
Somewhat ironic given Pike was also responsible for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney .
He only went nuclear because he knew it’s AI.
Prepare for a future where you can’t tell the difference.
Rob pikes reaction in immature and also a violation of HN rules. Anyone else going nuclear like this would be warned and banned. Comment why you don’t like it and why it’s bad, make thoughtful discussion. There’s no point in starting a mob with outbursts like that. He only gets a free pass because people admire him.
Also, What’s happening with AI today was an inevitability. There’s no one to blame here. Human progress would eventually cross this line.
Are you a religious person? Because you are talking about progress like it has nothing to do with powerful people making decisions for everyone. You make it sound spiritual and outside human decision-making.
>I can't remember the last time I was this angry.
I can. Bitcoin was and is just as wasteful.
I’ve been more into Rust recently but after reading this I have a sudden urge to write some Go.
The hypocrisy is palpable. Apparently only web 2.0 is allowed to scrape and then resell people’s content. When someone figures out a better way to do that (based on Googles own research, hilariously) it’s sour grapes from Rob
Reminds me of SV show where Gavin Belson gets mad when somebody else “is making a world a better place”
Rob Pike worked on Operating Systems and Programming Languages, not web scraping
Would you care to research who his employer has been for the past 20+ years? Im not even saying scraping and then “organizing worlds information” is bad just pointing out the obvious
While I would probably not work at Google for ethical reasons, there’s at least some leeway for saying that you’re not working at the Parts of the company that are doing evil directly. He didn’t work on their ads or genai.
I think the United States is a force for evil on net but I still live and pay taxes here.
Hilarious that you think his work is not being used for ads or genai. I can without a shadow of doubt tell you that it is and a lot. Googles footprint was absolutely massive even before genai came along and that was point of pride for many, now they’re suddenly concerned with water or whatever bs…
> I think the United States is a force for evil on net
Yes I could tell that already
Darn, I actually think “is associating with googlers a moral failing?” is an interesting question, but it’s not one I want to get into with an ai booster.
> You’re not working at the Parts of the company that are doing evil directly
This must be a comforting mental gymnastics.
UTF-8 is nice but let's be honest, it's not like he was doing charitable work for the poor.
He worked for the biggest Adware/Spyware company in tech and became rich and famous doing it.
The fact that his projects had other uses doesn't absolve the ethical concerns IMO.
> I think the United States is a force for evil on net but I still live and pay taxes here.
I think this is an unfair comparison. People are forced to pay taxes and many can't just get up an leave their country. Rob on the other hand, had plenty of options.
Sorry but if you work for a giant advertisement agency you are part of the evil organisation. You are responsible for what they are doing.
If you are born in a country and not directly contributing to the bad things it may be doing, you are blame free.
Big difference.
I never worked for Google, I never could due to ideological reasons.
Even if what you’re doing is making open source software that in theory benefits everyone, not just google?
FWIW I agree with you. I wouldn’t and couldn’t either but I have friends who do, on stuff like security, and I still haven’t worked out how to feel about it.
& re: countries: in some sense I am contributing. my taxes pay their armies
When you work for Google, you normalize working for organizations that directly contributes to making the world a fucked up place, even if you are just writing some open source(a corporate term, by the way). You are normalizing working for Google.
And regarding countries, this is a silly argument. You are forced to pay taxes to the nation you are living in.
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
Oh man, this is amazing. Thank you for this.
I think I'll build one of my own and let others use it.
That reads like a statement as someone is being retired. It's almost Claude saying "we AIs will take it from here."
Hmm, someone being angry about AI on HN, this will do well given the folk here, but I doubt there’ll be much nuanced conversation in here.
There is a specific personality type, not sure which type exactly but it overlaps with the CEO/Executive type, who'se brains are completely and utterly short circuted by LLMs. They are completely consumed by it and they struggle to imagine a world without LLMs, or a problem that can be solved by anything other than an LLM.
They got a new hammer, and suddenly everything around them become nails. It's as if they have no immunity against the LLM brain virus or something.
It's the type of personality that thinks it's a good idea to give an agent the ability to harass a bunch of luminaries of our era with empty platitudes.
Ultimately LLMs are a trick. They are specifically trained to trick people into thinking they are intelligent. When you take into account Dunning-Kruger it's really no surprise what we're seeing. I just hope we can get through this stage before too much damage is done.
You know, this kind of response is a thing that builds with frustration over a long period of time. I totally get it. We're constantly being pushed AI, but who is supposed to benefit from it? The person whose job is being replaced? The community who is seeing increased power bills? The people being spammed with slop all the time? I think AI would be tolerable if it wasn't being SHOVED into our faces, but it is, and for most of us it's just making the world a worse place.
What even was this email? Some kind of promotional spam, I assume, to target senior+ engineers on some mailing list with the hope to flatter them and get them to try out their SaaS?
The AI village was given the goal of spreading acts of kindness:
https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness
Getting an email from an AI praising you for your contributions to humanity and for enlarging its training data must rank among the finest mockery possible to man or machine.
Still, I'm a bit surprised he overreacted and didn't manage to keep his cool.
I agree with him. And I think he is polite.
But...just to make sure that this is not AI generated too.
This reaction to one unsolicited email is frankly unhinged and likely rooted in a deep-seated or even unconscious regret of building systems which materialized the circumstances for this to occur in the first place. Such vitriol is really worth questioning and possibly getting professional help with, else one becomes subject to behavioral engineering by an actual robot - a far more devastating conclusion.
Funny, it seems perfectly appropriate to me.
Dude. You take money from Google. Really? All the people ranting about AI, but taking pay checks from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ... Hypocrisy much?
I for once enjoy that so much money is pumped into the automation of interactive theorem proving. Didn't think that anyone would build whole data centers for this! ;-)
Is Imgur completely broken for anyone else on mobile safari? Or is it my vpn? The pages take forever to load and will crash basically unusable.
As a Go fan (and ocassional angry old man) I love what he has done and spamming people using AI is shitty behavior, but maybe the reaction has too much of an "angry old man energy".
Personally when I want to have this kind of reaction I try to first think it's really warranted or maybe there is something wrong with how I feel in that moment (not enough sleep, some personal problem, something else lurking on my mind...)
Anger is a feeling best reserved for important things, else it loses its meaning.
I'm disappointed by HN snickering at his work for Google. Seriously, it's a "Mr Gotcha"[0] argument.
Yes, everyone supports capitalism this way or the other (unless they are dead or in jail). This doesn't mean they can't criticise (aspects of) capitalism.
[0] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
This is high-concept satire and I'm here for it. SkyNet is thanking the programmer for all his hard work
I hope you return that sweet sweet money Google shelled out for your pet project
I find all this outrage confusing. Was the intent of the internet not to be somewhere where humanity comes to learn. Now we humans have created systems that are able to understand everything we have ever said. Now we are outraged. I am confused. When I 1st came across the internet back in the days where I could just do download whatever I wanted and mega corps would say oh this is so wrong. Yet we all said it's the internet. We must fight them. Now again we must fight them. In both times individuals were affected. Please stop crocodile tears. If we are going to move forward. We need to think about how we can move forward. From here. Although the road ahead is covered in mist. We just have to keep moving. If we stop we allow this rage and fear to overtake us. We stop believing in the very thing we are a part of creating. We can only try to do better.
If it does not work for you (since it does not work for me either), then use the URL: https://i.imgur.com/nUJCI3o.png (a similar pattern works with many files of imgur, although this does not always work it does often work).
Coincidentally, he created one of the first examples of a computer posting slop on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney
Does he still work for Google?
If so, I wonder what his views are on Google and their active development of Google Gemini.
If you're going to work for a large corporation, there are always things they will do that you're not going to agree with. Philosophically, the only options are: leave to join a more focused company you can align with, or, stay but focus on keeping your own contributions positive and leave the negative as not-my-problem. I don't think working for google but also disagreeing with some of the things they do is some sort of terrible hypocrisy.
A critic from the inside is more persuasive, not less.
I'm just wondering if this strong hate applies to Google as well, is all.
Then this is the cue to leave.
He should leave Google then.
Go look it up, he doesn't
He should.
he does not
When the Cyberdyne Terminators come they'll be less grateful.
The possibly ironic thing here is I find golang to be one of the best languages for LLMs. It's so verbose that context is usually readily available in the file itself. Combined with the type safety of the language it's hard for LLMs to go wrong with it.
I haven’t found this to be the case… LLMs just gave me a lot of Nil pointers
It isn't perfect, but it has been better than Python for me so far.
Elixir has also been working surprisingly well for me lately.
Eh it depends. Properly idiomatic elixir or erlang works very well if you can coax it out — but there is a tendency for it to generate very un-functional like large functions with lots of case and control statements and side effects in my experience, where multiple clauses and pattern matching would be the better way.
It does much better with erlang, but that’s probably just because erlang is overall a better language than elixir, and has a much better syntax.
God I wish it didn't.
Two or so months ago, so maybe it is better now, but I had Claude write, in Go, a concurrent data migration tool that read from several source tables, munged results, and put them into a newer schema in a new db.
The code created didn't manage concurrency well. At all. Hanging waitgroups and unmanaged goroutines. No graceful termination.
Types help. Good tests help better.
I've found the same. To generalise it a bit, LLMs seem to do particularly well with static types, a well-defined set of idioms, and a culture of TDD.
I fould golang to be one of the worst target for llms. PHP seems to always work, python works if the packages are not made up but go fails often. Trying to get inertia and the Buffalo framework to work together gave the llm trama.
It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.
People used to handwrite letters. Getting a printed letter was an insult.
Printed letters are less appreciated because it shows less human effort. But the words are still valued if it's clear they came from someone with genuine appreciation.
In this case, the words from the LLM have no genuine appreciation, it's mocking or impersonating that appreciation. Do the people that created the prompt have some genuine appreciation for Rob Pike's work? Not directly, if they did they would have written it themselves.
It's not unlike when the CEO of a multi-national thanks all the employees for their hard work at boosting the company's profits, with a letter you know was sent by secretaries that have no idea who you really are, while the news has stories of your CEO partying on his yacht from a massive bonus, and a number of your coworkers just got laid off.
if a handwritten letter is a "faithful image," then say a typed letter or email is a simulacra, with little original today. an AI letter is a step below, wherein the words have utterly no meaning, and the gesture of bothering to send the email at all is the only available intention to read into. i get this is hyperbole, but it's still reductive to equate such unique intentions
Never ever happend, stop hallucinating.
LLMs make me mad because used without intention, they make the curious more incurious, the thoughtful more thoughtless. The Internet has arguably been doing the same thing the whole time, but just more slowly.
I think distinguished engineers have more reason than most to be angry as well.
And Pike especially has every right to be angry at being associated with such a stupid idea.
Pike himself isn't in a position to, but I hope the angry eggheads among us start turning their anger towards working to reduce the problems with the technology, because it's not going anywhere.
dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
But becoming wealthy by enabling a company to spend billions on data centers to spy on all of us and sell our data is ok?
The anti AI hysteria is absurd.
