> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.”
How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.
I think his train of thought is "young graduates generally aren't anti-immigration, so if I insinuate they're anti-immigration if they disagree with me they will be convinced by my argument". I don't think we need to read much more than that into it.
this is how i took it as well. he’s creating a false equivalency between AI and immigrants, and attempting to justify it with “diversity of perspectives” and trying to tell you that to remain intellectually consistent you must embrace or reject both.
It's important to realize that those people are sociopaths. They delight in the suffering of the common man through their complete lack of empathy.
Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them being particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.
Also something I noticed: whenever you see them talking about AI, they all seem to have the same smirk on their faces: that “we’re making you a permanent underclass and you just have to deal with it” smirk. They all have it.
> It's important to realize that those people are sociopaths. They delight in the suffering of the common man.
> Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.
I couldn't agree more. Thank you for your comment!
Tenuous connection between unrelated topics to fit them into larger ingroup/outgroup dynamics is the junkfood of persuasion tactics. Bad for you but addictive anyway. If you look for it you'll see it all the time.
Actual generous interpretation: The adaptation required as workplaces adopt AI is the same as the ones immigrants have to go through in a new country. There's new modes of thinking, new workflows and an expanded surface of responsibility. Those that expect an easy definable role they can plug themselves into, to get the comfortable jobs (tm) of yesterday will not find those readily. They are there though, they just look different. The working immigrant (usually) doesn't find a spot for them to plug into, they have to hustle and adapt to find such a spot.
Corporate bosses have been screaming for more "hustle-y" employees for decades so that is nothing new.
Utterances that come out of executive’s mouths don’t have truth values. They’re sounds meant to irritate people’s nervous systems to achieve the exec’s goals.
there is no logic - just fallacy. it is a red herring, wrapped up in equivocation. he commits appeal to emotion, non sequitur, false equivalence along the way.
I think he is saying that if you are against AI you are against progress and so "America will no longer be the country that ambitious people want to come to". I don't think there was a point there about immigration being somehow equivalent to AI, that would come out of nowhere.
That seems like a really tenuous connection for him to make if that's what he's doing. I find it difficult to believe that ambitious people outside of a certain niche would refuse to come to the US because of perceived lack of AI progress. They'd refuse/are refusing to come because of the US's increasing hostility to outsiders, cutting of research funding, and subpar living conditions.
He's trying to virtue signal based on an understanding of young people's values that's so unsophisticated that he thinks throwing them the word "immigrant" will get them on his side. And they're obviously smart enough to see through it.
Generous interpretation: instead of pearl-clutching over ethnicities and traditionalism America invited the world to immigrate and encouraged diverse ideas and industries. Other societies have shunned even foreign food and music (most countries barely have different races), never mind porn industry ('burn the degenerates'), space travel ('why waste money on the moon'), nuclear power, computers etc. Is AI not yet another industry that is easy to disregard yet potentially transformative?
Corporate interpretation: listen you filthy cattle, gen-AI is bottoming out all our pesky human labour costs and allowing me and my friends to milk every last drop out of this late-stage capitalist nightmare, you better get used to it because from now on 99% of you will just have to make do scraping by in the gig economy, selling your bodies or just generally being dancing monkeys for billionaires - we'll still hire some of you as nurses and waiters because we don't exactly want clankers looking after our kids
Isn't that generous interpretation, like, profoundly idiotic if he meant it? Major multiracial feature of America happened due to slave trade at the time when genocide of native Americans was also going on. Other countries have porn industry, actually a lot of it. Other countries have nuclear power, but America is just in one war claiming it wants to stop the other country from the nuclear power.
Other countries typically have tons of foreign music and entertainment, most notably American music. America is the one that seems to be looking inwards here (due to being dominant on an international market - I am not saying it is sinister).
I think thats missing the point. Being multiracial is a function of being open, not a means to the end. America is a can-do country that generally embraces new things, which includes 'new people' and new ways.
I'm not American but for all its faults I can see it is clearly miles ahead in terms of economics, innovation and generally being the worlds only "real" new-world diverse democracy.
Yes it is pretty much run by corporate interests and yes it has started almost every war in the Middle East in the past century for the benefit of AIPAC. Yes it has skipped almost all the benefits of socialism that I enjoy as a European, and of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world I think ~48 are in North and South America.
Other countries do not "typically have tons of foreign music" - China is 99% ethnic Chinese, black people are basically not even allowed in restaurants there. The same goes for India and much of Africa. Europe is closest and the UK probably bridges the attitudes of Europe and America the most - which is why the UK also pioneered things like computing and multiculturalism.
> How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.
Maybe it ties in because, if you're not excited and enthusiastic about AI and our new Ways of Working, you're a racist. You don't want to be a racist, do you? AI is basically exactly like a black person getting chased by a lynch mob. Do you stand with the racist lynchers? Or with the civil rights movement (the billionaire AI promoters).
It's not clear to me why they booed him. you think for only asserting predictions that benefit him? Not because they agree on those predictions and don't want that future, blame him for this role in it?
From reading the text of the article, and the direct quotes, I'm also unclear on why they booed him.
My guess is because of what he's done, or at least perceived to have done, in the area of AI. Because what he said (at least to me) didn't seem boo-worthy, but in the context of who is saying it, I can see it.
Put another way, if someone that the audience liked said the same things, its not clear the person would get booed.
It was the same reaction from that other graduation speaker last week who was also booed over her remarks on AI. Totally dumbfounded about why anyone might not like AI.
These ghouls live in a totally different world than the rest of us and actually think everyone shares their positive outlook on AI.
We need more of this booing. Put up a consistent front and let these people know their views are not shared.
People with lots of power and clout contribute to making predictions reality by all making predictions that make similar assumptions. The predictions become more likely because people already behave as if they're likely.
AI is going to take away their jobs, big companies like google will profit greatly, meanwhile accelerating climate change with full speed ahead data centers, and no real thought about what will happen to all these unemployed graduates. But also try to keep an open mind
I think that the deeper topic is that there is a sense of double-speak going around, they mean freedom but what they really mean is to use the word and its meaning and to attach it to their own goals, in this case AI because google has a vested interest in that.
He was on stage and had a mic. I don’t know that the students had a lot of options to make their voices heard in the situation. And since folks like Schmidt already have access to channels to spread their opinions and this was the students’ graduation I think they get a pass.
Shouting people with power down is the closest to an open debate you will get with them.
No one with power like Schmidt will join in an open debate with you and me (well, unless you are one of the 9-figure millionaires that might be around HN), they circulate around others with similar power, they don't engage with the powerless, they have no need for it. They are not having a debate with us about rolling out AI, they just wield their power and do it unto us.
Getting some backlash is the bare minimum, if our democratic systems worked we could use democratic processes to curtail their power, unfortunately those systems are also tilted very heavily towards the ones with outsized power already. If you leave people without a voice, shouting the powerful ones down is the least you should expect.
These guys are obviously both tone deaf and totally unconcerned with the desires and fears of the next generation of hopeful knowledge workers. To have the audacity and callousness to stand in front of a group of people you are hoping to destroy for profit, and talk about the technology you are going to use to do this… I’m surprised these guys are only getting booed.
Booing is a valid form of debate. We could shout "your arguments are not made in good faith and you are a bad actor" but a boo accomplishes the same thing and is far more effective.
Schmidt paying out millions in political donations isn't open debate. Schmidt having a speaking role at a commencement without anyone able to respond to him isn't "open debate". This is purely a monologue. There is no debate that was going to be had in the first place because Schmidt, by virtue of the location and occassion, wouldn't allow a response.
He could have stopped reading his script and addressed the obvious concern. He didn't. The students clearly wanted him to address their concerns, not hear a sales pitch.
And he's probably there as the inspirational, senior, mature, leadership figure. That failed hard.
Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas. They may not actively use LLMs or even know what they are, but they’re satisfied with Google’s AI overview and they love using voice assistants. These aren’t people from any particular sphere I sought out or which self-selected, but neighbors, colleagues, extended family, the chef at a local restaurant etc.
People with disdain for AI are probably largely limited to one “elite” or another. Of course this goes for practically any cause. It’s basically impossible to to get large-scale momentum behind anything that goes against prevailing economic interests.
Of course he was still out of touch with that particular group, and if they all try really hard, maybe they can get some narrative out there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Unless corpos discover how they can use these clashing views for market segmentation or something.
I guess this just shows how divided the world is right now (in a lot of ways), but for me this sounds like one of the creepier episodes of Black Mirror or Twilight Zone.
> Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas.
They might not know that those assets are AI-generated. It's easy to not know if you don't have this stuff (somehow) constantly shoved into your face.
I had a sticker on my water bottle from a brewery for several days. Just last night did I realize that it was completely AI-generated. The design was just text. Anyone could've made it with any other application, and yet, they chose to use AI to do it. The font was a typical font used by AI, and the hero text had low-res dots on it, a tell-tale for one-shot AI art. I threw it away.
For the christmas decorations, yes, but the imagery I meant is mostly custom, apart from some shared memes. Images and videos of themselves or their dogs in some style or doing something or being somewhere. Some of these honestly betray some mental unwellness if you ask me, but the point is, people eat this shit up and see it as harmless fun. Which it is, of course, in the same way many things are if you ignore the externalities.
"Normal people" are not that political. They don't automatically change their opinion about a picture they like because they find out it was AI generated. They say, "oh that's interesting, I guess I should keep an eye out for this AI generated stuff. I heard a lot of it is slop, but it seems they can make some really cool stuff now".
My grandma can't tell the difference between reality and AI. My parents and older family members either treat AI as a dog ("wow, look at this fun trick") or, worryingly, as Google.
People younger than about 35 I know dislike AI, ranging from mild annoyance up to passionate hatred, except for the people who are all-in on it. Calling something "slop" causes a fun diverse reaction, with some people offended on behalf of an LLM, and with others poking fun at the slop referenced.
The vast majority simply doesn't seem to care outside of annoyance at AI being shoehorned into everything (but that might as well have been the web 3.0/blockchain/web 2.0/whatever term manages to milk investors).
I’ve found love of AI seems to be (with exceptions of course) pretty directly proportional to age and wealth. Older people and wealthier / business-owning people seem to be more excited by it, younger, working people not so much, especially artists and creative types. And it makes sense too, given who stands to gain and lose from it.
Virtually every person I talk to on a regular basis either (a) generally hates AI but uses it in specific ways because of the utility they perceive, or (b) hates AI and won't use it at all.
The idea that "distain for AI" is limited to "one 'elite' or another" is most definitely not borne out by any polling data. "Of course this goes for practically any cause" seems to be an opinion based on air. Many, many people across all social strata (except maybe millionaires/billionaires) are deeply invested in a wide variety of causes to make the world a better place.
I live in San Francisco, and my personal sample of “normal people” think AI generated imagery looks like shit, abhor the proliferation of slop, and are doing their best to avoid this stuff at all costs.
You can prompt up some really cool commercial-grade art within the limitations of the models.
Getting more precision and consistency in the images requires additional technical configuration and actual artistic skill such that it more resembles using Photoshop and similar software. But what can be done with prompting is a lot more impressive than what can be done with rudimentary Photoshop skills and a big photo library to work from.
In my experience there's a bit of a generation gap here (particularly outside the SF tech bubble). Parents excitedly gave e.g. giclée prints of AI-generated art of their adult children's pets to them as gifts last Christmas, but were met with muted-to-negative responses.
This feel like the same kind of problem as my favorite exec coming to me with an AI generated multi-page document explaining why the decisions he hired me to make are wrong.
It's on the same level as giving someone like, a box of chapsticks you picked up at Walgreens on the way over for Christmas dinner. No effort or thought, not really worth anyone's time, the giftee's or the gifter's.
That's one perspective. I would love so much to go back and revisit a birthday with my mom and be gifted a framed pic of my dog and I in matching outfits
Yeah, I mostly agree with you on both points. 1. Tech execs are all in for making money. A small tangent: my wife and I used to enjoy the All In Podcast, but now those four guys mostly lie (my opinion) in ways to profit themselves and their rich friends - really out of touch, and now they are kind-of boring. Used to be a fun podcast. 2. I am a super techie, retired now (I have 55 patents, written many books on AI, many great jobs): I am a little shocked at how most non-tech people I talk with don’t like AI: some because of energy use/data centers forced on unwilling communities, many fear for their or their children's or grandchildren’s jobs, etc.
I find this a weird comment. Isn't this the same kind of out of touch? I could write:
> Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the Hackernews commenter sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality loves LLMs and their touted trajectory.
And it would hold mostly true for me. This goes to show we should all be aware of our respective bubbles.
Imo there's a priority you should have for the generation below you. Just like how you clean up for your next week's self, you clean up for the next generation. Make sure you don't leave the world on fire before you dip. Two generations have failed at this, now's your chance to break the streak.
I don't think you are a hippy. From evolutionary perspective alone, it seems reasonable. However, US society in particular has been.. complicated for the past few generations.
I used to attribute it to the individualism ethos and whatnot, but I no longer think that is a reasonable take in a sense that it is not the whole story. There is a steady flow of push to separate individuals from one another. For example, it is not unusual for parent to offer a sentiment along the lines of 'you are out at 18'. And this is just one tiny example. The funny thing, there may be a merit to letting a bird fly out, but we are talking about concerted efforts to push birds out while outside is set up to be as anti-bird as possible. Not exactly a recipe for success..
> There is a steady flow of push to separate individuals from one another. For example, it is not unusual for parent to offer a sentiment along the lines of 'you are out at 18'.
If anything, I think this sentiment has decreased over the years. Partially as a result of economic challenges for young people and partially as a result of immigration from cultures where living with your parents as an adult is normal.
But I do agree with your wider point about individuals being separated from one another. I think it has to do mostly with technological changes and an economy which causes people to uproot their lives and move across the country for work.
I see AI exactly as what will help future generations, the possibilities it provides in terms of learning, research, analysis are huge.
It confusing to me how people complain about jobs - there is no guarantee that any job will be there forever, there is no guarantee that current social and economic model will be there forever, things always change, you have to adapt, there is no other way.
Present generations see the primary role for AI as being identical to the biggest disruption to US business in the past century — namely the gigantic sucking sound from the outsourcing of millions of US jobs in order to reduce labor costs. Of course they're terrified of it. By singing its praises AND IGNORING THAT CONCERN, Schmidt showed that he couldn't be more out of touch with the top priority of this generation — WILL AI TAKE MY JOB?
It's like Steve Forbes cluelessly joking that rise of Private Equity will make it easier for the unemployed to buy another racehorse. WTF?
Per CEO rhetoric's, the future generation will be useless and none of them will do research or analysis. They wont do art either. All that stuff will be done by AI. They will be either homeless or useless living of UBI if wealthy owners allow them to. They will never amount to anything that matters. Oh, and those powerful AI tools will be controlled by a winning monopoly corporation pretty much guaranteed to abuse non-rich people.
I do not see how is that supposed to be a vision that would help them. Why would you learn when you cant get a job, cant do research and are not worthy of doing analysis? In this vision, all of that will be like playing piano nowadays - nice wholesome but useless hobby.
I dont think the future has to happen that way necessarily, but I also do not see anyone trying to sell happy ai future for the average person. Schmidt was not selling them a happy future vision either. He was trying to convince them to accept the ugly one.
The AI marketing scheme is to devalue the labor of incoming college graduates. The proof of the power of AI is the number of unemployed 20-something losers that middle aged Americans have in their basements.
I'm starting to think that the most likely solution to this problem is that one or more generations leave things in such bad shape that everyone dies. Problem solved, no future generations to be worse off than prior ones!
As someone gen-z, I think that we are just the ones facing the double it and give it to the next generation problem.
i do not doubt that there were people like you who saw the problems and perhaps even wanted to fix it, but I cant help but wonder where it all went wrong.
also there is no guarantee for anything that gen-z wouldn't try to pass it to the next generation either. It's a ticking time bomb, Tick tock.
I think it’s messed up that we’re busy handing it off to the next generation instead of actually doing anything. We should be making things better for the younger generation not passing the buck to them.
> As someone gen-z, I think that we are just the ones facing the double it and give it to the next generation problem.
As I sometimes have to remind my own gen-z child who now unironically is blaming Millennials for the current situation. The Boomers still hold almost all of the reins of power. I want to note, in 1997 the President was born in 1946 (Bill Clinton), in 2007 the President was born in 1946 (George W. Bush), in 2017 the President was born in 1946 (Donald Trump), and in 2027 the President will have been born in 1946 (Donald Trump). I am 40, at no point in my entire life has anyone in my generation held any meaningful political or economic power in this country.
I point this out, because I agree with you, but I also want to point out that a big part of this problem is that Gen-X and Millennials basically never had a chance to impose their generational spirits on the world, they've been completely overshadowed by Boomers their entire lives. Gen-Z is now entering the workforce in a world controlled by a 3 generations back, rather than by the prior generation, and so that problematic attitude of selfishness that Boomers brought to every aspect of life persists because they're still in power.
I'm right there with you on breaking the cycle, but that starts with gaining the power to have a choice.
The difference is in whether you believe, by your own heuristics, that your observations are a reasonable sample of whatever broader reality is in question. We all may say anything about our experiences and observations and be told, "No, you're in a bubble" - and we could be wrong, or that other person might be in a bubble!
Point is: Just say it. If you think the parent is in a bubble, just express the opinion. You don't even have to mount an argument or present evidence, but there's really no value in calling somebody's opinion "weird" just because, essentially, "anybody could be wrong".
In general HN has been enamored by AI, with the sheen falling off only in the past quarter. This has matched with most people on HN being far more tech aware than the average user.
The issues with GenAI have also been couched to match observed reality.
——-
The point being, - You can have your experience, and you can talk about it to build a better understanding of reality.
So who has driven the 1000x increased usage of AI in the past year or two? My mother is in her 60s and uses Gemini every day. These data centers aren’t being built for no reason.
That's also because traditional google.com has become a product search engine instead of a knowledge search engine. So far at least, the AI results are mostly free of product placement and thus automatically 10x more useful than the first few pages of search engine results (but probably not for long).
I have many times now searched Google for an error message or similar and either gotten no results or been unable to get it to search for what I actually told it to search for instead of some vaguely similar but completely unhelpful phrase. The LLMs will find a link to a bug tracker or stack overflow. It’s crazy how much worse Google search results are now than they used to be.
> It’s crazy how much worse Google search results are now than they used to be.
I could not agree more. Each time I do a google search, I feel like I've stepped into a severe reality distortion field. The results are simply WORTHLESS. It's not just that the AI summary at the top answers the wrong question, but the sequence of hits thereafter wander off into the weeds almost immediately. I routinely have to constrain the search in multiple ways (time bounds, specific word rejection, etc) just to get one or two relevant hits.
Frankly, I think I'm going to have to MOVE AWAY FROM GOOGLE to a subscription-based search service just to get any useful search results again.
> Frankly, I think I'm going to have to MOVE AWAY FROM GOOGLE to a subscription-based search service just to get any useful search results again.
I would absolutely do this, but the only subscription search service i know about is Kagi, which is a bit too AI-forward for my taste. I wish there was a way i could subscribe to "google but 2007 google but with updated results"
Yes, Google search was good until they made it bad for profit and people still used it anyway because they'd lost the ability to do without it. We're in the era of being trained to rely on AI in the same way. If you think it will remain good, you haven't paid attention to the last ten years.
I don’t even think it’s good now. Sure, they’ll often give you a link. But sometimes they’ll just insist there definitely is a page that they’re pulling their made up info from but fail to provide a link, outright fabricate a link, or provide a reference that simply isn’t consistent with the purported summary. I’m sure the inevitable product placement won’t help matters.
If the AI results were so undeniably good, google would let me turn them off and let user preference prove it. I verify those AI results when i fail to avoid reading them, and they're wrong a shockingly high percent of the time.
At least partially the usage is driven by free plans. I use Gemini and ChatGPT for free. I will not pay for them unless traditional web search will be killed (google quality is subjectively on a downward trajectory for the last few years). My employer pays for AI but IMHO it's driven by a panic level FOMO, not evidence.
Probably too early for this, but I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. Evil acts made real by the decisions of those at the top, and the rest of us reject the acts. But quitely we accept these acts by being satisfied with verbal protest.
In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a difference when fighting against people's desire to 'take it easy'.
Humans will always compete, there's never any rest. AI is never going away. The crowd is booing but they will never act.
Circus and Bread has become Casino and Colleseum. The competition never stops.
What kind of sacrifice are you imagine the students to do here?
And also, that generation got quite a few students who did sacrificed their future in protests just a few years ago. The crackdown was very real and is still ongoing.
I have zero opinion about the state of the world. I'm just making an observation.
Awareness of issues only gets you so far. But it factors into daily decisions. And when it's all too much to bear, we just push it out of mind and continue with our little sphere of influence.
Society is built up this way: everyone has their own little sphere of influence.
Money and power have much larger spheres.
So you either protest enough to cope and move on, or you get angry enough to change.
Again, I have no answers, just observation. I'm fine with AI, despite realizing our economy is eating itself. You slowly begin to realize all we ever do is eat each other, or other things.
Is that an actual observation or theory about how world should work? Because what I wrote was actual observation - students actually being willing to put on work, organize and sacrifice. And another observation that there is no real action they could possibly take and are lazily not taking.
From that point of view, your stance seems more like a theory/ideology you project on the world rather then an observation.
The only way to act is to not produce or consume (to the best of your ability) any slop, and be loud about it. We are being absolutely overrun with low-quality art, prose, and software, and making the production of such unprofitable (and even unfashionable) is the only reasonable action you can take.
That's the danger behind economy and society: we all must be useful in some way. We all have to find 'value' in some way. We take on 'roles' so we can contribute.
Roles are necessary because we simply don't have time to be experts in everything.
The metaphor I'll make here is this: It is much much cheaper for McDonald's to produce a hamburger then for some Michelin rated chef to produce fine cuisine. Society needs to have demand for fine cuisine or we'll all be stuck eating the cheapest, unhealthiest possible fast food.
You're right, we all don't have time to be experts in everything. But that doesn't mean experts aren't valuable, or that experts shouldn't exist.
TBF Hollywood and the streaming sites were already flooding us with low quality content by importing all those 2nd tier foreign-made reality TV shows. I watch maybe 2-3 hours of TV a week now depending on which series I like is airing its 8-10 episode season (down from 15-24 because the good stuff doesn't come for free!).
Anyone that thinks an LLM won't be up to spewing endless Harlequin Romance level prose is in a state of denial. And the cost of tokens continues to drop. This either means the current generation of content gets cheaper or better content becomes affordable through chain of thought token burning. I don't see a problem with that. The problem IMO is pushing a narrative that AI exists primarily to displace humans and the pushback is finally loud enough that it's getting blasted back into the faces of the billionaires. I see that as a good thing. May their endless hedonistic orgy at everyone else's expensive finally become a living nightmare of inadequacy on the hamster wheel of despair
Interesting, because I find hacker news to have both more adoption but also more disdain (as two overlapping subgroups of IT workers / geeks) for AI, and is more informed and worried about future.
In my non-IT life:
1. Vast majority of people have limited awareness and even less care about AI. In fact, they cheerfully consume AI generated Facebook, tiktok and YouTube videos, let alone articles, websites, reviews and emails - my electrician, factory and plumbing male friends like nothing better than to watch random 25 second reels of scantily clad AI women after a hard day work. Other people are enjoying non-existent huskies howling and kittens mewowing, listen to AI muzak on spotify, are amazed by non-existent weird creatures, etc. They are peripherally aware thay chatgpt can make you a nicer email or tell you about something but honestly cannot be bothered much. And then there's the faction that enjoys consuming manufactured outrage. They fall for AI emails and scams and generally blissfully consume massive amounts of ai daily without being aware of it.
2. There are young passionate anti AI zealots who are not in IT. Their passionate cries all too frequently fall on death ears because they have no actual fundamental thorough correct understanding of what GenAI / LLM is, its failure modes, actual consumption, or socio-political risk. At best, they post under every AI video "won't somebody think of the water!". Which, fair enough.
3. It's really only the technically aware folks that I find have any real sense of understanding or concern about AI dangers (as well as being the ones using / championing it the most). It can even be both in same person - as a parent I'm extremely concerned what will employment and political future be for my kids - so I took a part time role as AI focal for my team to better understand and perhaps shape / guide it).
(Yes, I'm quite aware of the risk this is all a "only those who share exact same concerns I do are legit " perspective. I welcome counter arguments :).
It is only spectacular because of the free tiers and the artificially lowered costs of the services. Put the real prices on the OpenAI and Anthropic services, remove the free tier and only than you will have a true picture of how many people are willing to pay to use it.
> It is only spectacular because of the free tiers
The thesis under discussion is "most people hate AI", not "most people will pay for AI". People who hate AI won't sign up to use the tools if they're free or paid QED AI service signups regardless of paid status are useful datapoints for "how many people don't hate AI".
The majority of users will see the convenient answer right in front of them and stop, because their question has been answered. We've seen it again and again across industries, an an accelerating cycle: make it easy, and the users will usually do what you want.