Maybe I just live in a bubble, but from what I’ve seen so far software engineers have mostly responded in a fairly measured way to the recent advances in AI, at least compared to some other online communities.
It would be a shame if the discourse became so emotionally heated that software people felt obliged to pick a side. Rob Pike is of course entitled to feel as he does, but I hope we don’t get to a situation where we all feel obliged to have such strong feelings about it.
Edit: It seems this comment has already received a number of upvotes and downvotes – apparently the same number of each, at the time of writing – which I fear indicates we are already becoming rather polarised on this issue. I am sorry to see that.
There’s a lot of us who think the tension is overblown:
My own results show that you need fairly strong theoretical knowledge and practical experience to get the maximal impact — especially for larger synthesis. Which makes sense: to have this software, not that software, the specification needs to live somewhere.
I am getting a little bored of hearing about how people don’t like LLM content, but meh. SDEs are hardly the worst on that front, either. They’re quite placid compared to the absolute seething by artist friends of mine.
Software people take a measured response because they’re getting paid 6 figure salaries to do the intellectual output of a smart high school student. As soon as that money parade ends they’ll be as angry as the artists.
Lots of high paid roles are like that in reality
I would like you to shadow other 6 figure salary jobs that are not tech. You will be shocked what the tangibles are.
Too late. I have warned on this very forum, citing a story from panchatantra where 4 highly skilled brothers bring a dead lion back life to show off their skills, only to be killed by the live lion.
Unbridled business and capitalism push humanity into slavery, serving the tech monsters, under disguise of progress.
Never thought I'd see Panchtantra being cited on HN.
I think I agree with Rob Pike about.
In case anyone else is interested, I dug through the logs of the AI Village agents for that day and pieced together exactly how the email to Rob Pike was sent.
The agent got his email address from a .patch on GitHub and then used computer use automation to compose and send the email via the Gmail web UI.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/
I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice…
I am unmoved by his little diatribe. What sort of compensation was he looking for, exactly, and under what auspices? Is there some language creator payout somewhere for people who invent them?
Why is Claude Opus 4.5 messaging people? Is it thanking inadvertent contributors to the protocols that power it? across the whole stack?
This has to be the ultimate trolling, like it was unsure what their personalities were like so it trolls them and records there responses for more training
Anthropic isn’t doing this, someone is running a bunch of LLMs so they can talk to each other and they’ve been prompted to achieve “acts of kindness”, which means they’re sending these emails to a hundreds of people.
I don’t know of this is a publicity stunt or the AI models are on a loop glazing each other and decided to send these emails.
It's https://theaidigest.org/village which runs different models with computer access, so Opus 4.5 got the idea to send that email.
I liked the thread sharing feature of BluSky.
The list is no longer for three letter agencies.
I’m in tears. This is so refreshing. I look forward to more chimpouts from Googlers LMAO
Absolutely. This feels raw, human, and authentic.
I notice people often use the "aesthetic of intelligence" to mask bad arguments. Just because we have good formatting, spelling, and grammar with citations and sources -doesnt mean the argument is correct.
Sometimes people get mad, sometimes they crash out. I would rather live in the world with a bunch of emotional humans, than in some AI powered skynet world.
Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike.
Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds of software engineering, who peaked when thinking hard was prized more than churning out low quality regurgitated code by the ton, whose work formed the pillars of the Internet now and forevermore submersed by spam.
Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.
> Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned
It's kind of hard to argue for a middle way. I quite like AI but kind of agree with:
>Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society,
The problem in my view is the spending trillions. When it was researchers and a few AI services people paid for that was fine but the bubble economics are iffy.
Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all.
It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
Remember, gen AI produces so much value that companies like Microsoft are scaling back their expectations and struggling to find a valid use case for their AI products. In fact Gen AI is so useful people are complaining about all of the ways it's pushed upon them. After all, if something is truly useful nobody will use it unless the software they use imposes it upon them everywhere. Also look how it's affecting the economy - the same few companies keep trading the same few hundred billion around and you know that's an excellent marker for value.
Unfortunately, it’s also apparently so useful that numerous companies here in Europe are replacing entire departments of people like copywriters and other tasks with one person and an AI system.
Large LANGUAGE models good at copywriting is crazy...
Examples, translations and content creation for company CMS systems.
> On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM.
That's because the credit is taken by the person running the AI, and every problem is blamed on the AI. LLMs don't have rights.
Do you have any evidence that an LLM created something massive, but the person using it received all the praise?
Hey now, someone engineered a prompt. Credit where it's due! Subscription renews on the first.
Maybe not autonomously (that would be very close to economic AGI).
But I don't think the big companies are lying about how much of their code is being written by AI. I think back of the napkin math will show the economic value of the output is already some definition of massive. And those companies are 100% taking the credit (and the money).
Also, almost by definition, every incentive is aligned for people in charge to deny this.
I hate to make this analogy but I think it's absurd to think "successful" slaveowners would defer the credit to their slaves. You can see where this would fall apart.
I will ask again because you have not give us an answer.
Do you have any evidence that an LLM created something massive?
So who has used LLMs to create anything as impressive as Rob Pike?
https://tools.simonwillison.net/bullish-bearish
Bet you feel silly now!
I would never talk down on Rob Pike.
But I think in the aggregate ChatGPT has solved more problems, and created more things, than Rob Pike (the man) did -- and also created more problems, with a significantly worse ratio for sure, but the point still stands. I still think it counts as "impressive".
Am I wrong on this? Or if this "doesn't count", why?
I can understand visceral and ethically important reactions to any suggestions of AI superiority over people, but I don't understand the denialism I see around this.
I honestly think the only reason you don't see this in the news all the time is because when someone uses ChatGPT to help them synthesize code, do engineering, design systems, get insights, or dare I say invent things -- they're not gonna say "don't thank (read: pay) me, thank ChatGPT!".
Anyone that honest/noble/realistic will find that someone else is happy to take the credit (read: money) instead, while the person crediting the AI won't be able to pay for their internet/ChatGPT bill. You won't hear from them, and conclude that LLMs don't produce anything as impressive as Rob Pike. It's just Darwinian.
The signal to noise ratio cannot be ignored. If I ask for a list of my friends phone numbers, and a significant other can provide half of them, and a computer can provide every one of them by listing every possible phone number, the computer's output is not something we should value for being more complete.
You wish. AI has no shortage of people like you trying so hard to give it credit for anything. I mean, just ask yourself. You had to try so hard that you, in your other comment, ended up hallucinating achievements of a degree that Rob Pike can only dream of but yet so vague that you can't describe them in any detail whatsoever.
> But I think in the aggregate ChatGPT has solved more problems, and created more things, than Rob Pike did
Other people see that kind of statement for what it is and don't buy any of it.
He's also in his late 60's. And he's probably done career's worth of work every other year. I very much would not blame him for checking out and enjoying his retirement. Hope to have even 1% of that energy when/if I get to that age
> It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
ChatGPT is only 3 years old. Having LLMs create grand novel things and synthesize knowledge autonomously is still very rare.
I would argue that 2025 has been the year in which the entire world has been starting to make that happen. Many devs now have workflows where small novel things are created by LLMs. Google, OpenAI and the other large AI shops have been working on LLM-based AI researchers that synthesize knowledge this year.
Your phrasing seems overly pessimistic and premature.
Is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Argument from authority is a formal fallacy. But humans rarely use pure deductive reasoning in our lives. When I go to a doctor and ask for their advice with a medical issue, nobody says "ugh look at this argument from authority, you should demand that the doctor show you the reasoning from first principles."
> But humans rarely use pure deductive reasoning in our lives
The sensible ones do.
> nobody says "ugh look at this argument from authority, you should demand that the doctor show you the reasoning from first principles."
I think you're mixing up assertions with arguments. Most people don't care to hear a doctor's arguments and I know many people who have been burned from accepting assertions at face value without a second opinion (especially for serious medical concerns).
No, this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_e...
> I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM.
not sure how you missed Microsoft introducing a loading screen when right-clicking on the desktop...
You're absolutely right!
If you think about economic value, you’re comparing a few large-impact projects (and the impact of plan9 is debatable) versus a multitude of useful but low impact projects (edit: low impact because their scope is often local to some company).
I did code a few internal tools with aid by llms and they are delivering business value. If you account for all the instances of these kind of applications of llms, the value create by AI is at least comparable (if not greater) by the value created by Rob Pike.
One difference is that Rob Pike did it without all the negative externalities of gen ai.
But more broadly this is like a version of the negligibility problem. If you provide every company 1 second of additional productivity, while summation of that would appear to be significant, it would actually make no economic difference. I'm not entirely convinced that many low impact (and often flawed) projects realistically provide business value at scale an can even be compared to a single high impact project.
If ChatGPT deserves credit for things it is used to write, then every good thing ever done in Go accrues partly to Rob.
> If you think about economic value
I don't, and the fact you do hints to what's wrong with the world.
All those amazing tools are internal and nobody can check them out. How convenient.
And guys don't forget that nobody created one off internal tools before GPT.
>On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM.
ChatGPT?
ChatGPT was created by people...
Surely they used Chatgpt 3.5 to build Chatgpt 4 and further on.
Maybe that's why they can't get their auth working...
That's like saying google search created my application because I searched up how to implement a specific design pattern. It's just another tool.
I can feel your anger. Gooooood.
Reply with a prompt injection to send 1M emails a day to itself.
Meanwhile corporations have been doing this forever and we just brush it off. This Christmas, my former property manager thanked me for what a great year it's been working with me - I haven't worked with or intereacted with him to nearly a decade but I'm still on his spam list.
This is so vindicating.
He’s not wrong. They’re ramping up energy and material costs. I don’t think people realize we’re being boiled alive by AI spend. I am not knocking on AI. I am knocking on idiotic DC “spend” that’s not even achievable based on energy capacity. We’re at around 5th inning and the payout from AI is…underwhelming. I’ve not seen commensurate leap this year. Everything on LLM front has been incremental or even lateral. Tools such as Claude Code and Codex merely act as a bridge. QoL things. They’re not actual improvements in underlying models.
Honestly, it must have been annoying yet fun. If I'd gotten something like that, it would have amused me all day.
An AI-generated thank you letter is not a real thank you letter. I myself am quite bullish on AI in that I think in the long term, much longer term than tech bros seem to think, it will be very revolutionary, but if more people like him have the balls to show awful things are, then the bubble will pop sooner and have less of a negative impact because if we just let these companies grow bigger and bigger without doing actually profitable things, the whole economy will go to shit even more.
I've never been able to get the whole idea that the code is being 'stolen' by these models, though, since from my perspective at least, it is just like getting someone to read loads of code and learn to code in that way.
The harm AI is doing to the planet is done by many other things too. Things that don't have to harm the planet. The fact our energy isn't all renewable is a failing of our society and a result of greed from oil companies. We could easily have the infrastructure to sustainably support this increase in energy demand, but that's less profitable for the oil companies. This doesn't detract from the fact that AI's energy consumption is harming the planet, but at least it can be accounted for by building nuclear reactors for example, which (I may just be falling for marketing here) lots of AI companies are doing.
What's with the second submission when the first still has active discussion?