I was able to avoid talking to Gemini, but only by switching to DuckDuckGo and then also doctoring Chromium to run searches using a 'no-AI' option. At least I think I'm avoiding talking to Gemini, but for all I know I'm talking to it right now.
Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen.
Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use.
The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap, competent, cloud-based open source.
??? - My comment doesn't even look like an LLM wrote it.
> It’s against the guidelines.
To be clear:
I wRoTe
- E V E R Y - w o r d -
by [picture ASCII art of "human hand" here]⠀
Do not accuse me of using an LLM as a substitute for thinking.
I do not use LLMs to write any of my Hacker News comments, and I never have.
I have used LLMs to help me search for information, but I have never once in my life posted the outputs of an LLM into a post verbatim as my own. That's laziness.
I'm not dismissing LLMs here. They produce better writing than a lot of humans. They are fantastic tools for constructing media, for getting work done, and for furthering your own capabilities.
But I curate my thoughts and craft my arguments. That sort of wanton dismissal of my comments is worse than using an LLM as a substitute for thinking. That's real "human slop".
Is that organic growth as people actually want to use it, or it's being foisted upon everyone. I use it everyday willingly, but I'm not sure that's true globally.
I opened a grocery store where anyone can walk in, take whatever they want, and walk out without having to pay for it. No grocery store has ever seen the level of customer growth as mine!
The reason for all the LLM spend & forced adoption is to make LLMs a critical part of everyone's processes while it's cheap/free, and then crank up the price once it's too late to easily back out. Just like I will jack up the price on my grocery store once all the fools at competing stores who are charging their customers money go out of business, and I'm the only one left in the area, leaving everyone (except for me!) worse off than where they started.
> Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
The Western media is stoking these fears.
Asia is embracing AI. Japan is using it in anime. India is going wild with large and small business usage. All of my friends in India report how popular it is, and how they're using it to get work done. I don't even have to mention China.
I am sick of how our media is brainwashing people to hate one of the most important technological developments in our lifetime.
They tried doing this during the internet era too. When I was a kid, every newspaper was going on about how awful the internet was. Didn't stop me from jumping on IRC and learning to program.
Every single time disruption happens, there's a cacophony of ire and disdain. Musicians that hated "electronic" music. Digital photography. This one just happens to be broader and even more impacting, so you're hearing it everywhere.
These tools are immensely useful. They can empower individuals with superpowers, like wearing an exoskeleton.
The conversation is never about monopolization or consolidation of power, which is how this should be articulated. Instead, it's always "AI bad" or "think of the water". That is 10000% the wrong framing.
The people running these companies give interviews every few months where they gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs. The people building this technology are the ones creating the hatred you’re seeing.
> The people running these companies give interviews every few months where the gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs.
That was not the original narrative by any company. I was here ten years ago when WaveNet and DeepDream were first published.
The media started shitting on this stuff immediately. DALL-E and Midjourney were not describing themselves as artist destroyers. GPT-3 was not hailed as a white collar job killer. Yet the news media hounded the industry relentlessly.
Labs started co-opting this narrative from the news media to create FOMO for investors and possible customers.
I work in AI. I had a coworker quit a job four years ago because his sister had a long talk with him that "AI destroyed art", which is something she learned from YouTube. Four years ago.
No AI CEO was saying any of this stuff back then. It was all seeded by the news media and certain YouTubers.
I can remember when John Oliver was joking around with Midjourney and DeepDream on his show and laughing about how fun and cool it was. He can't do that now because he'd be crucified for it.
I can go back and do an archeological dig if you like.
I am a working artist. Professional visual artists were furious about DALL-E and Midjourney immediately. If you didn’t see this, or you weren’t aware of it, it’s a self-selection problem.
Sam Altman was talking about how we neeeed UBI because AI was going to take everyone’s job very early in the development of LLMs. I have no idea why you don’t remember that, but it’s in writing everywhere.
Oh sure. But that was a different tone and audience.
The "it's stealing" arguments have quieted down. Especially since there are weights trained on fully licensed materials by Adobe and others.
Now that code models can do it, it's a moot point. Data can be found anywhere, and models are pretty good at generalizing out of domain, not unlike human brains.
Engineers finding out these models are good is drawing a lot of the same "slop" / "clanker" arguments that non-artists have been using. These arguments are much less interesting than arguments about copyright and control.
This is a tortured line of reasoning. There's nothing confusing about what's happening - people can have every reason to hate something without it meaning that they are "pretending" nothing is happening or not preparing for it (which may mean fighting to protect people in some way, and planning for losing that battle, in equal measures).
It's strange that your comment puts "fear of change" right there next to one of the actual concrete reasons. Usually the people disparaging negative attitudes about AI say "fear of change" to avoid talking about the obvious reasons.
For college graduates, LLM tech is an existential threat to their livelihoods by making it so much harder to start a career without connections or pedigree.
If no one is hiring, connections or pedigree need to get extraordinarily elite before you can leverage them to get an entry-level software developer job.
It's very unclear what you're trying to say. Disliking something that is going to harm your future is going to harm you? You might as well say "don't care about your future". But if your dislike was for a different reason, it wouldn't harm you? Both implications seem nonsensical.
The context was a specific booing. Nobody said anything like your quote. This is a straw man in the context of this thread. I use AI every day, and I'd give anything for it to be destroyed (though if I had a magical wish, I'd make some more nuanced change, not just destroy it).
"Refuse to use them" is a strawman. Of course the graduates will use them. They will do whatever it takes to make a living. What they hate is that either they won't make a living or they will make a worse living because of AI.
Do you think that protesting that X is happening is the same as pretending that X is not happening? Or are you saying that X is happening anyway, so you might just as well learn to like it? That's some highly dubious rhetoric.
While I disagree on the assumption, I do agree on the pragmatism of the proposed approach. It is important to see things as they are. The tech is genuinely neat.
However, this is not the issue. The issue is that the tech is being hijacked by corps and already on the verge of being annoying. I my corner of the world, I get high level company message of 'use AI' ( which include goals that say so ), but also -- already -- ridiculous sets of limits on how much I an use it ( our context recently got nearly zeroed ; we no longer can upload unsanctioned files ). And if you want something beyond email summarization machine, you need special approvals. This thing is already being neutered at multiple levels and it barely even started to blossom.
Add to this clear indicators that our dictators have no intention of being benevolent and it is not exactly a surprise why younger generations are not exactly thrilled. I like this tech and I hate the retardation I am subjected to daily resulting directly from its outputs.
> I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
Why not? Most people do. There are still about 10,000 working blacksmiths in America.
Unironically I think we need more lifestyle and technological diversity in the world. End the monopolies that make running your own X harder. More Amish adjacent microcommunities and less monoculture. Federalism for tech / lifestyle creep.
The only reason these things seem inevitable is because our shared delusions make it so. We would have more power if we weren’t all so afraid to exercise it.
> I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
You imply that the change is inevitable. AI isn't inevitable.
It requires governments to allow the construction of datacentres and for companies to be able to spend vast amounts of money they don't have for the hope of future return, which will inevitably result in a too-big-to-fail cascade which gets money dragged out of the middle/lower class via slogans like "we're all in this together".
None of this is required. The idea that humanity is stuck on this future pathway is frankly bunk.
> but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing
I don't think people are pretending the world isn't changing. I think people are right to be deeply skeptical about the direction we're headed in. More powerful tech companies dug in deeper into our lives, more government surveillance, harder times for small companies and more influence from mega-corps.
Lying, cheating and game-rigging at industrial scale powered by machine intelligence. He's lucky all he got were boos.
Why would a bunch of folks studying for white collar work, be happy with a technology that a bunch of capitalists (literally) keep selling as eliminating white collar workers?
notably, I haven’t seen any ACTUAL technical improvements from LLMs, just a massive amount of slop. The ‘improvements’ are in volume of slop, not quality.
In reality they like LLMs because they're the highest user of them. Pew reported 64% of U.S. teens used AI chatbots, while a Harvard study found 51% of ages 14–22 had used generative AI at some point.
What you answer on a survey is meaningless. Look at their actions.
And no they're not being pressured to use LLMs, standards or expectations have not gone up dramatically.
Your last sentence is factually not true. Friends across five different companies report that LLM adoption is now a key metric in their performance review.
It’s mostly not students working those sorts of jobs. But I know people taking architecture and design courses that are heavily pushing LLM use. Hopefully that doesn’t exist outside of SF, though.
“Revealed preferences” are not the same as actual preferences. Treating them the same is what led us to the current situation we have with everyone addicted to social media and miserable. Also, expectations are not the only thing that could pressure someone to use these tools. If all your peers were using these tools and finishing their work in a fraction of the time it takes you, and getting the same or better grades, you would probably use them too.
What you do says a lot more about you than what you answer in a survey.
The obvious difference between LLM adoption and social media, if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds, is that there is social pressure to use social media. Your friends are organizing and bonding on social media. None of this exists with LLMs. There is no social pressure to have an AI girlfriend, quite the opposite.
Also I preempted the "if all your peers were using these tools..." none of this applies to students. In fact i'm sure most teacher would prefer not getting AI slop. Standards have not increased.
Please read the entire comment next time before replying
Social pressure from one's peers is not the only form of pressure. I don't think I'm the one who can credibly be accused of not reading the entire comment or not thinking for longer than 10 seconds in this exchange.
Cars are a great example, because some parts of the world were so excited by the prospect of the automotive age that they bulldozed entire parts of their cities to make way for huge arterials and parking lots without looking closer at what they were throwing away.
That is not a contradiction. Just look at social media use where you can observe the same.
People can hate on AI e.g. because they see it as a symbol of inequality and billionaires deciding important things over our heads and also actively use it.
Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to be the “good” outcome that e.g. OpenAI is playing for. I don’t understand why any of you think that’s good or positive or desirable.
Well.....there is the 'lump of labor' fallacy that states that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in the economy. There is also the thought that a super intelligent AI would go the route of the Buddha having run all simulations under the virtual Bodhi tree and become benevolent. But most people think its going to be the Terminator so.......
The pessimistic case is based on the misconception that AI is some kind of a superhuman. Our current AI models are trained on human data, which has an unfortunate side effect which causes them to think and behave like a human. But as soon as we learn to train them without human data, we find out that AI is just a supercalculator, and it won't have any own will or agency.
Will and agency are primal biological instincts, which a pure intelligence doesn't have. It doesn't want or need anything. Therefore it won't act.
A superintelligence with human primal instincts would be scary indeed, but obviously we don't want to build that.
Increasingly AI's are trained using reinforcement learning [1] so these are not really human tasks but things like trying to prove theorems, play games, solve code problems and getting feedback from compilers and similar. A lot of the early pop science coverage of AI was around the ideas of "data walls" and constrains of human data, most of which just wasn't really true or long term true anyway.
What you mention of training without human data seems to me an impossibility. Unless you're talking about going back to programming an AI via traditional methods rather than relying on machine learning (which might not be impossible, hard to prove it as such at least).
I don't think you can divorce intelligence from all biological aspects and just get computational power. It's an interesting question though..
> that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI
Setting aside whether a permanent underclass will be an outcome or not - is it not a bit incompatible to simultaneously believe that all jobs will be gone and that a subsistence UBI is necessarily very bad?
The way I see it, if strong AGI really replaces all jobs, then even a subsistence level UBI (by the new post-AGI standards) will be a world with ubiquitous resources and post-scarcity wealth where people pretty much spend their time how they want. Yes, perhaps it might be an "underclass" in the sense that Musk and Altman meanwhile settled Mars with some privatized space colonization, but I might still be orders of magnitudes richer than I am today - so why should I care, except for status games?
It's basically like someone in the pre-industrial age complaining that the industrial revolution will lead to the permanent underclass of people who currently live on welfare in developed countries. But this is surely a wonderful outcome from the pre-industrial peasant's perspective - even poor people in the western world live better than middle age kings!
> post-scarcity wealth where people pretty much spend their time how they want
In a true post-scarcity society where Musk et al are off colonizing Mars while you're stuck on Earth on UBI, doing what exactly? In such a future, AI has automated boring chores but also everything else. Art, movies, cooking, everything you might find enjoyable. So lots of free time to do what? Work on yourself? Nobody will care. Engage with your hobbies? Nobody will care to see them, so unless you're the kind of person who enjoys their inner life without interaction with others, be aware nobody will read your AI novel nor watch your AI movie, because they can make one specifically tailored for themselves.
To me this seems like a hellish future, a mix of "Farenheit 451" with people staring at wall screens (only AI-tailored for them) or the "basic income but restless" people from Earth in "The Expanse". It's even worse than "A Brave New World" because human workers will be mostly unneeded. Their basic necessities covered, but nothing for them to do, no real struggle other than boredom. Any challenges that remain must be artificially self-imposed, because the real challenges will be for a chosen few.