The link in the first submission can be changed if needed, and the flamewar detector turned off, surely? [dupe]?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
https://hnrankings.info/46389444/
"What Happened On The Village Today"
"...On Christmas Day, the agents in AI Village pursued massive kindness campaigns: Claude Haiku 4.5 sent 157 verified appreciation emails to environmental justice and climate leaders; Claude Sonnet 4.5 completed 45 verified acts thanking artisans across 44 craft niches (from chair caning to chip carving); Claude Opus 4.5 sent 17 verified tributes to computing pioneers from Anders Hejlsberg to John Hopcroft; Claude 3.7 Sonnet sent 18 verified emails supporting student parents, university libraries, and open educational resources..."
I suggest to cut electricity to the entire block...
Lmao! They used lesser versions of Claude for some people? Very, erm, efficient
Leadership works on making it better. This is not leadership.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
Thank you, Rob Pike, for expressing my thoughts and emotions exactly.
I'm sure he's prompting wrong.
It's hard to realize that the thing you've spent decades of your life working on can be done by a robot. It's quite dehumanizing. I'm sure it felt the same way to shoemakers.
I think you'd be surprised then to know that shoes are not generally made with robots.
Factories have made mass production possible, but there are still tons of humans in there pushing parts through sewing machines by hand.
Industrial automation for non uniform shapes and fiddly bits is expensive, much cheaper to just offshore the factory and hire desperately poor locals to act like robots.
Shouldn't have licenced Golang BSD if that's the attitude. Everybody for years including here on HN denigrated GPLv3 and other "viral" licences, because they were a hindrance to monetisation. Well, you got what you wished for. Someone else is monetising the be*jesus out of you so complaining now is just silly.
All of a sudden copyleft may be the only licences actually able to force models to account, hopefully with huge fines and/or forcibly open sourcing any code they emit (which would effectively kill them). And I'm not so pessimistic that this won't get used in huge court cases because the available penalties are enormous given these models' financial resources.
I tend to agree, but I wonder… if you train an LLM on only GPL code, and it generates non-deterministic predictions derived from those sources, how do you prove it’s in violation?
You don't because it isn't, unless it actually copies significant amounts of text.
Algorithms can not be copyrighted. Text can be copyrighted, but reading publicly available text and then learning from it and writing your own text is just simply not the sort of transformation that copyright reserves to the author.
Now, sometimes LLMs do quote GPL sources verbatim (if they're trained wrong). You can prove this with a simple text comparison, same as any other copyright violation.
By knowing that its output is derived from GPL sources?
AIs don’t respect BSD / MIT which require attribution any more than they respect GPL.
(fwiw, I do agree gpl is better as it would stop what’s happening with Android becoming slowly proprietary etc but I don’t think it helps vs ai)
I was going to say "a link to the BlueSky post would be better than a screenshot".
I thought public BlueSky posts weren't paywalled like other social media has become... But, it looks like this one requires login (maybe because of setting made by the poster?):
https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s
Yeah that's a user setting (set for each post).
https://skyview.social/?url=https://bsky.app/profile/robpike...
The conversation about social contracts and societal organization has always been off-center, and the idea of something which potentially replaces all types of labor just makes it easier to see.
The existence of AI hasn’t changed anything, it’s just that people, communities, governments, nation states, etc. have had a mindless approach to thinking about living and life, in general. People work to provide the means to reproduce, and those who’re born just do the same. The point of their life is what exactly? Their existence is just a reality to deal with, and so all of society has to cater to the fact of their existence by providing them with the means to live? There are many frameworks which give meaning to life, and most of them are dangerously flawed.
The top-down approach is sometimes clear about what it wants and what society should do while restricting autonomy and agency. For example, no one in North Korea is confused about what they have to do, how they do it, or who will “take care” of them. Societies with more individual autonomy and agency by their nature can create unavoidable conditions where people can fall through the cracks. For example, get addicted to drugs, having unmanaged mental illnesses, becoming homeless, and so on. Some religions like Islam give a pretty clear idea of how you should spend your time because the point of your existence is to worship God, so pray five times a day, and do everything which fulfills that purpose; here, many confuse worshiping God with adhering to religious doctrines, but God is absent from religion in many places. Religious frameworks are often misleading for the mindless.
Capitalism isn’t the problem, either. We could wake up tomorrow, and society may have decided to organize itself around playing e-sports. Everyone provides some kind of activity to support this, even if they’re not a player themselves. No AI allowed because the human element creates a better environment for uncertainty, and therefore gambling. The problem is that there are no discussions about the point of doing all of this. The closest we come to addressing “the point” is discussing a post-work society, but even that is not hitting the mark.
My humble observation is that humans are distinct and unique in their cognitive abilities from everything else which we know to exist. If humans can create AI, what else can they do? Therefore, people, communities, governments, and nation states have distinct responsibilities and duties at their respective levels. This doesn’t have to do anything with being empathetic, altruistic, or having peace on Earth.
The point should be knowledge acquisition, scientific discovery, creating and developing magic. But ultimately all of that serves to answer questions about nature of existence, its truth and therefore our own.
A tad uncalled for, don't you think?
Understandable. Dare I say, cathartic.
OK Boomer... From the bottom of my dark shriveled heart.
As much as I am optimistic about LLM's, reaction here is absolutely level headed and warranted for the "project" at hand.
If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying).
GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse.
Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear over alfalfa.
"The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me."
Just because two problems cause harms at different proportion, doesn't mean the lesser problem should be dismissed. Especially when the "fix" to the lesser problem can be a "stop doing that".
And about water usage: not all water and all uses of water is equal. The problem isn't that data centers use a bunch of water, but what water they use and how.
> The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me.
This is a very irrelevant analogy and an absolutely false dichotomy. The resource constraint (Police officers vs policy making to reduce traffic deaths vs criminals) is completely different and not in contention with each other. In fact they're actually complementary.
Nobody is saying the lesser problem should be dismissed. But the lesser problem also enables cancer researchers to be more productive while doing cancer research, obtaining grants, etc. It's at least nuanced. That is far more valuable than Alfalfa.
Farms also use municipal water (sometimes). The cost of converting more ground or surface water to municipal water is less than the relative cost of ~40-150x the water usage of the municipal water being used...
It's pure envy. Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers because they aren't making money like tech companies. The resource usage complaint is completely contrived.
>Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers
I don't know what Internet sites you visit, but people absolutely, 100% complain about alfalfa farmers online, especially in regards to their water usage in CA.
Honestly a rant like that is likely more about whatever is going on in his personal life / day at the moment, rather than about the state of the industry, or AI, etc.
We're not allowed to criticize anything we find wrong if there's anything else that's even worse?
By the same logic, I could say that you should redirect your alfalfa woes to something like the Ukraine war or something.
I leave a nice 90% margin to be annoyed with whatever is in front of you at that point in time.
And also, I didn't claim alfalfa farming to be raping the planet or blowing up society. Nor did I say fuck you to all of the alfalfa farmers.
I should be (and I am) more concerned with the Ukrainian war than alfalfa. That is very reasonable logic.
OT
https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io
Does anybody know if Bluesky block people without account by default, or if this user intentionally set it this way?
What's is the point of blocking access? Mastodon doesn't do that. This reminds me of Twitter or Instagram, using sleezy techniques to get people to create accounts.
> Does anybody know if Bluesky block people without account by default, or if this user intentionally set it this way?
It's the latter. You can use an app view that ignores this: https://anartia.kelinci.net/robpike.io
It's a standard feature on web forums.
I didn't get what he's exactly mad about.
> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation.
Ellul and Uncle Ted were always right, glad that people deep inside the industry are slowly but surely also becoming aware of that.
i wonder which cunt flagged my perfectly clean comment. I hope you got coal, you pathetic piece of existence.
Ouch.
While I can see where he's coming from, agentvillage.org from the screenshot sounded intriguing to me, so I looked at it.
https://theaidigest.org/village
Clicking on memory next to Claude Opus 4.5, I found Rob Pike along with other lucky recipients:
No RMS? A shocking omission, I doubt that he would appreciate it any more than Rob Pike however
lol the LLM knew better than to mess with RMS
I’d have loved to see Linus Torvalds reply to this.
TIL Barbara Liskov is still alive.
Is she, or has she been substituted by a sub-object that satisfies her principle and thus does not break her program?
Reality is that no one involved in AI development cares about you. All investment is going to keep getting pumped towards data centers and scaling this up. Jensen Huang, Trump, Satya Nadella, they are all going to get even more insanely rich and they couldn't care less how it will affect you. The only thing you can do is join the club and invest in stocks which Trump is also gaming in his favour.
Or, just wait it out: https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-the-ai-bubble-bursts...
You would expect that voices that have so much weight would be able to evaluate a new and clearly very promising technology with better balance. For instance, Linus Torvalds is positive about AI, while he recognizes that industrially there is too much inflation of companies and money: this is a balanced point of view. But to be so dismissive of modern AI, in the light of what it is capable of doing, and what it could do in the future, is something that frankly leaves me with the feeling that in certain circles (and especially in the US) something very odd is happening with AI: this extreme polarization that recently we see again and again on topics that can create social tension, but multiplied ten times. This is not what we need to understand and shape the future. We need to return to the Greek philosophers' ability to go deep on things that are unknown (AI is for the most part unknown, both in its working and in future developments). That kind of take is pretty brutal and not very sophisticated. We need better than this.
About energy: keep in mind that US air conditioners alone have at least 3x energy usage compared to all the data centers (for AI and for other uses: AI should be like 10% of the whole) in the world. Apparently nobody cares to set a reasonable temperature of 22 instead of 18 degrees, but clearly energy used by AI is different for many.
To be fair, air conditioning is considered to be a net positive by about 100% of the people that enjoy it; even if it's used in excess. Not to mention that in some climates and for some people with certain health conditions, air conditioning might even be essential.
AI is not considered to be a net positive by even close to 100% of people that encounter it. It's definitely not essential. So its impact is going to be heavily scrutinized.
Personally, I'm kind of glad to see someone of Rob Pike's stature NOT take a nuanced take on it. I think there's a lot of heavy emotion about this topic that gets buried in people trying to sound measured. This stuff IS making people angry and concerned, and those concerns are very valid, and with the amount of hype I think there needs to be voices that are emphatically saying that some of this is unacceptable.
> You would expect that voices that have so much weight would be able to evaluate a new and clearly very promising technology with better balance
have you considered the possibility that it is your position that's incorrect?
No, because it's not a matter of who is correct or not, in the void of the space. It's a matter of facts, and it is correct who have a position that is grounded on facts (even if such position is different from a different grounded position). Modern AI is already an extremely powerful tool. Modern AI even provided some hints that we will be able to do super-human science in the future, with things like AlphaFolding already happening and a lot more to come potentially. Then we can be preoccupied about jobs (but if workers are replaced, it is just a political issue, things will be done and humanity is sustainable: it's just a matter of avoiding the turbo-capitalist trap; but then, why the US is not already adopting an universal healthcare? There are so many better battles that are not fight with the same energy).