> Work on yourself? Nobody will care. Engage with your hobbies? Nobody will care to see them
But this is already the case now, no? The only person you do self-improvement or hobbies for is yourself or your closest social circle. We are already worse at everything than the professionals in the respective fields and also do not despair about it.
> To me this seems like a hellish future, a mix of "Farenheit 451" with people staring at wall screens (only AI-tailored for them) or the "basic income but restless" people from Earth in "The Expanse".
I think a more optimistic take people usually bring up is the Culture series. But yes, of course ultimately it all boils down to us being obsolete. That does not give me worse existential angst than life (to which there's no real point) already does, however, so I don't see it as worse than the status quo.
> But this is already the case now, no? The only person you do self-improvement or hobbies for is yourself or your closest social circle.
Well, you could be a professional in the field instead of a hobbyist. But not anymore (in this scenario). And even your closest social circle won't care about your hobbies, when they can easily produce the same. Even hobbyists have a (small) audience -- unless they are completely self-absorbed, which I know some people are, but let's leave them aside for a second -- and that'll be gone.
> We are already worse at everything than the professionals in the respective fields and also do not despair about it.
Yes, I'm saying in this dystopian future the professionals will be gone too. And then you won't be able to aspire to becoming a professional either, nothing left for you to look forward or aspire to. So what will we do with all our free time? Learn to cook? Nobody will be impressed, the Cook-bot in every kitchen will do it way better than you.
> But yes, of course ultimately it all boils down to us being obsolete
> It's basically like someone in the pre-industrial age complaining that the industrial revolution will lead to the permanent underclass of people who currently live on welfare in developed countries. But this is surely a wonderful outcome from the pre-industrial peasant's perspective - even poor people in the western world live better than middle age kings!
Wow, it took more than a century to get to live better than middle age kings. Do you think the people that lost their means to make a good living in 1800s care that we live so much better today ? It is incredible how so many tech people lack empathy for how regular people think or want to live.
I liked the Culture series too, but how they got to the presented post scarcity world is never described. How many generation lived a worse life than their predecessors? Do you think the current or future bi and trillionaires are willing to pay everyone a decent wage to live through this transition period ?
> Wow, it took more than a century to get to live better than middle age kings. Do you think the people that lost their means to make a good living in 1800s care that we live so much better today ? It is incredible how so many tech people lack empathy for how regular people think or want to live.
I noticed that comes more from a place of not imagining themselves being the subject of the possible terrible consequences.
Many tech people think in abstract terms, they look back in history without thinking much about how the life of a normal person during a major transitional period was impacted, it's just a sequence of facts, not a collection of human stories.
It's sad because it completely detaches many of these folks from having empathy, yes, change is the only constant but if our aim is to progress as a species we should also be progressing on how to make inevitable changes less miserable for those impacted. I see a lot in tech people the thinking of technological advancement for the sake of technological advancement, not for building a better world for every human, humans tend to get in the way of major technological changes so in their minds they prioritise the advancements without caring much about the human aspect.
It's quite baffling to me because those are usually smart people, I'd expect smart people to have better holistic thinking.
To everyone replying here: if you think that the owners of the machines will have any incentive to keep you alive once they no longer need you, or your reading of history is that kings and capitalists have ever willingly made concessions to their power out of benevolence, you are going to have a bad time.
Did you ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation? The current trajectory is like the Ship's Computer. It know everything humanity has learned and can do a lot. But it can't explore and lacks desires and agency. That's why they made a big deal about the character Data being an entirely new kind of AI. Of course Star Trek has a very different economic system and there is a book called Trekenomics about that. So optimistically people live for themselves and don't persue labor they despise. Half of Americans hate their jobs and live for the dream of retirement when they get to actually do what they want.... But they don't have the same energy anymore.
>Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI?
The optimistic case is technological deflation. Where goods and services become so cheap, you don't need a lot of money to afford them. If you can have a robot sort packages like,
Why have a human do that? I don't think there's a person alive whose life goal is to sort packages. A human will lose a job, but only a job they accepted because the human needed money. Well if the package sorting drops the price of things, they don't need as much money. Now if every job is robotic, everything becomes cheaper to the point we don't need money for very many things at all.
OK, and in a world where this technology is broadly available and not controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat, I can see how this could be a good outcome. But that’s not the situation we’re in.
For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.
>controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat
This has been the situation for CPUs for decades. We now carry a 1980 cray super computer in our pockets.
>For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.
They won't need to engineer a Terminator style genocide of mankind. Man will kill each other in another war, like we always do. Biological imperatives mean we all kill each other until resources are abundant for those left standing. Then the winners of that war have a baby boom, their children are boomers for the next 80 years, and we start all over again.
The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.
hey now, they should be grateful they get enough tokens for their appointments with ClaudeMD for their statistically below par data labeling performance, we could reduce the allowance if we keep hearing that kind of talk. We have been very generous with portions at the automatic canteen as well, that energy could be better allocated to the maintenance bots in the server farm.
Elon Musk is busy arguing to massively cut social security because it's fiscally unsustainable. He's also claimed that AI will create so much wealth that 'everyone can have a penthouse if they want'. These beliefs do not seem consistent, but the instinct to fight taxation is extremely consistent.
Sure. The machine gods are benevolent gods who care deeply for their creator-species. We are freed from labour and troubles into a paradise, to eat peaches and cream and make love under the sun. Rich or poor, we'll all be emperors of our domain, free to do as we please. Our lives keep getting better and better with technological progress, at least in the scope of our social-capitalist system. They will only get better until they end.
I don't think you need to worry yourself so much on my account friend. You asked, I told. Let's keep it at that. Also feel free to keep the name-calling to yourself.
You asked for an optimistic case and he gave you one. One thing I really like about LLMs is that they don't engage in this type of petty deceit where they ask a question and then insult you for answering.
100% agree. There's no substance to the argument, just the same cultish rhetoric from the aristocracy trying to fleece us into thinking that, while they simultaneously push mass layoffs and aim to drive down the price of labor, they are actually doing this to benefit us in the long run. "Just wait," they say. Once the AI future comes to fruition, you will eat "peaches and cream" and "bask in the sun all day." "You will dance in this utopian paradise." How could anyone possibly take this seriously, and are we expected not to see, plainly, the self-interested agenda being dressed up in the language of collective uplift?
Yep, the Time Machine minus the fear, the cannibalism, the suffering, the apathy, the reduced capacity for engagement etc are essentially the best-case scenario, which takes us out of HG Wells enough for it not to matter much as a cautionary tale.
I'm more "the kids are showing healthy skepticism of corporate dystopia but AI is vital" camp, here is my argument:
1. Yes the risk of AI corporate/authoritarian dystopia is HUGE, we'll have to fight for our rights MANY times this century. Transcendental AI takeover is probably less of a risk than humans in power using armies of robots and Stasi-AI surveillance.
2. Our current economy is bs and the last century of 'relative prosperity' was a bit of luck + tech and population boom + globalist exploitation and massaging debt. We've tried variations of capitalism, socialism, communism, there doesn't seem to be a silver bullet.
3. AI is not like other tech, and tech does not 'create jobs', it creates business opportunities which up until now have always translated to jobs. We've never had a "drop-in replacement" for a human employee, it could replace anything from 40 to 99% of jobs.
Those are the risks, the potential rewards are:
- OpEx converted to CapEx making almost any kind of business extremely efficient
- Nobody has to spend weeks away from family or risking their health in dangerous or degrading jobs
- Extremely cheap housing and infrastructure with everything from mining to construction to maintenance automated. Fixing the broken window effect of rundown neighbourhoods and generally increasing quality of life
- Almost nobody needs to commute, or do all the other things around commuting, vastly reducing transport, congestion and pollution
- Food can be grown in better ways, even at home, with less mono-cropping, pesticides and waste. Your robot can weed by hand, work the land 24/7 and with the combined experience of millions of farmers, botanists etc
- Healthier society, no need for convenience food if your robot can cook and clean, and it can make far tastier traditional food than McDonalds
- Many products can be made at home or locally. Mass production favoured big dumb machines but a robot can build you a table exactly how you want it, with appropriate materials rather than commoditising everything down to shitty MDF off-gassing formaldyhide. You don't have time to pick through recycled wood - your robot does
- Our existing road network can have far higher capacity because barely anyone needs to commute and idiots don't hold up traffic or drive distracted. Streets aren't jammed with parked cars, taxis instantly have 20% extra capacity as they don't need to carry a driver. We may even get rid of or severely reduce traffic lights, not to mention safety
- Anything in your life that involves expensive repairs or buying more dumb shit is improved, every robot is a plumber with 100 million job experience, so many problems are solved with a machine that combines cheap labour and wide expertise
"Oh but humans need purpose" I just don't think 90% of jobs provide purpose. Purpose is raising kids, spending time with friends and family, working on some project, art, community improvement - it's absolutely insane we spend so much time working on bs.
Even just one of these things coming true is revolutionary - we have turned into fat commuter drones stress eating stuck in traffic thinking about some abstract spreadsheet report so far removed from reality but stealing our sleep and peace. AI isn't the problem here its corporate greed and concentration of power that AI could give
I watched the whole commencement, and it seems that Eric Schmidt himself was booed louder than anything "AI" that came before him in the program. The students had strong reactions to almost every statement he made. If you listen to the other speakers... it's generally positive / calm. The media characterization of this event seems inaccurate, to be generous.
This caught my attention because I really enjoy hearing ES speak about AI. Directionally, I’m listening for a roadmap. Is the problem I’m solving right now even worthwhile? As an avid user of these tools, am I in the driver seat or am I a passenger? I feel like the latter.
For some context, according to the daily beast, student groups at the university distributed fliers urging students to “turn their backs to the stage” or “boo” during the former executive’s speech. The fliers stated that they wanted to “make it clear that the University of Arizona and greater community that we represent, whether from Tucson or beyond, do not support abusers being platformed.” Schmidt was accused by Michelle Ritter in a 2021 lawsuit of “forcibly raping” her during a trip off the coast of Mexico and later initiating sex without her consent in 2023 during the annual Burning Man festival.
When the ramen noodles run out, how many will begrudgingly create a linkedin account and pretend to embrace AI while they fight for the remaining/dwindling job openings?
Question to your question: How many will actually get a job?
When the system fails to reward compliance, that begrudging conformity will eventually curdle into systemic disruption.
History has proven so time & time again.
Lock a massive class of highly educated, financially desperate young people out of the economy.. they won't just starve in silence.
They organize unions, radicalize politics, and ultimately rewrite the rules of the game.
Drones and robot killer dogs a la Back Mirror will keep everybody in check until they die an early preventable death from being lied to about COVID, etc.
History might rhyme, until it doesn't, due to paradigm shifts like these.
Expectation: In 10 years, killer drones will corral us away from quarantine zones to forcibly infect millions of hapless civilians. The proletariat will revolt and wage civil war against the state, sending millions of shock troops to fight for representation in government or dismantle the governing body itself. They will die peacefully, knowing they were right.
Reality: People will scroll TikTok for another decade and contract sedentary lifestyle diseases that they blame on others instead of themselves. Constant influence campaigns and surveillance will keep them divided and give them new scapegoats to assuage their mounting insecurity and shame for their generation. They will die outraged, knowing they were wrong.
Yes, but to your previous point, the propaganda system is well tuned enough to pit the blue half of that populist contempt against the red half, even though you and I both know it's orchestrated by the uniparty. The only thing that comes to mind recently that bridges the gap is the Epstein stuff, but people are easily distracted with aforementioned propaganda and mindless scrolling.
Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but not them.. where does that end?
It's worse than having to pick one position or the other: both are hypocritical, and both are deceptive hype mongering.
Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to use that expertise?
Totally agree — if AI tools are already or nearly at the point where you can say “write a program to do X” and it does it, that’s like telling people they need to learn skills to order something at McDonald’s. The goal is for the barrier to entry to be basically zero. Oh sure today there are things like “I made a claude.md file that does this and I wrote a really clever prompt!!” But the goal is for that work to be deleted as well — where is the magic skill that is / will be needed?
I use coding agents every day for non-trivial projects. But I can definitely say that a prompt of the form "Write a program that does X" will earn you a git rollback of a mess, unless what you want has been done a bazillion times before.
Peak efficiency in using coding agents is a weird balancing act at this point in the development of coding agents: being too incremental and detailed is inefficient, but if you let it rip on a task with multiple sub tasks you have to be ready for the coding agent to get utterly lost while providing you with only hints at what made it to lose its way. It's like an inexperienced intern with a high opinion of its competency.