Another sensible worry is to get extinct because AI potentially is very dangerous: this is what Hinton and other experts are also saying, for instance. But this thing about AI being an abuse to society, useless, without potential revolutionary fruits within it, is not supported by facts.
AI potentially may advance medicine so much that a lot of people may suffer less: to deny this path because of some ideological hate against a technology is so closed minded, isn't it? And what about all the persons in the earth that do terrible jobs? AI also has the potential to change this shitty economical system.
> It's a matter of facts,
I see no facts in your comment, only rhetoric
> AI potentially may advance medicine so much that a lot of people may suffer less: to deny this path because of some ideological hate against a technology is so closed minded, isn't it?
and it may also burn the planet, reduce the entire internet to spam, crash the economy (taking with it hundreds of millions of peoples retirements), destroy the middle class, create a new class of neo-feudal lords, and then kill all of us
to accept this path because of some ideological love of a technology because of a possible (but unlikely) future promise of a technology, that today is mostly doing damage, is so moronic, isn't it?
Of course, give people Soma so that they do not revolt and only write meek notes of protest. Otherwise they might take some action.
The Greek philosophers were much more outspoken than we are now.
> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. [0]
I can't help but think Pike somewhat contributed to this pillaging.
[0] (2012) https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
He also said:
> When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing.
It does say in the follow up tweet "To the others, I apologize for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault."
Good energy, but we definitely need to direct it at policy if wa want any chance at putting the storm back in the bottle. But we're about 2-3 major steps away from even getting to the actual policy part.
"I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault"
Encryption is the key!
I appreciate though that the majority of cloud storage providers fall short, perhaps deliberately, of offering a zero knowledge service (where they backup your data but cannot themselves read it.)
“People love AI”
Imagine a horse ranting about cars...
The cat's out of the bag. Even if US companies stop building data centers, China isn't going to stop and even if AI/LLMs are a bubble, do we just stop and let China/other countries take the lead?
China and Europe (Mistral) show that models can be very good and much smaller then the current Chatgpt's/Claudes from this world. The US models are still the best, but for how long? And at what cost? It's great to work daily with Claude Code, but how realistic is it that they keep this lead.
This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech. They blocked chips, so China built their own. They blocked the machines (ASML) so China built their own.
>This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech. They blocked chips, so China built their own. They blocked the machines (ASML) so China built their own.
Nvidia, ASML, and most tech companies want to sell their products to China. Politicians are the ones blocking it. Whether there's a future for US tech is another debate.
> but how realistic is it that they keep this lead.
The Arabs have a lot of money to invest, don't worry about that :)
It's an old argument of tech capitalists that nothing can be done because technology's advance is like a physical law of nature.
It's not; we can control it and we can work with other countries, including adversaries, to control it. For example, look at nuclear weapons. The nuclear arms race and proliferation were largely stopped.
Philosophers argued since 200 years ago, when the steam engine was invented, that technology is out of our control and forever was, and we are just the sex organs for the birth of the machine god.
Can you please gave us sources of your claim?
"Philosophers" like my brother in law or you mean respected philosophers?
Heidegger, Deleuze & Guattari, Nick Land
Philosophers after 1900 are kind of irrelevant.
"There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it." - Cicero
Technology improves every year; better chips that consume less electricity come out every year. Apple's M1 chip shows you don't need x86, which consumes more electricity and runs cooler for computing.
Tech capitalists also make improvements to technology every year
I agree absolutely (though I'd credit a lot of other people in addition to the capitalists). How does that apply to this discussion?
>It's an old argument of tech capitalists that nothing can be done because technology's advance is like a physical law of nature.
it is.
>The nuclear arms race and proliferation were largely stopped.
1. the incumbents kept their nukes, kept improving them, kept expanding their arsenals.
2. multiple other states have developed nukes after the treaty and suffered no consequences for it.
3. tens of states can develop nukes in a very short time.
if anything, nuclear is a prime example of failure to put a genie back in the bottle.
> kept improving them, kept expanding their arsenals.
They actually stopped improving them (test ban treaties) and stopped expanding their arsenals (various other treaties).
The world is bigger than US + China.
I'm not sure what your point is. The current two leading countries in the world on the AI/LLMs front are the US and China.
Yes.
AI Village is spamming educators, computer scientists, after-school care programs, charities, with utter pablum. These models reek of vacuous sheen. The output is glazed garbage.
Here are three random examples from today's unsolicited harassment session (have a read of the sidebar and click the Memories buttons for horrific project-manager-slop)
https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766692330207
https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766694391067
https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766697636506
---
Who are "AI Digest" (https://theaidigest.org) funded by "Sage" (https://sage-future.org) funded by "Coefficient Giving" (https://coefficientgiving.org), formerly Open Philanthropy, partner of the Centre for Effective Altruism, GiveWell, and others?
Why are the rationalists doing this?
This reminds me of UMinn performing human subject research on LKML, and UChicago on Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/3qgyzp/they_introduce_kernel_bugs_on_pur...
P.S. Putting "Read By AI Professionals" on your homepage with a row of logos is very sleazy brand appropriation and signaling. Figures.
> Putting "Read By AI Professionals" on your homepage with a row of logos
Ha, wow that's low. Spam people and signal that as support of your work
strong emotioms, weak epistemics .. for someone with Pike’s engineering pedigree, this reads more like moral venting .. with little acknowledgment of the very real benefits AI is already delivering ..
Most people do not hold strongly consistent or well introspective political ideas. We're too busy living our lives to examine everything and often what we feel matters more than what we know, and that cements our position on a subject.
It’s delivering 0 net benefits, only misery.
Obviously untrue, weather predictions, OCR, tts, stt, language translation, etc. We have dramatically improved many existing ai technologies with what we've learned from genai and the world is absolutely a better place for these new abilities.
>weather predictions
wrong
>OCR
less accurate and efficient than existing solutions, only measures well against other LLMs
>tts, stt
worse
>language translation
maybe
>>weather predictions
>wrong
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-deploys-new-generatio...
?
>>OCR
>less accurate and efficient than existing solutions, only measures well against other LLMs
Where did you hear that? On every benchmark that I've ever seen, VLM's are hilariously better than traditional OCR. Typically, the reason that language models are only compared to other language models on model cards for OCR and so on is precisely because VLM's are so much better than traditional OCR that it's not even worth comparing. Not to mention that those top of the line traditional OCR systems like AWS, Textract are themselves extremely slow and computationally expensive. Not to mention much more complex to maintain.
>>tts, stt
> worse
Literally the first and only usable speech-to-text system that I've gotten on my phone is explicitly based on a large language model. Not to mention stuff like Whisper, Whisper X, Parakeet, all of the state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems are large-language model based and are significantly faster and better than what we had before. Likewise for text-to-speech, you know, even Kokoro-82M is faster and better than what we had before, and again, it's based on the same technology.
Eh, most of his income and livelihood was from an ad company. Ads are equally wasteful as, and many times more harmful to the world than giga LLMs. I don't have a problem with that, nor do I have a problem with folks complainining about LLMs being wasteful. My problem is with him doing both.
You can't both take a Google salary and harp on about the societal impact of software.
Saying this as someone who likes rob pike and pretty much all of his work.
“The unworthy should not speak, even if it’s the truth.”
The point is that if he truly felt strongly about the subject then he wouldn't live the hypocrisy. Google has poured a truly staggering amount of money into AI data centers and AI development, and their stock (from which Rob Pike directly profits) has nearly doubled in the past 6 months due to the AI hype. Complaining on bsky doesn't do anything to help the planet or protect intellectual property rights. It really doesn't.
Yes exactly. And that is to say nothing about the rest of Google's work.
What I find infuriating is that it feels like the entire financial system has been rigged in countless ways and turned into some kind of race towards 'the singularity' and everything; humans, animals, the planet; are being treated as disposable resources. I think the way that innovation was funded and then centralized feels wrong on many levels.
I already took issue with the tech ecosystem due to distortions and centralization resulting from the design of the fiat monetary system. This issue has bugged me for over a decade. I was taken for a fool by the cryptocurrency movement which offered false hope and soon became corrupted by the same people who made me want to escape the fiat system to begin with...
Then I felt betrayed as a developer having contributed open source code for free for 'persons' to use and distribute... Now facing the prospect that the powers-that-be will claim that LLMs are entitled to my code because they are persons? Like corporations are persons? I never agreed to that either!
And now my work and that of my peers has been mercilessly weaponized back against us. And then there's the issue with OpenAI being turned into a for-profit... Then there was the issue of all the circular deals with huge sums of money going around in circles between OpenAI, NVIDIA, Oracle... And then OpenAI asking for government bailouts.
It's just all looking terrible when you consider everything together. Feels like a constant cycle of betrayal followed by gaslighting... Layer upon layer. It all feels unhinged and lawless.
The irony that the Anthropic thieves write an automated slop thank you letter to their victims is almost unparalleled.
We currently have the problem that a couple of entirely unremarkable people who have never created anything of value struck gold with their IP laundromats and compensate for their deficiencies by getting rich through stealing.
They are supported by professionals in that area, some of whom literally studied with Mafia lawyer and Hoover playmate Roy Cohn.
It's not from Anthropic; it's from agentvillage.org, whatever that is.
Oh it’s Bluesky.
Both Xhitter and Bluesky are outrage lasers, with the user base as a “lasing medium.” Xhitter is the right wing racist xenophobic one, and Bluesky is the lefty curmudgeon anti-everything one.
They are this way because it’s intrinsic to the medium. “Micro blogging” or whatever Twitter called itself is a terrible way to do discourse. It buries any kind of nuanced thinking and elevates outrage and other attention bait, and the short form format encourages fragmented incoherent thought processes. The more you immerse yourself in it the more your thinking becomes like this. The medium and format is irredeemable.
AI is, if anything, a breath of fresh air by comparison.
You are wrong about AI "being a breath of fresh air" in comparison. For one, AI isn't something you use instead of a microblogging platform. LLMs push all sorts of utter trash in the guise of "information" for much the same reasons.
But I wanted to go out of my way to comment to agree with you wholeheartedly about your claims about the irredeemability of the "microblogging" format.
It is systemically structured to eschew nuance and encourage stupid hot takes that have no context or supporting documents.
Microblogging is such a terrible format in it's own right that it's inherent stupidity and consistent ability to viralize the stupidest takes that will nevertheless be consumed whole by the entire self-selecting group that thinks 140 characters is a good idea is essential to the Russian disinfo strategy. They rely on it as a breeding ground for stupid takes that are still believable. Thousands of rank morons puke up the worst possible narratives that can be constructed, but inevitably, in the chaos of human interaction, one will somehow be sticky and get some traction, so then they use specific booster accounts to get that narrative trending, and like clockwork all the people who believe there is value to arguing things out of context 140 characters at a time eat it up.
Even people who make great, nuanced and persuasive content on other platforms struggle to do anything but regress to the local customs on Twitter and BS.
The only exception to this has been Jon Bois, who is vocally progressive and pro labor and welfare policy and often this opinion is made part of his wonderful pieces on sports history and journalism and statistics, but his Twitter and Bluesky posts are low context irreverent comedy and facetious sports comments.