LLMs trained for coding are most productive when pushed to their limits, but that's where they start to fall down.
> run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich...
I don't get people who believe this. Why would an AI company provide a service that someone can sell at 10x the price, mostly unchanged? Why wouldn't the AI company sell it directly?
Wholesale vs retail. I think the highest value, biggest markets will have products straight from the AI labs (ie legal review) but there's a lot of "last mile" type stuff that it's probably not as economical for anthropic to care about but maybe for some other company.
Both? The messaging from the last 30+ years has already been that the only way to be successful is to develop your own capital, not to get a job. He's saying that learning how to use AI will be essential in developing the next generation capital.
if they were selling crack cocaine, he would say “young people need to learn how to use Crack Cocaine to be successful”.
There's nothing to learn, just some CEOs trying to get you hooked on their product and a bunch of hucksters trying to be the number one "AI thought leader"
"While the computer connected people, "democratized knowledge" and lifted many out of poverty, it also carried a darker side, Schmidt said.
"The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you're using now, also degraded the public square," he said. "They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society."
Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer - and was immediately met with boos."
In other words, he tried to promote Silicon Valley's shift away from one "business model" (e.g., search, social media) to another
YouTube is among the "platforms" that are "rewarding outrage" and "degrading the public square" in order to support an ad services business. The days of this "business model" may be numbered
As one unsustainable model fails, there is always another one to replace it. Maybe people are noticing the pattern
All these "business models" share something in common: use of a computer and a Silicon Valley middleman spying on peoples' computer use
LLMs (the current AI approach) are definitely useful tools BUT the cost of training and inference and creating bigger and bigger model to improve the "intelligence" is extremely high and the consequence of this high cost is having negative impact of average people whether it is in terms of job losses or rising cost of electricity and other stuff.
Unless the industry is able to reduce the cost drastically and soon, it will have negative impact on all of us.
> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.”
This sounds cynical if there is a kinglike president, surrounded by a small clique of tech billionaires who all are becoming increasingly open about the kind of future they want to realise.
It's just wildly unprofessional from management, in no particular order my frustrations are:
1. A majority of planning documents from management have become LLM output, which no longer actually matches the desired/required work (but it sure looks nice if you don't have to read all of it).
2. Management undertones are pretty clearly: "Figure out how to use AI to replace yourself."
3. The visibility of leaderboards that promote spend with no relationship to output - ex: employees who spend the most tokens are rewarded, even when there's no equivalent boost in productivity.
---
My take is that AI is actually a managerial crucible - aka, a great filter for companies with poor management practices and processes.
Company management needs to shift in response to AI more than engineering, and I don't think most are prepared.
> Basically, here's a solution. Find problems for it.
Same where I work, and I suppose everywhere. It's upsetting, and there's no way of politely voicing concerns about this without looking like a luddite... which is obviously bad for you and your job security.
I think this is a major reason behind the backlash against AI. In the past, people celebrated tech billionaires because there was a widespread belief that, someday, they might join their ranks. But wealth inequality may have now reached a point where that illusion no longer works.
I believe that AI is truly revolutionary, but I struggle to feel sympathy to these large companies who (while building tremendously powerful tools) also work on extracting as much money they can from users, potentially making millions of them redundant while paying as little as possible for used texts, codes. In some sense this is how capitalism is supposed to work. But I am not required to like the bosses who pontificate about the future opportunities.
(A somewhat contrasting behaviour is say l deepseek who releases their models to the public, and I would not boo them)
The people behind pushing 'everyone needs to learn to code' are now the same pushing 'everyone must use AI'. The same Eric Schmidt that was pedaling 'I assume that everybody here agrees that globalization is wonderful' to a Davos crowd.
The guy has always looked for way to keep humans as chattel.
I know billionaires are generally out of touch with the trials of the common citizen, but can they be so out of touch that they think the promise that AI will take your job is going to resonate?
It is interesting that his speech started strong and then ran aground and sunk on the same dangerous reef he began by pointing out:
“The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you’re using now, also degraded the public square,” he said. “They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society.”
The biggest issue I see with discourse around AI is you have two voices: one is of the tech CEO's and other elites that talk about it largely in the abstract and how it's going to take everyone's jobs, and then you have folks on Twitter/X that talk about things that they are actually using it for.
Generally what I found listening to both sides is the latter group is very optimistic about AI and what it can do while the former group tries to be optimistic but just ends up coming off as doomery about it. And the problem that the AI space has right now is the doomery group is just more visible to the average person and thus the average person gets their opinion informed by that group.
I really wish there was a way to better surface the sentiment that I see on X about AI, the folks there aren't talking about how AI will replace you at work and make you obsolete, they use AI every day and they know that's just not realistic, not now and probably not ever. Rather they talk about all the cool things that it can help you do now, and how it can be a force multiplier in the best sense.
The problem with the elites talking about AI is everything they say is just so detached and abstract. And their giant egos prevent them from seeing the damage they are doing to the field.
And how about the group of kids who are just graduating college, and entering a job market where it's non-abstractly harder to to land a junior role as it's been in decades? It's the elites who have their finger on that scale, not the twitter folks.
I just don't think that "I use AI to help plan a vacation or make a funny picture to share with my friends or create a study plan" outweighs the very obvious challenges that AI is creating for new graduates as they enter the job market. I'm sure even that a lot of these students used AI to cheat.
But the stuff from the rich bosses isn't just rhetoric. These students are graduating into an extremely messy job market and AI is directly to blame. That affects students in a huge way.
AI Billionaire and AI Executive cohorts are openly advocating in media and the press for total job replacement by AI within a narrow time frame. Dario Amodei has spent years braying that AI will replace most or all jobs within half a decade; Sundar Pichai has openly told working folks the equivalent of "Good luck, fuckers" (his 2-DEC-2025 remarks about the working class "working through" social disruption forcibly imposed on them by his billionaire class); Microsoft's AI ghoul went on a media spree this year bragging that knowledge-work will be gone in eighteen months.
It doesn't matter whether or not any of this is true, because these same students - the law students, the pre-med students, the political science students, the psychology and history and econ and tech students and the like, they all have to write essays about this, read newspaper articles about it, read journals about it. They see the actions taken by this same cohort of AI boosters in blocking regulatory reforms, in blocking social programs, in blocking work protections and social safety net expansions and tax reforms. These students aren't stupid, they see the naked hypocrisy on display by the people telling them the sky is falling and are rightfully enraged at it.
You are telling fresh graduates, saddled with student debt, at a time of pride in their own accomplishments and uncertainty in their job prospects, to their face, that they have no future and that's going to be peachy-keen because everyone other than them will be better off as a result.
It feels also this speech was not really in any way related to AI per se.
It was the Ayn Rand-esque hero, an Übermensch, who of course formed Google out of nothing proclaiming that individualism and egoism are the way to go, that they have a small alcove at best in between the productive assets of the factory owner who wields the materials to his will and creates his perfect city of perfect design that needs none of your contribution. That these graduates aren't be be valued by their creativity or self-worth but by the marginal contribution they may have towards his empire, to be discarded once they don't have anything to give. He's the ultimate factory owner, the owner of the factory that makes everything and brings light to all, and the masses just don't appreciate his brilliance and the brilliance of the other tech bros.
None if it is particular to AI, it's just that AI is the latest tool with which the workers of the world are deprived of the means of production. They know that capitalism is healthiest when the wealth is distributed, and here the Randian hero tells them not that the wealth will be distributed, but only the labour and the AI will do most of the labour, and that the human contribution is a penny for themselves and 99 cents to those that already have a hundred billion, and excited with an incomparable glee Eric expresses that the datacenter that powers the AI will be the panopticon through which the factory owner will judge the productivity of his workers.
It is such a horrifyingly dismal picture he painted right on their faces and if they would just allow that data center and stop booing him they'd understand, surely they must understand that he's the hero, that he and his Rearden Steel will make them the shining city that the unwashed masses for their utter collective incompetence cannot.
It is of course, one step between this view and them being punished for having that view. One small step between being declared a luddite and the powers that be deciding that luddites aren't a thing we're to have.
> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.”
This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way."
Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.
It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.
To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsibility to prevent the AI revolution from being as bad. All evidence points to it being worse exactly because of corporations like Google. I get that this guy is only the former CEO but the speech seems kinda tone-deaf to the reality here, and I bet that's why he got booed.
Was commenting on the quote in particular. It’s just a version of “the future is in your hands” which you can find in one form or another in many graduation speeches. Just seems odd to me to read a cliche line as something cynical.
Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech:
> “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.”
I’m pretty sure I heard the same quote at my high school and university graduation ceremonies, and those were many years before AI. It’s a standard way to inspire new grads, right?
> It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly.
It's not entirely within the power of the creators of technology to control how it is used. In our case, they actively market the technology as replacement for human intelligence, at which it fails miserably and yet companies force it through. I would love to see a more grounded frontier AI company, but beyond certain safety measures, they can't stop people from misusing it.
I think the booing was less about Schmidt specifically and more about the class of 2026 processing what it means to graduate into an AI-transformed economy from someone who personally profited from the last transformation.
He's not wrong that "the future is unwritten" — but that's cold comfort when you're holding a degree that might be worth less in 3 years than it was the day you started the program. The tech leaders saying "you can shape this" are the same ones whose companies are actively building the tools that might make entry-level knowledge work redundant.
The booing was inarticulate but the sentiment underneath is legitimate: "don't tell us we have agency over a transformation you're driving and we're expected to survive."
Still, I'd rather someone like Schmidt engage with the crowd than retreat to a bubble. At least the friction is out in the open.
It's industrial revolution which doesn't want to happen. Unless the new industrial revolution means those unwilling to attend to billionaires and oligarchs are to be priced out of housing and life in general, this one is swiftly approaching. I mean forget housing, even getting good computer is out of reach by now.
The guy has been a stochastic parrot of A2Z talking points for years. What's new is we have reached the finding out phase of telling an entire generation of children who just spent 6 figures and 4ish years on education that they will be replaced by the irresponsibly deployed toy of the old white dudes who made college that expensive in the first place.
AI as a technology is amazeballs in precisely the same way AI thought leaders, executives and mid-level management are not. And yet, here we are poisoning its innovation with late stage capitalism and privatized panopticons. Yuck.
Rich sex pests engaged in a coordinated effort to destroy #metoo and protect themselves basically as soon as the movement started. You can even see a lot of this in the Epstein files. The backlash to #metoo was larger than the movement ever was (while not referring to the same event, Susan Faludi's Backlash is a great discussion of this).
The effect is that a ton of these guys either experienced no consequence whatsoever or were able to lay low for a couple years and return to their positions of power.
Well, I believe we have officially entered the find out stage... And I love how easily triggered some people are on here by saying anything bad about the Kash Patel of the tech industry. Why can't we all just quietly stop asking his opinion on anything? When's the last time he wrote a single line of code? I'm guessing 30 to 40 years and he's the expert on the future of software engineering?
Eric Schmidt made billions, probably 10s of billions from Google becoming an AI behemoth. The young graduates who can't find a job, will likely not be able to afford a median home in their 20-30s due to their debt growing faster than earnings. It is a stark difference.
"You have the power to shape AI" - So many empty words spoken!
> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.”
How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.
It's a rhetorical attempt to tie "those who dislike AI" to "those who dislike immigrants, and we all know they're super-duper evil".
It's a relatively cheap trick, badly executed.
I think his train of thought is "young graduates generally aren't anti-immigration, so if I insinuate they're anti-immigration if they disagree with me they will be convinced by my argument". I don't think we need to read much more than that into it.
this is how i took it as well. he’s creating a false equivalency between AI and immigrants, and attempting to justify it with “diversity of perspectives” and trying to tell you that to remain intellectually consistent you must embrace or reject both.
I agree. I think it's telling that AI leaders need to rely on fallacious reasoning and trickery to promote their product.
A good product should sell itself.
I feel that AI leaders have been shoving their product down our throats for the last two years (at least).
It's important to realize that those people are sociopaths. They delight in the suffering of the common man through their complete lack of empathy.
Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them being particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.
Also something I noticed: whenever you see them talking about AI, they all seem to have the same smirk on their faces: that “we’re making you a permanent underclass and you just have to deal with it” smirk. They all have it.
> It's important to realize that those people are sociopaths. They delight in the suffering of the common man.
> Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.
I couldn't agree more. Thank you for your comment!
He's just trying to meet the graduates at their intellectual level, since the graduates' boos operate at about the same level of depth.
> What’s the logic here
Tenuous connection between unrelated topics to fit them into larger ingroup/outgroup dynamics is the junkfood of persuasion tactics. Bad for you but addictive anyway. If you look for it you'll see it all the time.