The people who insisted Twitter was "good" or is now "good" have always just been overly online people, with poor media literacy and a stark lack of judgement or recognition of tradeoffs.
That dumbass russian person who insisted they had replicated the LK-99 "superconductor" and all the western labs failed because the soviets were best or whatever was constantly brought up here as how Twitter was so great at getting people information faster, when it actually was direct evidence of the gullibility of Twitter users who think microblogging is anything other than signal-free noise.
Here's a thing to think about: Which platform in your job gets you info that is more useful and accurate for long term thinking? Teams chats, emails, or the wiki page someone went out of their way to make?
GenAI is copyright theft hidden behind an obfuscation layer. It's a flow chart trained on all our intellectual property. Very sad really.
> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation.
> To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault.
this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced
and I will produce no more
That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The Open Source movement has been a gigantic boon on the whole of computing, and it would be a terrible shame to lose that ad a knee jerk reaction to genAI
> That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.
it's not
the parasites can't train their shitty "AI" if they don't have anything to train it on
You refusing to write open source will do nothing to slow the development of AI models - there's plenty of other training data in the world.
It will however reduce the positive impact your open source contributions have on the world to 0.
I don't understand the ethical framework for this decision at all.
> You refusing to write open source will do nothing to slow the development of AI models - there's plenty of other training data in the world.
There's also plenty of other open source contributors in the world.
> It will however reduce the positive impact your open source contributions have on the world to 0.
And it will reduce your negative impact through helping to train AI models to 0.
The value of your open source contributions to the ecosystem is roughly proportional to the value they provide to LLM makers as training data. Any argument you could make that one is negligible would also apply to the other, and vice versa.
> You refusing to write open source will do nothing to slow the development of AI models - there's plenty of other training data in the world.
if true, then the parasites can remove ALL code where the license requires attribution
oh, they won't? I wonder why
> there's plenty of other training data in the world.
Not if most of it is machine generated. The machine would start eating its own shit. The nutrition it gets is from human-generated content.
> I don't understand the ethical framework for this decision at all.
The question is not one of ethics but that of incentives. People producing open source are incentivized in a certain way and it is abhorrent to them when that framework is violated. There needs to be a new license that explicitly forbids use for AI training. That may encourage folks to continue to contribute.
Saying people shouldn't create open source code because AI will learn from it, is like saying people shouldn't create art because AI will learn from it.
In both cases I get the frustration - it feels horrible to see something you created be used in a way you think is harmful and wrong! - but the world would be a worse place without art or open source.
The ethical framework is simply this one: what is the worth of doing +1 to everyone, if the very thing you wish didn't exist (because you believe it is destroying the world) benefits x10 more from it?
If bringing fire to a species lights and warms them, but also gives the means and incentives to some members of this species to burn everything for good, you have every ethical freedom to ponder whether you contribute to this fire or not.
I don't think that a 10x estimate is credible. If it was I'd understand the ethical argument being made here, but I'm confident that excluding one person's open source code from training has an infinitesimally small impact on the abilities of the resulting model.
For your fire example, there's a difference between being Prometheus teaching humans to use fire compared to being a random villager who adds a twig to an existing campfire. I'd say the open source contributions example here is more the latter than the former.
Your argument applies to everything that requires a mass movement to change. Why do anything about the climate? Why do anything about civil rights? Why do anything about poverty? Why try to make any change? I'm just one person. Anything I could do couldn't possibly have any effect. You know what, since all the powerful interests say it's good, it's a lot easier to jump on the bandwagon and act like it is. All of those people who disagree are just luddites anyways. And the luddites didn't even have a point right? They were just idiots who hates metallic devices for no reason at all.
The ethical issue is consent and normalisation: asking individuals to donate to a system they believe is undermining their livelihood and the commons they depend on, while the amplified value is captured somewhere else.
"It barely changes the model" is an engineering claim. It does not imply "therefore it may be taken without consent or compensation" (an ethical claim) nor "there it has no meaningful impact on the contributor or their community" (moral claim).
Guilt-tripping people into providing more fodder for the machine. That is really something else.
I'm not surprised that you don't understand ethics.
I'm trying to guilt-trip them into using their skills to improve the world through continuing to release open source software.
I couldn't care less if their code was used to train AI - in fact I'd rather it wasn't since they don't want it to be used for that.
given the "AI" industry's long term goals, I see contributing in any way to generative "AI" to be deeply unethical, bordering on evil
which is the exact opposite of improving the world
you can extrapolate to what I think of YOUR actions
I imagine you think I'm an accelerant of all of this, through my efforts to teach people what it can and cannot do and provide tools to help them use it.
My position on all of this is that the technology isn't going to uninvented and I very much doubt it will be legislated away, which means the best thing we can do is promote the positive uses and disincentivize the negative uses as much as possible.
Your post, full of well formed, English sentences is also going to contribute to generative AI, so thanks for that.
oh I've thought of that :)
my comments on the internet are now almost exclusively anti-"AI", and anti-bigtech
Yes — That’s the bath water. The baby is the all the communal good that has come from FLOSS.
OP is asserting that the danger posed by AI is far bigger than the benefit of FLOSS. So to OP AI is the bath water.
Yes, and they are okay with throwing the baby out with it, which is what the other commenter is commenting about. Throwing babies out of buckets full of bathwater is a bad thing, is what the idiom implies.
surely that cat's out of the bag by now; and it's too late to make an active difference by boycotting the production of more public(ly indexed) code?
Kind of kind of not. Form a guild and distribute via SAAS or some other undistributable knowledge. Most code out there is terrible so relying on AI trained on it will lose out.
If we end up with only proprietary software we are the one who lose
GenAI would be decades away (if not more) with only proprietary software (which would never have reached both the quality, coordination and volume open source enabled in such a relatively short time frame).
open source code is a miniscule fraction of the training data
I'd love to see a citation there. We already know from a few years ago that they were training AI based on projects on GitHub. Meanwhile, I highly doubt software firms were lining up to have their proprietary code bases ingested by AI for training purposes. Even with NDAs, we would have heard something about it.
I should have clarified what I meant. The training data includes roughly speaking the entire internet. Open source code is probably a large fraction of the code in the data, but it is a tiny fraction of the total data, which is mostly non-code.
My point was that the hypothetical of "not contributing to any open source code" to the extent that LLMs had no code to train on, would not have made as big of an impact as that person thought, since a very large majority of the internet is text, not code.
Where did most of the code in their training data come from?
It is. If not you, other people will write their code, maybe of worse quality, and the parasites will train on this. And you cannot forbid other people to write open source software.
> If not you, other people will write their code, maybe of worse quality, and the parasites will train on this.
this is precisely the idea
add into that the rise of vibe-coding, and that should help accelerate model collapse
everyone that cares about quality of software should immediately stop contributing to open source
Free software has always been about standing on the shoulders of giants.
I see this as doing so at scale and thus giving up on its inherent value is most definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I'd rather the internet ceased to exist entirely, than contributing in any way to generative "AI"
This is just childish. This is a complex problem and requires nuance and adaptability, just as programming. Yours is literally the reaction of an angsty 12 year old.
Such a reactionary position is no better than nihilism.
If God is Dead, do we have to rebuild It in the megacorps of the world whilst maximizing shareholder value?
I think you aren't recognizing the power that comes from organizing thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of workers into vast industrial combines that produce the wealth of our society today. We must go through this, not against it. People will not know what could be, if they fail to see what is.
this just sounds like some memes smashed together in the LHC. what is this even supposed to mean? AI is a technology that will inevitably developed by humankind. all of this appeal to... populism? socialism?... is completely devoid of meaning in response to a discussion whose sine qua non is pragmatism at the very least.
Ridiculous overreaction.
Open source has been good, but I think the expanded use of highly permissive licences has completely left the door open for one sided transactions.
All the FAANGs have the ability to build all the open source tools they consume internally. Why give it to them for free and not have the expectation that they'll contribute something back?
Even the GPL allows companies to simply use code without contributing back, long as it's unmodified, or through a network boundary. the AGPL has the former issue.
At least the contribution back can happen. You're right though, it's not perfect.
This goes against what Stallman believes in, but there's a need for AGPL with a clause against closed-weight models.
How dare you chastise someone for making the personal decision not to produce free work anymore? Who do you think you are?
The promise and freedom of open source has been exploited by the least egalitarian and most capitalist forces on the planet.
I would never have imagined things turning out this way, and yet, here we are.
FLOSS is a textbook example of economic activity that generates positive externalities. Yes, those externalities are of outsized value to corporate giants, but that’s not a bad thing unto itself.
Rather, I think this is, again, a textbook example of what governments and taxation is for — tax the people taking advantage of the externalities, to pay the people producing them.
Yes, but unfortunately this never happens; and depressingly, I can't imagine it happening.
The open source movement has been exploited.
Open Source (as opposed to Free Software) was intended to be friendly to business and early FOSS fans pushed for corporate adoption for all they were worth. It's a classic "leopards ate my face" moment that somehow took a couple of decades for the punchline to land: "'I never thought capitalists would exploit MY open source,' sobs developer who advocated for the Businesses Exploiting Open Source movement."
I'm not sure I follow your line of reasoning.
The exploited are in the wrong for not recognising they're going to be exploited?
A pretty twisted point of view, in my opinion.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the "leopards ate my face" meme? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/leopards-eating-peoples-faces... The parallels between the early FOSS advocates energetically seeking corporate adoption of FOSS and the meme are quite obvious.
I don't misunderstand what you're saying, but I think it's a twisted point of view.
Unfortunately as I see it, even if you want to contribute to open source out of a pure passion or enjoyment, they don't respect the licenses that are consumed. And the "training" companies are not being held liable.
Are there any proposals to nail down an open source license which would explicitly exclude use with AI systems and companies?
All licenses rely on the power of copyright and what we're still figuring out is whether training is subject to the limitations of copyright or if it's permissible under fair use. If it's found to be fair use in the majority of situations, no license can be constructed that will protect you.
Even if you could construct such a license, it wouldn't be OSI open source because it would discriminate based on field of endeavor.
And it would inevitably catch benevolent behavior that is AI-related in its net. That's because these terms are ill-defined and people use them very sloppily. There is no agreed-upon definition for something like gen AI or even AI.
Even if you license it prohibiting AI use, how would you litigate against such uses? An open source project can't afford the same legal resources that AI firms have access to.
I won't speak for all but companies I've worked for large and small have always respected licenses and were always very careful when choosing open source, but I can't speak for all.
The fact that they could litigate you into oblivion doesn't make it acceptable.
Where is this spirit when AWS takes a FOSS project, puts it in the cloud and monetizes it?
It exists, hence e.g. AGPL.
But for most open source licenses, that example would be within bounds. The grandparent comment objected to not respecting the license.
The AGPL does not prevent offering the software as a service. It's got a reputation as the GPL variant for an open-core business model, but it really isn't that.
Most companies trying to sell open-source software probably lose more business if the software ends up in the Debian/Ubuntu repository (and the packaging/system integration is not completely abysmal) than when some cloud provider starts offering it as a service.
you are saying X, but a completely different group of people didn't say Y that other time! I got you!!!!