"If you don't like AI, you're a nazi."
And remember: they don't call you a nazi because they think you are. They call you a nazi to make you a valid target.
"This AI was built by a woman, don't you support their cause?.."
It's a pretty classic move. "My political party stands for freedom and prosperity; you can't be against those things, can you?"
Actual generous interpretation: The adaptation required as workplaces adopt AI is the same as the ones immigrants have to go through in a new country. There's new modes of thinking, new workflows and an expanded surface of responsibility. Those that expect an easy definable role they can plug themselves into, to get the comfortable jobs (tm) of yesterday will not find those readily. They are there though, they just look different. The working immigrant (usually) doesn't find a spot for them to plug into, they have to hustle and adapt to find such a spot.
Corporate bosses have been screaming for more "hustle-y" employees for decades so that is nothing new.
That's a pretty good steelman.
I do think there's a gestalt (esp. among younger folks) of "AI is bad", to put it bluntly. An anecdote I saw today was:
parent: we're having dinosaur meat for dinner tonight.
kid: oh, that's just AI.
(i.e. "that's made-up" or "that's silly" or "that's just lies") -- none of which are a positive sentiment)
It means nothing, as you imply. He is improvising and deflects with a point that he thinks will land with his audience and detract from the issue.
Utterances that come out of executive’s mouths don’t have truth values. They’re sounds meant to irritate people’s nervous systems to achieve the exec’s goals.
Relevant Kendall Roy quote: "Words are just uh, what? Nothing. Complicated airflow."
there is no logic - just fallacy. it is a red herring, wrapped up in equivocation. he commits appeal to emotion, non sequitur, false equivalence along the way.
New expansion, AI = artificial immigrant
Somebody said "alien" she thought they said "illegal alien" and signed up!
P.S. I just couldn't resist, sorry
I think he is saying that if you are against AI you are against progress and so "America will no longer be the country that ambitious people want to come to". I don't think there was a point there about immigration being somehow equivalent to AI, that would come out of nowhere.
That seems like a really tenuous connection for him to make if that's what he's doing. I find it difficult to believe that ambitious people outside of a certain niche would refuse to come to the US because of perceived lack of AI progress. They'd refuse/are refusing to come because of the US's increasing hostility to outsiders, cutting of research funding, and subpar living conditions.
He's trying to virtue signal based on an understanding of young people's values that's so unsophisticated that he thinks throwing them the word "immigrant" will get them on his side. And they're obviously smart enough to see through it.
Wouldnt a "diversity or perpsectives" would include those that differ from that of Silicon Valley
Generous interpretation: instead of pearl-clutching over ethnicities and traditionalism America invited the world to immigrate and encouraged diverse ideas and industries. Other societies have shunned even foreign food and music (most countries barely have different races), never mind porn industry ('burn the degenerates'), space travel ('why waste money on the moon'), nuclear power, computers etc. Is AI not yet another industry that is easy to disregard yet potentially transformative?
Corporate interpretation: listen you filthy cattle, gen-AI is bottoming out all our pesky human labour costs and allowing me and my friends to milk every last drop out of this late-stage capitalist nightmare, you better get used to it because from now on 99% of you will just have to make do scraping by in the gig economy, selling your bodies or just generally being dancing monkeys for billionaires - we'll still hire some of you as nurses and waiters because we don't exactly want clankers looking after our kids
Isn't that generous interpretation, like, profoundly idiotic if he meant it? Major multiracial feature of America happened due to slave trade at the time when genocide of native Americans was also going on. Other countries have porn industry, actually a lot of it. Other countries have nuclear power, but America is just in one war claiming it wants to stop the other country from the nuclear power.
Other countries typically have tons of foreign music and entertainment, most notably American music. America is the one that seems to be looking inwards here (due to being dominant on an international market - I am not saying it is sinister).
I think thats missing the point. Being multiracial is a function of being open, not a means to the end. America is a can-do country that generally embraces new things, which includes 'new people' and new ways.
I'm not American but for all its faults I can see it is clearly miles ahead in terms of economics, innovation and generally being the worlds only "real" new-world diverse democracy.
Yes it is pretty much run by corporate interests and yes it has started almost every war in the Middle East in the past century for the benefit of AIPAC. Yes it has skipped almost all the benefits of socialism that I enjoy as a European, and of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world I think ~48 are in North and South America.
Other countries do not "typically have tons of foreign music" - China is 99% ethnic Chinese, black people are basically not even allowed in restaurants there. The same goes for India and much of Africa. Europe is closest and the UK probably bridges the attitudes of Europe and America the most - which is why the UK also pioneered things like computing and multiculturalism.
> How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.
Maybe it ties in because, if you're not excited and enthusiastic about AI and our new Ways of Working, you're a racist. You don't want to be a racist, do you? AI is basically exactly like a black person getting chased by a lynch mob. Do you stand with the racist lynchers? Or with the civil rights movement (the billionaire AI promoters).
> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with.
I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.
It's not clear to me why they booed him. you think for only asserting predictions that benefit him? Not because they agree on those predictions and don't want that future, blame him for this role in it?
From reading the text of the article, and the direct quotes, I'm also unclear on why they booed him.
My guess is because of what he's done, or at least perceived to have done, in the area of AI. Because what he said (at least to me) didn't seem boo-worthy, but in the context of who is saying it, I can see it.
Put another way, if someone that the audience liked said the same things, its not clear the person would get booed.
I think it's not clear to him either why he was booed.
It was the same reaction from that other graduation speaker last week who was also booed over her remarks on AI. Totally dumbfounded about why anyone might not like AI.
These ghouls live in a totally different world than the rest of us and actually think everyone shares their positive outlook on AI.
We need more of this booing. Put up a consistent front and let these people know their views are not shared.
He should ask Claude what it thinks
People with lots of power and clout contribute to making predictions reality by all making predictions that make similar assumptions. The predictions become more likely because people already behave as if they're likely.
AI is going to take away their jobs, big companies like google will profit greatly, meanwhile accelerating climate change with full speed ahead data centers, and no real thought about what will happen to all these unemployed graduates. But also try to keep an open mind
If you don't know why he was boo'd I suggest taking some emotional intelligence courses and maybe open up a physical newspaper once a week or so.
Maybe they were booing because of his "no-poach" policy while at Google or the allegations of sexual assault, stalking, and digital surveillance.
> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom.
> graduates embraced freedom and boo'd schmidt.
Schmidt: No, not like that!
I think that the deeper topic is that there is a sense of double-speak going around, they mean freedom but what they really mean is to use the word and its meaning and to attach it to their own goals, in this case AI because google has a vested interest in that.
Billionaires’ and businesses’ freedom to replace creative and white collar workers with obedient and 24/7-working AI.
Shouting people down isn’t “open debate”.
He was on stage and had a mic. I don’t know that the students had a lot of options to make their voices heard in the situation. And since folks like Schmidt already have access to channels to spread their opinions and this was the students’ graduation I think they get a pass.
This is exactly the meme: “I am being silenced! says the man with the microphone, book deal, and celebrity-level media access.”
Speaking over people on a microphone and loudspeaker isn't open debate either
Sure, but where is this mythical "open debate" where nobody important ever shows up?
Shouting people with power down is the closest to an open debate you will get with them.
No one with power like Schmidt will join in an open debate with you and me (well, unless you are one of the 9-figure millionaires that might be around HN), they circulate around others with similar power, they don't engage with the powerless, they have no need for it. They are not having a debate with us about rolling out AI, they just wield their power and do it unto us.
Getting some backlash is the bare minimum, if our democratic systems worked we could use democratic processes to curtail their power, unfortunately those systems are also tilted very heavily towards the ones with outsized power already. If you leave people without a voice, shouting the powerful ones down is the least you should expect.
These guys are obviously both tone deaf and totally unconcerned with the desires and fears of the next generation of hopeful knowledge workers. To have the audacity and callousness to stand in front of a group of people you are hoping to destroy for profit, and talk about the technology you are going to use to do this… I’m surprised these guys are only getting booed.
Booing is a valid form of debate. We could shout "your arguments are not made in good faith and you are a bad actor" but a boo accomplishes the same thing and is far more effective.
Schmidt paying out millions in political donations isn't open debate. Schmidt having a speaking role at a commencement without anyone able to respond to him isn't "open debate". This is purely a monologue. There is no debate that was going to be had in the first place because Schmidt, by virtue of the location and occassion, wouldn't allow a response.
He could have stopped reading his script and addressed the obvious concern. He didn't. The students clearly wanted him to address their concerns, not hear a sales pitch.
And he's probably there as the inspirational, senior, mature, leadership figure. That failed hard.
AI promotional strategies are profoundly and uniquely illiberal.
AI leaders are not interested in open debate and they have demonstrated this again and again.
Shouting this person down is the appropriate, humane response.
OK Charlie Kirk
A lot of these rich guys seem to think that embracing open debate means that people listen to them and don't ever criticize them.
I would boo him if I was there.
Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas. They may not actively use LLMs or even know what they are, but they’re satisfied with Google’s AI overview and they love using voice assistants. These aren’t people from any particular sphere I sought out or which self-selected, but neighbors, colleagues, extended family, the chef at a local restaurant etc.
People with disdain for AI are probably largely limited to one “elite” or another. Of course this goes for practically any cause. It’s basically impossible to to get large-scale momentum behind anything that goes against prevailing economic interests.
Of course he was still out of touch with that particular group, and if they all try really hard, maybe they can get some narrative out there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Unless corpos discover how they can use these clashing views for market segmentation or something.
I guess this just shows how divided the world is right now (in a lot of ways), but for me this sounds like one of the creepier episodes of Black Mirror or Twilight Zone.
> Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas.
They might not know that those assets are AI-generated. It's easy to not know if you don't have this stuff (somehow) constantly shoved into your face.
I had a sticker on my water bottle from a brewery for several days. Just last night did I realize that it was completely AI-generated. The design was just text. Anyone could've made it with any other application, and yet, they chose to use AI to do it. The font was a typical font used by AI, and the hero text had low-res dots on it, a tell-tale for one-shot AI art. I threw it away.
For the christmas decorations, yes, but the imagery I meant is mostly custom, apart from some shared memes. Images and videos of themselves or their dogs in some style or doing something or being somewhere. Some of these honestly betray some mental unwellness if you ask me, but the point is, people eat this shit up and see it as harmless fun. Which it is, of course, in the same way many things are if you ignore the externalities.
"Normal people" are not that political. They don't automatically change their opinion about a picture they like because they find out it was AI generated. They say, "oh that's interesting, I guess I should keep an eye out for this AI generated stuff. I heard a lot of it is slop, but it seems they can make some really cool stuff now".
People are varied.
My grandma can't tell the difference between reality and AI. My parents and older family members either treat AI as a dog ("wow, look at this fun trick") or, worryingly, as Google.
People younger than about 35 I know dislike AI, ranging from mild annoyance up to passionate hatred, except for the people who are all-in on it. Calling something "slop" causes a fun diverse reaction, with some people offended on behalf of an LLM, and with others poking fun at the slop referenced.
The vast majority simply doesn't seem to care outside of annoyance at AI being shoehorned into everything (but that might as well have been the web 3.0/blockchain/web 2.0/whatever term manages to milk investors).
I’ve found love of AI seems to be (with exceptions of course) pretty directly proportional to age and wealth. Older people and wealthier / business-owning people seem to be more excited by it, younger, working people not so much, especially artists and creative types. And it makes sense too, given who stands to gain and lose from it.
Virtually every person I talk to on a regular basis either (a) generally hates AI but uses it in specific ways because of the utility they perceive, or (b) hates AI and won't use it at all.
The idea that "distain for AI" is limited to "one 'elite' or another" is most definitely not borne out by any polling data. "Of course this goes for practically any cause" seems to be an opinion based on air. Many, many people across all social strata (except maybe millionaires/billionaires) are deeply invested in a wide variety of causes to make the world a better place.
I live in San Francisco, and my personal sample of “normal people” think AI generated imagery looks like shit, abhor the proliferation of slop, and are doing their best to avoid this stuff at all costs.
You can prompt up some really cool commercial-grade art within the limitations of the models.
Getting more precision and consistency in the images requires additional technical configuration and actual artistic skill such that it more resembles using Photoshop and similar software. But what can be done with prompting is a lot more impressive than what can be done with rudimentary Photoshop skills and a big photo library to work from.
yea but the whole point is that it is not art... never will be
In my experience there's a bit of a generation gap here (particularly outside the SF tech bubble). Parents excitedly gave e.g. giclée prints of AI-generated art of their adult children's pets to them as gifts last Christmas, but were met with muted-to-negative responses.