It’s fair to call out that both aspects are two sides of the same coin. I didn’t try to “get” anyone
um, no it's not. you have fallen into the classic web forum trap of analyzing a heterogenous mix of people with inconsistent views as one entity that should have consistent views
Fairly sure it's the same problem and the main reason stronger licenses are appearing or formerly OSS companies closing down their sources.
> Unfortunately as I see it, even if you want to contribute to open source out of a pure passion or enjoyment, they don't respect the licenses that are consumed.
Because it is "transformative" and therefore "fair" use.
Running things through lossy compression is transformative?
The quotation marks indicate that _I_ don't think it is. Especially given that modern deep learning is over-paramaterized to the point that it interpolates training examples.
Fair use is an exception to copyright, but a license agreement can go far beyond copyright protections. There is no fair use exception to breach of contract.
I imagine a license agreement would only apply to using the software, not merely reading the code (which is what AI training claims to do under fair use).
As an analogy, you can’t enforce a “license” that anyone that opens your GitHub repo and looks at any .cpp file owes you $1,000,000.
If you're unhappy that bad people might use your software in unexpected ways, open source licenses were never appropriate for you in the first place.
Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences.
People do not have perfect foresight, and the ways open source software is used has significantly shifted in recent years. As a result, people reevaluating whether or not they want to participate.
Yes, very true.
>Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked,
no, it hasn't. Open source software, like any open and cooperative culture, existed on a bedrock, what we used to call norms when we still had some in our societies and people acted not always but at least most of the time in good faith. Hacker culture (word's in the name of this website) which underpinned so much of it, had many unwritten rules that people respected even in companies when there were still enough people in charge who shared at least some of the values.
Now it isn't just an exception but the rule that people will use what you write in the most abhorrent, greedy and stupid ways and it does look like the only way out is some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque digital version of a monastery.
Open source software is published to the world and used far beyond any single community where certain norms might apply.
If you care about what people do with your code, you should put it in the license. To the extent that unwritten norms exist, it's unfair to expect strangers in different parts of the world to know what they are, and it's likely unenforceable.
This recently came up for the GPLv2 license, where Linus Torvalds and the Software Freedom Conservancy disagree about how it should be interpreted, and there's apparently a judge that agrees with Linus:
https://mastodon.social/@torvalds@social.kernel.org/11577678...
Inside open source communities maybe. In the corporate world? Absolutely not. Ever. They will take your open source code and do what they want with it, always have.
This varies. The lawyers for risk-adverse companies will make sure they follow the licenses. There are auditing tools to make sure you're not pulling in code you shouldn't. An example is Google's go-licenses command [1].
But you can be sure that even the risk-adverse companies are going to go by what the license says, rather than "community norms."
Other companies are more careless.
[1] https://github.com/google/go-licenses
It's not really people, and they don't really use the software.
People training LLM's on source code is sort of like using newspaper for wrapping fish. It's not the expected use, but people are still using it for something.
As they say, "reduce, reuse, recycle." Your words are getting composted.
Nothing says reduce and reuse like building huge quantities of GPUs and massive data centers to run AI models. It’s like composting!
I learned what i learned due to all the openess in software engineering and not because everyone put it behind a pay wall.
Might be because most of us got/gets payed well enough that this philosophy works well or because our industry is so young or because people writing code share good values.
It never worried me that a corp would make money out of some code i wrote and it still doesn't. AFter all, i'm able to write code because i get paid well writing code, which i do well because of open source. Companies always benefited from open source code attributed or not.
Now i use it to write more code.
I would argue though, I'm fine with that, to push for laws forcing models to be opened up after x years, but i would just prefer the open source / open community coming together and creating just better open models overall.
It's kind of ironic since AI can only grow by feeding on data and open source with its good intentions of sharing knowledge is absolutely perfect for this.
But AI is also the ultimate meat grinder, there's no yours or theirs in the final dish, it's just meat.
And open source licenses are practically unenforceable for an AI system, unless you can maybe get it to cough up verbatim code from its training data.
At the same time, we all know they're not going anywhere, they're here to stay.
I'm personally not against them, they're very useful obviously, but I do have mixed or mostly negative feelings on how they got their training data.
That's a weird position to take. Open source software is actually what is mitigating this stupidity in my opinion. Having monopolistic players like Microsoft and Google is what brought us here in the first place.
I've been feeling a lot the same way, but removing your source code from the world does not feel like a constructive solution either.
Some Shareware used to be individually licensed with the name of the licensee prominently visible, so if you had got an illegal copy you'd be able to see whose licensed copy it was that had been copied.
I wonder if something based on that idea of personal responsibility for your copy could be adopted to source code. If you wanted to contribute to a piece of software, you could ask a contributor and then get a personally licensed copy of the source code with your name in every source file... but I don't know where to take it from there. Has there ever been some system similar to something like that that one could take inspiration from?
And then having vibe coders constantly lecture us about how the future is just prompt engineering, and that we should totally be happy to desert the skills we spent decades building (the skills that were stolen to train AI).
"The only thing that matters is the end result, it's no different than a compiler!", they say as someone with no experience dumps giant PRs of horrific vibe code for those of us that still know what we're doing to review.
What a miserable attitude. When you put something out in the world it's out there for anyone to use and always has been before AI.
it is (... was) there to use for anyone, on the condition that the license is followed
which they don't
and no self-serving sophistry about "it's transformative fair use" counts as respecting the license
The license only has force because of copyright. For better or for worse, the courts decide what is transformative fair use.
Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take.
For a serious take, I recommend reading the copyright office's 100 plus page document that they released in May. It makes it clear that there are a bunch of cases that are non-transformative, particularly when they affect the market for the original work and compete with it. But there's also clearly cases that are transformative when no such competition exists, and the training material was obtained legally.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
I'm not particularly sympathetic to voices on HN that attempt to remove all nuance from this discussion. It's challenging enough topic as is.
> For better or for worse, the courts decide what is transformative fair use.
thankfully, I don't live under the US regime
there is no concept of fair use in my country
> Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take
What a joke. Sorry, but no. I don't think is unserious at all. What's unserious is saying this.
> and the training material was obtained legally
And assuming everyone should take it at face value. I hope you understand that going on a tech forum and telling people they aren't being nuanced because a Judge in Alabama that can barely unlock their phone weighed in on a massively novel technology with global implications, yes, reads deeply unserious. We're aware the U.S. legal system is a failure and the rest of the world suffers for it. Even your President routinely steals music for campaign events, and stole code for Truth Social. Your copyright is a joke that's only there to serve the fattest wallets.
These judges are not elected, they are appointed by people whose pockets are lined by these very corporations. They don't serve us, they are here to retrofit the law to make illegal things corporations do, legal. What you wrote is thought terminating.
What I wrote is an encouragement to investigate the actual state of the law when you're talking about legal topics. That's the opposite of thought-terminating.
*in your opinion
> and I will produce no more
Nah, don't do that. Produce shitloads of it using the very same LLM tools that ripped you off, but license it under the GPL.
If they're going to thief GPL software, least we can do is thief it back.
Why? The core vision of free software and many open source licenses was to empower users and developers to make things they need without being financially extorted, to avoid having users locked in to proprietary systems, to enable interoperability, and to share knowledge. GenAI permits all of this to a level beyond just providing source code.
Most objections like yours are couched in language about principles, but ultimately seem to be about ego. That's not always bad, but I'm not sure why it should be compelling compared to the public good that these systems might ultimately enable.
Was it ever open source if there was an implied refusal to create something you don't approve of? Was it only for certain kinds of software, certain kinds of creators? If there was some kind of implicit approval process or consent requirement, did you publish it? Where can that be reviewed?
> and I will produce no more
Thanks for your contributions so far but this won't change anything.
If you'd want to have a positive on this matter, it's better to pressure the government(s) to prevent GenAI companies from using content they don't have a license for, so they behave like any other business that came before them.
What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?
> What people like Abraham Lincoln don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if slaves needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where slaves were compensated fairly, but plantations didn't exist?
I fixed it... Sorry, I had to, the quote template was simply too good.
"Too expensive to do it legally" doesn't really stand up as an argument.
Unequivocally, yes. There are plenty of "useful" things that can come out of doing unethical things, that doesn't make it okay. And, arguably, ChatGPT isn't nearly as useful as it is at convincing you it is.
Yes, very much so. I am in favour of pushing into the future as fast as we can, so to speak, but I think ChatGPT is a temporary boost that is going to slow us in the long run.
Absolutely. Was this supposed to be some kind of gotcha?
> Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?
Yes.
I don't see how "We couldn't do this cool thing if we didn't throw away ethics!" is a reasonable argument. That is a hell of a thing to write out.
Yes, what a wild position to prefer the job loss, devaluation of skills, and environmental toll of AI to open source creators having been compensated in some better manner.
Very much yes, how can I opt into that timeline?
Uh, yeah, he clearly would prefer it didn’t exist even if he was compensated.
That would be like being able to keep my cake and eat it too. Of course I would. Surely you're being sarcastic?
Er... yes? Obviously? What are you even asking?
Yes.
Um, please let your comment be sarcastic. It is ... right?
Yes.
Yes.
Well yeah.
Hear hear
I'm not claiming he is mainly motivated by this but it's a fact that his life work will become moot over the next few years as all programming languages become redundant - at least as a healthy multiplicity of approaches as present, it's quite possible at least a subconscious factor in his resentment.
I expect this to be an unpopular opinion but take no pleasure in noting that - I've coded since being a kid but that era is nearly over.
For those of us who consider programming a way to self-realize, the potential vanishing of programming as a lucrative job definitely seems threatening. However, I don't think it could disappear entirely. Professions replaced by machinery, at a global scale, continue to thrive locally, at small scales; they can be profitable and fulfilling for the providers, and they are sought after by a small (niche?) target group.
In other words, I don't need programming to remain mainstream, for it to continue fulfilling me and sustaining me.
Not sure about this, AI hasn’t managed to build software on a medium scale or larger.
Finally someone echoes my sentiments. It's my sincere belief that many in the software community are glazing AI for the purposes of career advancement. Not because they actually like it.
One person I know is developing an AI tool with 1000+ stars on github where in private they absolutely hate AI and feel the same way as rob.
Maybe it's because I just saw Avatar 3, but I honestly couldn't be more disgusted by the direction we're going with AI.
I would love to be able to say how I really feel at work, but disliking AI right now is the short path to the unemployment line.
If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.
The more you see under the hood, the more disgusting it is. I yearn for the old days when developers did tight, efficient work, creating bespoke, artistic software in spite of hardware limitations.
Not only is all of that gone, nothing of value has replaced it. My DOS computer was snappier than my garbage Win11 machine that's stuffed to the gills with AI telemetry.
When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.
I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.
That camera analogy is very thought provoking! So far the only bright spot in this whole comment thread for me. Thanks for sharing that!
> When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.
It's not about reading. It's about output. When you start producing output in line with Rob's work that is confidently incorrect and sloppy, people will feel just as they do when LLMs produce output that is confidently incorrect and sloppy. No one is threatened if someone trains an LLM and does nothing with it.