This feel like the same kind of problem as my favorite exec coming to me with an AI generated multi-page document explaining why the decisions he hired me to make are wrong.
AI generated art is Microsoft Office WordArt of this decade.
how much do of a redditor do you have to be to give a muted-to-negative response to your parents gifting you AI-generated art of your pet lol
It's on the same level as giving someone like, a box of chapsticks you picked up at Walgreens on the way over for Christmas dinner. No effort or thought, not really worth anyone's time, the giftee's or the gifter's.
That's one perspective. I would love so much to go back and revisit a birthday with my mom and be gifted a framed pic of my dog and I in matching outfits
Sorry for your loss :(
Well, congrats, you have the power to go make 50 of those in 3 minutes. Enjoy...?
thanks! And in return I hope you make the most of your opportunities to give muted-to-negative responses to gifts given to you by your parents!
> adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas
I'll thank the universe for not knowing anyone that does this.
Yeah, I mostly agree with you on both points. 1. Tech execs are all in for making money. A small tangent: my wife and I used to enjoy the All In Podcast, but now those four guys mostly lie (my opinion) in ways to profit themselves and their rich friends - really out of touch, and now they are kind-of boring. Used to be a fun podcast. 2. I am a super techie, retired now (I have 55 patents, written many books on AI, many great jobs): I am a little shocked at how most non-tech people I talk with don’t like AI: some because of energy use/data centers forced on unwilling communities, many fear for their or their children's or grandchildren’s jobs, etc.
I find this a weird comment. Isn't this the same kind of out of touch? I could write:
> Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the Hackernews commenter sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality loves LLMs and their touted trajectory.
And it would hold mostly true for me. This goes to show we should all be aware of our respective bubbles.
Imo there's a priority you should have for the generation below you. Just like how you clean up for your next week's self, you clean up for the next generation. Make sure you don't leave the world on fire before you dip. Two generations have failed at this, now's your chance to break the streak.
But maybe I'm just a hippie, who knows.
I don't think you are a hippy. From evolutionary perspective alone, it seems reasonable. However, US society in particular has been.. complicated for the past few generations.
I used to attribute it to the individualism ethos and whatnot, but I no longer think that is a reasonable take in a sense that it is not the whole story. There is a steady flow of push to separate individuals from one another. For example, it is not unusual for parent to offer a sentiment along the lines of 'you are out at 18'. And this is just one tiny example. The funny thing, there may be a merit to letting a bird fly out, but we are talking about concerted efforts to push birds out while outside is set up to be as anti-bird as possible. Not exactly a recipe for success..
> There is a steady flow of push to separate individuals from one another. For example, it is not unusual for parent to offer a sentiment along the lines of 'you are out at 18'.
If anything, I think this sentiment has decreased over the years. Partially as a result of economic challenges for young people and partially as a result of immigration from cultures where living with your parents as an adult is normal.
But I do agree with your wider point about individuals being separated from one another. I think it has to do mostly with technological changes and an economy which causes people to uproot their lives and move across the country for work.
I see AI exactly as what will help future generations, the possibilities it provides in terms of learning, research, analysis are huge.
It confusing to me how people complain about jobs - there is no guarantee that any job will be there forever, there is no guarantee that current social and economic model will be there forever, things always change, you have to adapt, there is no other way.
> I see AI exactly as what will help future generations, the possibilities it provides in terms of learning, research, analysis are huge.
Do you really think a 20 years old that is afraid of not finding a good job today cares about potential benefits 10 or 20 years from now ?
Present generations see the primary role for AI as being identical to the biggest disruption to US business in the past century — namely the gigantic sucking sound from the outsourcing of millions of US jobs in order to reduce labor costs. Of course they're terrified of it. By singing its praises AND IGNORING THAT CONCERN, Schmidt showed that he couldn't be more out of touch with the top priority of this generation — WILL AI TAKE MY JOB?
It's like Steve Forbes cluelessly joking that rise of Private Equity will make it easier for the unemployed to buy another racehorse. WTF?
Per CEO rhetoric's, the future generation will be useless and none of them will do research or analysis. They wont do art either. All that stuff will be done by AI. They will be either homeless or useless living of UBI if wealthy owners allow them to. They will never amount to anything that matters. Oh, and those powerful AI tools will be controlled by a winning monopoly corporation pretty much guaranteed to abuse non-rich people.
I do not see how is that supposed to be a vision that would help them. Why would you learn when you cant get a job, cant do research and are not worthy of doing analysis? In this vision, all of that will be like playing piano nowadays - nice wholesome but useless hobby.
I dont think the future has to happen that way necessarily, but I also do not see anyone trying to sell happy ai future for the average person. Schmidt was not selling them a happy future vision either. He was trying to convince them to accept the ugly one.
The AI marketing scheme is to devalue the labor of incoming college graduates. The proof of the power of AI is the number of unemployed 20-something losers that middle aged Americans have in their basements.
I'm starting to think that the most likely solution to this problem is that one or more generations leave things in such bad shape that everyone dies. Problem solved, no future generations to be worse off than prior ones!
As someone gen-z, I think that we are just the ones facing the double it and give it to the next generation problem.
i do not doubt that there were people like you who saw the problems and perhaps even wanted to fix it, but I cant help but wonder where it all went wrong.
also there is no guarantee for anything that gen-z wouldn't try to pass it to the next generation either. It's a ticking time bomb, Tick tock.
I think it’s messed up that we’re busy handing it off to the next generation instead of actually doing anything. We should be making things better for the younger generation not passing the buck to them.
> As someone gen-z, I think that we are just the ones facing the double it and give it to the next generation problem.
As I sometimes have to remind my own gen-z child who now unironically is blaming Millennials for the current situation. The Boomers still hold almost all of the reins of power. I want to note, in 1997 the President was born in 1946 (Bill Clinton), in 2007 the President was born in 1946 (George W. Bush), in 2017 the President was born in 1946 (Donald Trump), and in 2027 the President will have been born in 1946 (Donald Trump). I am 40, at no point in my entire life has anyone in my generation held any meaningful political or economic power in this country.
I point this out, because I agree with you, but I also want to point out that a big part of this problem is that Gen-X and Millennials basically never had a chance to impose their generational spirits on the world, they've been completely overshadowed by Boomers their entire lives. Gen-Z is now entering the workforce in a world controlled by a 3 generations back, rather than by the prior generation, and so that problematic attitude of selfishness that Boomers brought to every aspect of life persists because they're still in power.
I'm right there with you on breaking the cycle, but that starts with gaining the power to have a choice.
The difference is in whether you believe, by your own heuristics, that your observations are a reasonable sample of whatever broader reality is in question. We all may say anything about our experiences and observations and be told, "No, you're in a bubble" - and we could be wrong, or that other person might be in a bubble!
Point is: Just say it. If you think the parent is in a bubble, just express the opinion. You don't even have to mount an argument or present evidence, but there's really no value in calling somebody's opinion "weird" just because, essentially, "anybody could be wrong".
Everyone is in a bubble
Right, that's my point.
Sure - and people can engage with you on that.
For example, is that true of your experience?
In general HN has been enamored by AI, with the sheen falling off only in the past quarter. This has matched with most people on HN being far more tech aware than the average user.
The issues with GenAI have also been couched to match observed reality.
——-
The point being, - You can have your experience, and you can talk about it to build a better understanding of reality.
I mean normal people shun LLM users so it’s no wonder it’s true for you.
So who has driven the 1000x increased usage of AI in the past year or two? My mother is in her 60s and uses Gemini every day. These data centers aren’t being built for no reason.
That's also because traditional google.com has become a product search engine instead of a knowledge search engine. So far at least, the AI results are mostly free of product placement and thus automatically 10x more useful than the first few pages of search engine results (but probably not for long).
I have many times now searched Google for an error message or similar and either gotten no results or been unable to get it to search for what I actually told it to search for instead of some vaguely similar but completely unhelpful phrase. The LLMs will find a link to a bug tracker or stack overflow. It’s crazy how much worse Google search results are now than they used to be.
> It’s crazy how much worse Google search results are now than they used to be.
I could not agree more. Each time I do a google search, I feel like I've stepped into a severe reality distortion field. The results are simply WORTHLESS. It's not just that the AI summary at the top answers the wrong question, but the sequence of hits thereafter wander off into the weeds almost immediately. I routinely have to constrain the search in multiple ways (time bounds, specific word rejection, etc) just to get one or two relevant hits.
Frankly, I think I'm going to have to MOVE AWAY FROM GOOGLE to a subscription-based search service just to get any useful search results again.
> Frankly, I think I'm going to have to MOVE AWAY FROM GOOGLE to a subscription-based search service just to get any useful search results again.
I would absolutely do this, but the only subscription search service i know about is Kagi, which is a bit too AI-forward for my taste. I wish there was a way i could subscribe to "google but 2007 google but with updated results"
Yes, Google search was good until they made it bad for profit and people still used it anyway because they'd lost the ability to do without it. We're in the era of being trained to rely on AI in the same way. If you think it will remain good, you haven't paid attention to the last ten years.
I don’t even think it’s good now. Sure, they’ll often give you a link. But sometimes they’ll just insist there definitely is a page that they’re pulling their made up info from but fail to provide a link, outright fabricate a link, or provide a reference that simply isn’t consistent with the purported summary. I’m sure the inevitable product placement won’t help matters.
This is basically the idea of enshittification popularized by Cory Doctorow right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
If the AI results were so undeniably good, google would let me turn them off and let user preference prove it. I verify those AI results when i fail to avoid reading them, and they're wrong a shockingly high percent of the time.
> My mother is in her 60s and uses Gemini every day.
If your mother is at all like my mother, she isn't burning through nearly as many tokens as developers who are utilizing AI effectively.
Datacenters aren't being built for the handful of people using a hundred or two tokens a month but the fields where each user is utilizing 10k+
At least partially the usage is driven by free plans. I use Gemini and ChatGPT for free. I will not pay for them unless traditional web search will be killed (google quality is subjectively on a downward trajectory for the last few years). My employer pays for AI but IMHO it's driven by a panic level FOMO, not evidence.
curious what does she use it for?
Your mother generating cringy AI picutes to post on Facebook is not an industry.
That will never generate the revenue to justify the amount of investment being directed at AI.
Probably too early for this, but I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. Evil acts made real by the decisions of those at the top, and the rest of us reject the acts. But quitely we accept these acts by being satisfied with verbal protest.
In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a difference when fighting against people's desire to 'take it easy'.
Humans will always compete, there's never any rest. AI is never going away. The crowd is booing but they will never act.
Circus and Bread has become Casino and Colleseum. The competition never stops.
Thus Evil speaks.
Evil wins when the Good do nothing.
How hard should we 'try', how much time should a person spend working, learning, versus living?
Are 'working' and 'learning' not part of 'living?'
What kind of sacrifice are you imagine the students to do here?
And also, that generation got quite a few students who did sacrificed their future in protests just a few years ago. The crackdown was very real and is still ongoing.
I have zero opinion about the state of the world. I'm just making an observation.
Awareness of issues only gets you so far. But it factors into daily decisions. And when it's all too much to bear, we just push it out of mind and continue with our little sphere of influence.
Society is built up this way: everyone has their own little sphere of influence.
Money and power have much larger spheres.
So you either protest enough to cope and move on, or you get angry enough to change.
Again, I have no answers, just observation. I'm fine with AI, despite realizing our economy is eating itself. You slowly begin to realize all we ever do is eat each other, or other things.
Is that an actual observation or theory about how world should work? Because what I wrote was actual observation - students actually being willing to put on work, organize and sacrifice. And another observation that there is no real action they could possibly take and are lazily not taking.
From that point of view, your stance seems more like a theory/ideology you project on the world rather then an observation.
> The crowd is booing but they will never act.
The only way to act is to not produce or consume (to the best of your ability) any slop, and be loud about it. We are being absolutely overrun with low-quality art, prose, and software, and making the production of such unprofitable (and even unfashionable) is the only reasonable action you can take.
That's the danger behind economy and society: we all must be useful in some way. We all have to find 'value' in some way. We take on 'roles' so we can contribute.
Roles are necessary because we simply don't have time to be experts in everything.
AI changes the way we contribute.
The metaphor I'll make here is this: It is much much cheaper for McDonald's to produce a hamburger then for some Michelin rated chef to produce fine cuisine. Society needs to have demand for fine cuisine or we'll all be stuck eating the cheapest, unhealthiest possible fast food.
You're right, we all don't have time to be experts in everything. But that doesn't mean experts aren't valuable, or that experts shouldn't exist.
TBF Hollywood and the streaming sites were already flooding us with low quality content by importing all those 2nd tier foreign-made reality TV shows. I watch maybe 2-3 hours of TV a week now depending on which series I like is airing its 8-10 episode season (down from 15-24 because the good stuff doesn't come for free!).