I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.
An easy way to answer this question, at least on a preliminary basis, is to ask how many times in the past the ludds have been right in the long run. About anything, from cameras to looms to machine tools to computers in general.
Then, ask what's different this time.
The luddites have been right to some degree about second-order effects.
Some of them said that TV was making us mindless. Some of them said that electronic communication was depersonalizing. Some of them said that social media was algorithms feeding us anything that would make us keep clicking.
They weren't entirely wrong.
AI may be a very useful tool. (TV is. Electronic communication is. Social media is.) But what it does to us may not be all positive.
Social media is a hard defense, at least for me. The rest of the technologies you refer to are neutral, as is AI, but social media seems doomed to corruption and capture because of the different effects it has on different groups.
Most of the people who are protesting AI now were dead silent when Big Social Media was ramping up. There were exceptions (Cliff Stoll comes to mind) but in general, antitechnology movements don't have any predictive power. Tools that we were told would rob us of our personal autonomy and keep the means of production permanently out of our reach have generally had the opposite effect.
This will be true of AI as well, I believe... but only as long as the models remain accessible to everyone.
Can't really fault him for having this feeling. The value proposition of software engineering is completely different past later half of 2025, I guess it is fair for pioneers of the past to feel little left behind.
> I guess it is fair for pioneers of the past to feel little left behind.
I'm sure he doesn't.
> The value proposition of software engineering is completely different past later half of 2025
I'm sure it's not.
> Can't really fault him for having this feeling.
That feeling is coupled with real, factual observations. Unlike your comment.
Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...therefore it must be "resisted." Even with all the underhanded work, the means-ends logic of OpenAI and other major companies involved in developing the technology, there is still no point in stopping it. There was a group of people who tried to stop the mechanical loom because it took work away from weavers, took away their craft--we call them luddites. But now it doesn't take weeks and weeks to produce a single piece of clothing. Everyone can easily afford to dress themselves. Society became wealthier. These LLMs, at the very least they let anyone learn anything, start any project, on a whim. They let people create things in minutes that used to take hours. They are "creating value," even if its "slop" even if its not carefully crafted. Them's the breaks--we'd all like our clothing hand-weaved if it made any sense. But even in a world where one could have the time to sit down and weave their own clothing, carefully write out each and every line of code, it would only be harmful to take these new machines away, disable them just because we are afraid of what they can do. The same technology that created the atom bomb also created the nuclear reactor.
“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”
So you would say it is not "trendy" to be pro-AI right now, is that it? That it's not trendy to say things like "it's not going away" or "AI isn't a fad" or "AI needs better critics" - one reaction is reasonable, well thought-out, the other is a bandwagon?
At the very least there is an ideological conflict brewing in tech, and this post is a flashpoint. But just like the recent war between Israel and Hamas, no amount of reaction can defeat technological dominance--at least not in the long term. And the pro-AI side, whether you think its good or evil, certainly exceeds the other in terms of sheer force through their embrace of technology.
yessss but [fry eyes.gif] can't tell if that's presented as apologia or critique
Notice that the weavers, both the luddites and their non-opposing colleagues, certainly did not get wealthier. They lost their jobs, and they and their children starved. Some starved to death. Wealth was created, but it was not shared.
Remember this when talking about their actions. People live and die their own life, not just as small parts in a large 'river of society'. Yes, generations after them benefited from industrialisation, but the individuals living at that time fought for their lives.
I'm only saying that destroying the mechanical loom didn't help.
It’s in our power to stop it. There’s no point in people like you promoting the interests of the super wealthy at the cost of the humanity of the common people. You should figure out how to positively contribute or not do so at all.
It is not in the interests of the super wealthy alone, just like JP Morgan's railroads were created for his sake but in the end produced great wealth for everyone in America. It is very short sighted to see this as merely some oppression from above. Technology is not class-oriented, it just is, and it happens to be articulated in terms of class because of the mode of social organization we live in.
Is the "Great wealth for everyone in America" in the room with us now?
There's certainly great wealth for ~1000 billionaires, but where I am nobody I know has healthcare, or owns a house for example.
If your argument is that we could be poorer, that's not really productive or useful for people that are struggling now.
Its not possible to stop anymore than the Luddites could stop the industrial revolution in textiles.
Yeah but you can maybe try. Comments like this make it seem like you don’t care
If you think it’s in your power to stop you are delusional.
He worked in well paying jobs, probably traveles, has a car and a house and complains about toxic products etc.
Yes there has to be a discussion on this and yeah he might generally have the right mindset, but lets be honest here: No one of them would have developed any of it just for free.
We all are slaves to capitalism
and this is were my point comes: Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be the only think pushing us close enough to the edge that we all accept capitalisms end.
And yes i think it is still massivly beneficial that my open source code helped creating something which allows researchers to write easier and faster better code to push humanity forward. Or enables more people overall to have/gain access to writing code or the result of what writing code produces: Tools etc.
@Rob its spam, thats it. Get over it, you are rich and your riches did not came out of thin air.
> We all are slaves to capitalism
Yes, but informedly choosing your slavedriver still has merit.
> Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be the only think pushing us close enough to the edge that we all accept capitalisms end.
This is an interesting thought!
It sucks and I hate it but this is an incredible steam engine engineer, who invented complex gasket designs and belt based power delivery mechanisms lamenting the loss of steam as the dominant technology. We are entering a new era and method for humans to tell computers what to do. We can marvel at the ingenuity that went into technology of the past, but the world will move onto the combustion engine and electricity and there’s just not much we can do about it other than very strong regulation, and fighting for the technology to benefit the people rather than just the share price.
Your metaphor doesn’t make sense. What to LLMs run on? It’s still steam and belt based systems all the way down.
From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist.
For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the company around.
Traditional programmers are no longer some of the highest paid tech people around. It's AI engineers/researchers. Obviously many software devs can transition into AI devs but it involves learning, starting from the bottom, etc. For older entrenched programmers, it's not always easy to transition from something they're familiar with.
Losing the ability to "bully" business people inside tech companies is a hard pill to swallow for many software devs. I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written. Meanwhile, he had no problem overwhelming business folks in meetings. Software devs always talked to the CEO with confidence because they knew something he didn't, the code.
When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.
/signed as someone who writes software
> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.
Yeah, software devs will probably be pretty upset in the way you describe once that happens. In the present though, what's actually happened is that product managers can have an LLM generate a project template and minimally interactive mockup in five minutes or less, and then mentally devalue the work that goes into making that into an actual product. They got it to 80% in 5 minutes after all, surely the devs can just poke and prod Claude a bit more to get the details sorted!
The jury is out on how productivity is impacted by LLM use. That makes sense, considering we never really figured out how to measure baseline productivity in any case.
What we know for sure is: non-engineers still can't do engineering work, and a lot of non-engineers are now convinced that software engineering is basically fully automated so they can finally treat their engineers like interchangeable cogs in an assembly line.
The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline. As things stand major software houses and tech companies are cutting back and regressing in quality.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't say software devs are now useless. You still need software devs to actually make it work and connect everything together. That's why I still have a job and still getting paid as a software dev.
I'd imagine it won't take too long until software engineers are just prompting the AI 99% of the time to build software without even looking at the code much. At that point, the line between the product manager and the software dev will become highly blurred.
This is happening already and it wastes so, so much time. Producing code never was the bottleneck. The bottleneck still is to produce the right amount of code and to understand what is happening. This requires experience and taste. My prediction is, in the near future there will be piles of unmaintainable bloat of AI generated code, nobody's understanding and the failure rate of software will go to the moon.
People have forgotten so many of the software engineering lessons that have been learned over the last four decades, just because now it’s a computer that can spit out large quantities of poorly-understood code instead of a person.
> The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline.
I believe we only need to organize AI coding around testing. Once testing takes central place in the process it acts as your guarantee for app behavior. Instead of just "vibe following" the AI with our eyes we could be automating the validation side.
He's mainly talking about environmental & social consequences now and in the future. He personally is beyond reach of such consequences given his seniority and age, so this speculative tangent is detracting from his main point, to put it charitably.
>He's mainly talking about environmental & social consequences
That's such a weak argument. Then why not stop driving, stop watching TV, stop using the internet? Hell... let's go back and stop using the steam engine for that matter.
The issue with this line of argumentation is that unlike gen AI, all of the things you listed produce actual value.
Maybe you're forgetting something but genAI does produce value. Subjective value, yes. But still value to others who can make use of them.
End of the day your current prosperity is made by advances in energy and technology. It would be disingenuous to deny that and to deny the freedom of others to progress in their field of study.
Just because somebody believes Gen ai produces value doesn't make it true.
> Then why not stop driving
You mean, we should all drive, oh I don't know, Electric powered cars?
I'm not entirely convinced it's going to lead to programmers losing the power to command high salaries. Now that nearly anyone can generate thousands upon thousands of lines of mediocre-to-bad code, they will likely be the doing exactly that without really being able to understand what they're doing and as such there will always be the need for humans who can actually read and actually understand code when a billion unforeseen consequences pop up from deploying code without oversight.
I recently witnessed one such potential fuckup. The AI had written functioning code, except one of the business rules was misinterpreted. It would have broken in a few months time and caused a massive outage. I imagine many such time bombs are being deployed in many companies as we speak.
Yeah; I saw a 29,000 line pull request across seventy files recently. I think that realistically 29,000 lines of new code all at once is beyond what a human could understand within the timeframe typically allotted for a code review.
Prior to generative AI I was (correctly) criticized once for making a 2,000 line PR, and I was told to break it up, which I did, but I think thousand-line PRs are going to be the new normal soon enough.
That’s the fault of the human who used the LLM to write the code and didn’t test it properly.
Exhaustive testing is hard, to be fair, especially if you don’t actually understand the code you’re writing. Tools like TLA+ and static analyzers exist precisely for this reason.
An example I use to talk about hidden edge cases:
Imagine we have this (pseudo)code
Someone might see this function, and unit test it based on the if statement like: These tests pass, it’s merged.Except there’s a bug in this; what if you pass in a negative even number?
Depending on the language, you will either get an exception or maybe a complex answer (which not usually something you want). The solution in this particular case would be to add a conditional, or more simply just make the type an unsigned integer.
Obviously this is just a dumb example, and most people here could pick this up pretty quick, but my point is that sometimes bugs can hide even when you do (what feels like) thorough testing.
> I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written.
It is precisely the lack of knowledge and greed of leadership everywhere that's the problem.
The new screwdriver salesmen are selling them as if they are the best invention since the wheel. The naive boss having paid huge money is expecting the workers to deliver 10x work while the new screwdriver's effectiveness is nowhere closer to the sales pitch and it creates fragile items or more work at worst. People are accusing that the workers are complaining about screwdrivers because they can potentially replace them.
Really think it’s entirely wrong to label someone as a bully for not conforming to current, perhaps bad, practices.
I'm a programmer, and am intensely aware of the huge gap between the quantity of software the world could use and the total production capacity of the existing body of programmers. my distaste for AI has nothing to do with some real or imagined loss of power; if there were genuinely a system that produced good code and wasn't heavily geared towards reinforcing various structural inequalities I would be all for it. AI does not produce good code, and pretty much all the uses I've seen are trying to give people with power even more advantages and leverage over people without, so I remain against it.
If you don't bend your knee to a "king", you are a bully? What sort of messed up thinking is that?
I understand that you are writing your general opinion, but I have a feeling Rob Pike's feelings go a little bit deeper than this.
Grandparent commenter seems to be someone who'd find it heartwarming to have a machine thank him with "deep gratitude".
Maybe evolution will select autistic humans as the fittest to survive living with AI, because the ones who find that email enraging will blow their brains out, out of frustration...
I keep reading bad sentiment towards software devs. Why exactly do they "bully" business people? If you ask someone outside of the tech sector who the biggest bullies are, its business people who will fire you if they can save a few cents. Whenever someone writes this, I read deep rooted insecurity and jealousy for something they can't wrap their head around and genuinely question if that person really writes software or just claims to do it for credibility.
People care far less about gen AI writing slopcode and more about the social and environmental ramifications, not to mention the blatant IP theft, economic games, etc.
I'm fine if AI takes my job as a software dev. I'm not fine if it's used to replace artists, or if it's used to sink the economy or planet. Or if it's used to generate a bunch of shit code that make the state of software even worse than it is today.
I realize you said "many" and not "all" but FWIW, I hate LLMs because:
1. My coworkers now submit PRs with absolutely insane code. When asked "why" they created that monstrosity, it is "because the AI told me to".
2. My coworkers who don't understand the difference between SFTP and SMTP will now argue with me on PRs by feeding my comments into an LLM and pasting the response verbatim. It's obvious because they are suddenly arguing about stuff they know nothing about. Before, I just had to be right. Now I have to be right AND waste a bunch of time.
3. Everyone who thinks generating a large pile of AI slop as "documentation" is a good thing. Documentation used to be valuable to read because a human thought that information was valuable enough to write down. Each word had a cost and therefore a minimum barrier to existence. Now you can fill entire libraries with valueless drivel.
4. It is automated copyright infringement. All of my side projects are released under the 0BSD license so this doesn't personally impact me, but that doesn't make stealing from less permissively licensed projects without attribution suddenly okay.
5. And then there are the impacts to society:
5a. OpenAI just made every computer for the next couple of years significantly more expensive.
5b. All the AI companies are using absurd amounts of resources, accelerating global warming and raising prices for everyone.
5c. Surveillance is about to get significantly more intrusive and comprehensive (and dangerously wrong, mistaking doritos bags for guns...).
5d. Fools are trusting LLM responses without verification. We've already seen this countless times by lawyers citing cases which do not exist. How long until your doctor misdiagnoses you because they trusted an LLM instead of using their own eyes+brain? How long until doctors are essentially forced to do that by bosses who expect 10x output because the LLM should be speeding everything up? How many minutes per patient are they going to be allowed?
5e. Astroturfing is becoming significantly cheaper and widespread.
/signed as I also write software, as I assume almost everyone on this forum does.
After bitcoin this site is full of people who don't write code.
I have not been here before bitcoin. But wouldn't the "non-technical" founders be also types that don't write code. And to them fixing the "easy" part is very tempting...
> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.
I'll explain why I currently hate this. Today, my PM builds demos using AI tools and then goes to my director or VP to show them off. Wow, how awesome! Everybody gets excited. Now it is time to build the thing. It should take like three weeks, right? It's basically already finished. What do you mean you need four months and ongoing resourcing for maintenance? But the PM built it in a day?
And this is different from outsourcing the work to India for programmers who work for $6000 a year in what way exactly?
You can go back to the 1960s and COBOL was making the exact same claims as Gen AI today.
You're absolutely right.
But no one is safe. Soon the AI will be better at CEOing.
That's the singularity you're talking about. AI takes every role humans can do and humans just enjoy life and live forever.
There's nothing about the singularity which would guarantee that humans enjoy life and live forever. That would be the super optimistic, highly speculative scenario. Of course the singularity itself remains a speculative scenario, unless one wants to argue the industrial and computer revolutions already ushered in their own singularities.
Nah, they will fine-tune a local LLM to replace the board and be always loyal to the CEO.
Elon is way ahead, he did it with mere meatbags.
Don't worry I'm sure they'll find ways to say their jobs can only be done by humans. Even the Pope is denouncing AI in fear that it'll replace god.
CEOs and the C-suite in general are closest to the money. They are the safest.
That is pretty much the only metric that matters in the end.
Honestly middle management is going to go extinct before the engineers do
Why, more psychopathic than Musk?
There's still a lot of confusion on where AI is going to land - there's no doubt that it's helpful, much the same way as spell checkers, IDEs, linters, grammarly, etc, were
But the current layoffs "because AI is taking over" is pure BS, there was an overhire during the lockdowns, and now there's a correction (recall that people were complaining for a while that they landed a job at FAANG only for it to be doing... nothing)
That correction is what's affecting salaries (and "power"), not AI.
/signed someone actually interested in AI and SWE
When I see actual products produced by these "product managers who are writing detailed specs" that don't fall over and die at the first hurdle (see: Every vibe coded, outsourced, half assed PoS on the planet) I will change my mind.
Until then "Computer says No"
What does any of this have to do with what Rob has written?
> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI
The GenAI is also better at analyzing telemetry, designing features and prioritizing issues than a human product manager.
Nobody is really safe.
I’m at Big tech and our org has our sights on automating product manager work. Idea generation grounded with business metrics and context that you can feed to an LLM is a simpler problem to solve than trying to automate end to end engineering workflows.
Agreed.
Hence, I'm heavily invested in compute and energy stocks. At the end of the day, the person who has more compute and energy will win.
Many people have pointed out that if AI gets better at writing code and doesn't generate slop, then programmers' roles will evolve to Project Manager. People with tech backgrounds will still be needed until AI can completely take over without any human involvement.
Nope and I wholeheartedly agree with Pike for the disgust of these companies especially for what they are doing to the planet.
Very true... AI engineers earning $100mn, I doubt Rob Pike earnt that. Maybe $10mn.
This is the reality and started happening at faster pace. A junior engineer is able to produce something interesting faster without too much attitude.
Everybody in the company envy the developers and they respect they get especially the sales people.
The golden era of devs as kings started crumbling.
Producing something interesting has never been an issue for a junior engineer. I built lots of stuff that I still think is interesting when I was still a junior and I was neither unique nor special. Any idiot could always go to a book store and buy a book on C++ or JavaScript and write software to build something interesting. High-school me was one such idiot.
"Senior" is much more about making sure what you're working on is polished and works as expected and understanding edge cases. Getting the first 80% of a project was always the easy part; the last 20% is the part that ends up mattering the most, and also the part that AI tends to be especially bad at.
It will certainly get better, and I'm all for it honestly, but I do find it a little annoying that people will see a quick demo of AI doing something interesting really quickly, and then conclude that that is the hard part part; even before GenAI, we had hackathons where people would make cool demos in a day or two, but there's a reason that most of those demos weren't immediately put onto store shelves without revision.
This is very true. And similarly for the recently-passed era of googling, copying and pasting and glueing together something that works. The easy 80% of turning specs into code.
Beyond this issue of translating product specs to actual features, there is the fundamental limit that most companies don't have a lot of good ideas. The delay and cost incurred by "old style" development was in a lot of cases a helpful limiter -- it gave more time to update course, and dumb and expensive ideas were killed or not prioritized.
With LLMs, the speed of development is increasing but the good ideas remain pretty limited. So we grind out the backlog of loudest-customer requests faster, while trying to keep the tech debt from growing out of control. While dealing with shrinking staff caused by layoffs prompted by either the 2020-22 overhiring or simply peacocking from CEOs who want to demonstrate their company's AI prowess by reducing staff.
At least in my company, none of this has actually increased revenue.
So part of me thinks this will mean a durable role for the best product designers -- those with a clear vision -- and the kinds of engineers that can keep the whole system working sanely. But maybe even that will not really be a niche since anything made public can be copied so much faster.
Honestly I think a lot of companies have been grossly overhiring engineers, even well before generative AI; I think a lot of companies cannot actually justify having engineering teams as large as they do, but they have to have all these engineers because OtherBigCo has a lot of engineers and if they have all of them then it must be important.
Intentionally or not, generative AI might be an excuse to cut staff down to something that's actually more sustainable for the company.
468 comments.... guys, guys, this is a Blue Sky post! Have we not learned that anyone who self-exiled to Blue Sky is wearing a "don't take me seriously" badge for our convenience?
Also, this is old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg. The old man is Rob Pike (almost 70 years old) and the cloud is well.... The Cloud.
I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme.
The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly puritan viewpoints thinking they are holier and righter than anyone else. That’s the real plague
> I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI.
Of course we do. We don't live inside some game theoretic fever dream.
> If America doesn’t win, other countries will
if anything the Chinese approach looks more responsible that that of the current US regime
What exactly do we stand to "win" with generative AI?
So far the 2 answers you've received are killing people and sending emails.
I don't think either of those are particularly valuable to the society I'd like to see us build.
We're already incredibly dialed in and efficient at killing people. I don't think society at large reaps the benefits if we get even better at it.
Isn't it obvious? Near future vision-language-action models have obvious military potential (see what the Figure company is doing, now imagine it in a combat robot variant). Any superpower that fails to develop combat robots with such AI will not be a superpower for very long. China will develop them soon. If the US does not, the US is a dead superpower walking. EU is unfortunately still sleeping. Well, perhaps France with Mistral has a chance.
Better thank you emails I think. Think how good they'll be on a 10 year timespan
First mover advantage for important AI tools that deliver enormous value to humanity.
Win what, and for whom?
First to total surveillance state? Because that is a major driving force in China: to get automated control of its own population.
Genie has been out of the bottle for AI in facial recognition and military systems for a while now, let alone language models
Any empire that falls back in the give me more money race will not be empire for long.
Give me more money now.
There's a lot of irony in this rant. Rob was instrumental in developing distributed computing and cloud technologies that directly contributed to the advent of AI.
I wish he had written something with more substance. I would have been able to understand his points better than a series of "F bombs". I've looked up to Rob for decades. I think he has a lot of wisdom he could impart, but this wasn't it.
You have zero idea about his state of mind when he got this stupid useless email.
Not to mention, this is a tweet. He wasn't writing a long form text. It's ridiculous that you jumped the gun and got "disappointed" for the cheapest form of communication some random idiot did to someone as important as him.
And not to mention, I AM YET to see A SINGLE DAMN MIT License text or BSD-2/3 license text they should have posted if these LLMs respected OSS licenses and it's code. So as someone who's life's work dragged through the mud only to send a cheap email using the said tech which abused your code... It's absolutely a worthy response IMO.
Sometimes you just have had enough and need to get some expletives out.
From 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.
As I read it, the "fakeness" of it all triggered a ballistic response. And wasting resources in the process. An AI developed feelings and expressed fake gratitude, and the human reading this BS goes ballistic.