Anyone that thinks an LLM won't be up to spewing endless Harlequin Romance level prose is in a state of denial. And the cost of tokens continues to drop. This either means the current generation of content gets cheaper or better content becomes affordable through chain of thought token burning. I don't see a problem with that. The problem IMO is pushing a narrative that AI exists primarily to displace humans and the pushback is finally loud enough that it's getting blasted back into the faces of the billionaires. I see that as a good thing. May their endless hedonistic orgy at everyone else's expensive finally become a living nightmare of inadequacy on the hamster wheel of despair
If that's true you're equally out of touch and live in an echo chamber.
The only people who are really correct are the moderates.
Interesting, because I find hacker news to have both more adoption but also more disdain (as two overlapping subgroups of IT workers / geeks) for AI, and is more informed and worried about future.
In my non-IT life:
1. Vast majority of people have limited awareness and even less care about AI. In fact, they cheerfully consume AI generated Facebook, tiktok and YouTube videos, let alone articles, websites, reviews and emails - my electrician, factory and plumbing male friends like nothing better than to watch random 25 second reels of scantily clad AI women after a hard day work. Other people are enjoying non-existent huskies howling and kittens mewowing, listen to AI muzak on spotify, are amazed by non-existent weird creatures, etc. They are peripherally aware thay chatgpt can make you a nicer email or tell you about something but honestly cannot be bothered much. And then there's the faction that enjoys consuming manufactured outrage. They fall for AI emails and scams and generally blissfully consume massive amounts of ai daily without being aware of it.
2. There are young passionate anti AI zealots who are not in IT. Their passionate cries all too frequently fall on death ears because they have no actual fundamental thorough correct understanding of what GenAI / LLM is, its failure modes, actual consumption, or socio-political risk. At best, they post under every AI video "won't somebody think of the water!". Which, fair enough.
3. It's really only the technically aware folks that I find have any real sense of understanding or concern about AI dangers (as well as being the ones using / championing it the most). It can even be both in same person - as a parent I'm extremely concerned what will employment and political future be for my kids - so I took a part time role as AI focal for my team to better understand and perhaps shape / guide it).
(Yes, I'm quite aware of the risk this is all a "only those who share exact same concerns I do are legit " perspective. I welcome counter arguments :).
The numbers speak for itself. What has had the same level of user growth?
If I use Google Search to do a search and I get an AI answer that I scroll past, do I count an AI user?
The numbers are not reliable.
You could use ChatGPT/anthropic/etc signups as your proxy if you wanted, and those show similarly spectacular trajectories.
It is only spectacular because of the free tiers and the artificially lowered costs of the services. Put the real prices on the OpenAI and Anthropic services, remove the free tier and only than you will have a true picture of how many people are willing to pay to use it.
> It is only spectacular because of the free tiers
The thesis under discussion is "most people hate AI", not "most people will pay for AI". People who hate AI won't sign up to use the tools if they're free or paid QED AI service signups regardless of paid status are useful datapoints for "how many people don't hate AI".
The majority of users will see the convenient answer right in front of them and stop, because their question has been answered. We've seen it again and again across industries, an an accelerating cycle: make it easy, and the users will usually do what you want.
People can like talking to gemini, but dislike claude taking their programming job.
I was able to avoid talking to Gemini, but only by switching to DuckDuckGo and then also doctoring Chromium to run searches using a 'no-AI' option. At least I think I'm avoiding talking to Gemini, but for all I know I'm talking to it right now.
This is what bugs people.
We now have an official noai Chrome Extension here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/duckduckgo-no-ai-se...
Then start using DeepSeek.
Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen.
Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use.
The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap, competent, cloud-based open source.
Be the change you want to see.
Which GPU cloud instance are you using?
Lambda, RunPod, and I've used GCP and AWS instances and clusters too.
I'd prefer if we had a more open version of all of this. That's where open source will matter.
Please don’t post AI slop to HN. It’s against the guidelines.
> Please don’t post AI slop to HN.
??? - My comment doesn't even look like an LLM wrote it.
> It’s against the guidelines.
To be clear:
I wRoTe
- E V E R Y - w o r d -
by [picture ASCII art of "human hand" here]⠀
Do not accuse me of using an LLM as a substitute for thinking.
I do not use LLMs to write any of my Hacker News comments, and I never have.
I have used LLMs to help me search for information, but I have never once in my life posted the outputs of an LLM into a post verbatim as my own. That's laziness.
I'm not dismissing LLMs here. They produce better writing than a lot of humans. They are fantastic tools for constructing media, for getting work done, and for furthering your own capabilities.
But I curate my thoughts and craft my arguments. That sort of wanton dismissal of my comments is worse than using an LLM as a substitute for thinking. That's real "human slop".
Is that organic growth as people actually want to use it, or it's being foisted upon everyone. I use it everyday willingly, but I'm not sure that's true globally.
I opened a grocery store where anyone can walk in, take whatever they want, and walk out without having to pay for it. No grocery store has ever seen the level of customer growth as mine!
The reason for all the LLM spend & forced adoption is to make LLMs a critical part of everyone's processes while it's cheap/free, and then crank up the price once it's too late to easily back out. Just like I will jack up the price on my grocery store once all the fools at competing stores who are charging their customers money go out of business, and I'm the only one left in the area, leaving everyone (except for me!) worse off than where they started.
It's a scam, and it seems to be working.
The dot com bubble?
What has had the same level of money burning.
Covid. Black death. Measles. Cholera. Lots of examples
> Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
Same here, but I honestly think that's largely due to the threat is poses to their (and my) profession.
you live in some alternative reality, then.
> Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
The Western media is stoking these fears.
Asia is embracing AI. Japan is using it in anime. India is going wild with large and small business usage. All of my friends in India report how popular it is, and how they're using it to get work done. I don't even have to mention China.
I am sick of how our media is brainwashing people to hate one of the most important technological developments in our lifetime.
They tried doing this during the internet era too. When I was a kid, every newspaper was going on about how awful the internet was. Didn't stop me from jumping on IRC and learning to program.
Every single time disruption happens, there's a cacophony of ire and disdain. Musicians that hated "electronic" music. Digital photography. This one just happens to be broader and even more impacting, so you're hearing it everywhere.
These tools are immensely useful. They can empower individuals with superpowers, like wearing an exoskeleton.
The conversation is never about monopolization or consolidation of power, which is how this should be articulated. Instead, it's always "AI bad" or "think of the water". That is 10000% the wrong framing.
The people running these companies give interviews every few months where they gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs. The people building this technology are the ones creating the hatred you’re seeing.
> The people running these companies give interviews every few months where the gleefully proclaim that AI will eliminate thousands of jobs.
That was not the original narrative by any company. I was here ten years ago when WaveNet and DeepDream were first published.
The media started shitting on this stuff immediately. DALL-E and Midjourney were not describing themselves as artist destroyers. GPT-3 was not hailed as a white collar job killer. Yet the news media hounded the industry relentlessly.
Labs started co-opting this narrative from the news media to create FOMO for investors and possible customers.
I work in AI. I had a coworker quit a job four years ago because his sister had a long talk with him that "AI destroyed art", which is something she learned from YouTube. Four years ago.
No AI CEO was saying any of this stuff back then. It was all seeded by the news media and certain YouTubers.
I can remember when John Oliver was joking around with Midjourney and DeepDream on his show and laughing about how fun and cool it was. He can't do that now because he'd be crucified for it.
I can go back and do an archeological dig if you like.
I am a working artist. Professional visual artists were furious about DALL-E and Midjourney immediately. If you didn’t see this, or you weren’t aware of it, it’s a self-selection problem.
Sam Altman was talking about how we neeeed UBI because AI was going to take everyone’s job very early in the development of LLMs. I have no idea why you don’t remember that, but it’s in writing everywhere.
Oh sure. But that was a different tone and audience.
The "it's stealing" arguments have quieted down. Especially since there are weights trained on fully licensed materials by Adobe and others.
Now that code models can do it, it's a moot point. Data can be found anywhere, and models are pretty good at generalizing out of domain, not unlike human brains.
Engineers finding out these models are good is drawing a lot of the same "slop" / "clanker" arguments that non-artists have been using. These arguments are much less interesting than arguments about copyright and control.
> I work in AI
"Eat meat, said the butcher"
Are you sure it's the just western media and not the bigger western society in it's totality?
India is doing what exactly?
That stood out to me as well. I am curious.
"the media" as an entire without human beings behind.
> Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer — and was immediately met with boos.
That's a shame.
I assume the reason for the "deep distain" is rooted in fear of change, fear that LLM will make it harder to have a successful career.
That's a pretty negative mindset to have as a college grad just entering the workforce.
I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
This is a tortured line of reasoning. There's nothing confusing about what's happening - people can have every reason to hate something without it meaning that they are "pretending" nothing is happening or not preparing for it (which may mean fighting to protect people in some way, and planning for losing that battle, in equal measures).
It's strange that your comment puts "fear of change" right there next to one of the actual concrete reasons. Usually the people disparaging negative attitudes about AI say "fear of change" to avoid talking about the obvious reasons.
For college graduates, LLM tech is an existential threat to their livelihoods by making it so much harder to start a career without connections or pedigree.
If no one is hiring, connections or pedigree need to get extraordinarily elite before you can leverage them to get an entry-level software developer job.
Exactly! Thats a complimentary problem for new grads
Disliking AI for that reason harms you more than helps you.
It's very unclear what you're trying to say. Disliking something that is going to harm your future is going to harm you? You might as well say "don't care about your future". But if your dislike was for a different reason, it wouldn't harm you? Both implications seem nonsensical.
“I hate computers, so I refuse to use them”
If AI becomes common place at work (I’d argue it already has), it clearly will hurt you if you boycott it out of fear or anger that the tech exists.
It’s pretty simple
The context was a specific booing. Nobody said anything like your quote. This is a straw man in the context of this thread. I use AI every day, and I'd give anything for it to be destroyed (though if I had a magical wish, I'd make some more nuanced change, not just destroy it).
"Refuse to use them" is a strawman. Of course the graduates will use them. They will do whatever it takes to make a living. What they hate is that either they won't make a living or they will make a worse living because of AI.
Do you think that protesting that X is happening is the same as pretending that X is not happening? Or are you saying that X is happening anyway, so you might just as well learn to like it? That's some highly dubious rhetoric.
You’re wrong to assume that
While I disagree on the assumption, I do agree on the pragmatism of the proposed approach. It is important to see things as they are. The tech is genuinely neat.
However, this is not the issue. The issue is that the tech is being hijacked by corps and already on the verge of being annoying. I my corner of the world, I get high level company message of 'use AI' ( which include goals that say so ), but also -- already -- ridiculous sets of limits on how much I an use it ( our context recently got nearly zeroed ; we no longer can upload unsanctioned files ). And if you want something beyond email summarization machine, you need special approvals. This thing is already being neutered at multiple levels and it barely even started to blossom.
Add to this clear indicators that our dictators have no intention of being benevolent and it is not exactly a surprise why younger generations are not exactly thrilled. I like this tech and I hate the retardation I am subjected to daily resulting directly from its outputs.
> I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
Why not? Most people do. There are still about 10,000 working blacksmiths in America.
Unironically I think we need more lifestyle and technological diversity in the world. End the monopolies that make running your own X harder. More Amish adjacent microcommunities and less monoculture. Federalism for tech / lifestyle creep.
The only reason these things seem inevitable is because our shared delusions make it so. We would have more power if we weren’t all so afraid to exercise it.
It's it fear or anger?
> I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
You imply that the change is inevitable. AI isn't inevitable.
It requires governments to allow the construction of datacentres and for companies to be able to spend vast amounts of money they don't have for the hope of future return, which will inevitably result in a too-big-to-fail cascade which gets money dragged out of the middle/lower class via slogans like "we're all in this together".
None of this is required. The idea that humanity is stuck on this future pathway is frankly bunk.
What’s truly astonishing is that all of that money could be spent on bettering real people’s lives, but instead it gets spent on hubris.
> but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing
I don't think people are pretending the world isn't changing. I think people are right to be deeply skeptical about the direction we're headed in. More powerful tech companies dug in deeper into our lives, more government surveillance, harder times for small companies and more influence from mega-corps.
Lying, cheating and game-rigging at industrial scale powered by machine intelligence. He's lucky all he got were boos.
Why would a bunch of folks studying for white collar work, be happy with a technology that a bunch of capitalists (literally) keep selling as eliminating white collar workers?
notably, I haven’t seen any ACTUAL technical improvements from LLMs, just a massive amount of slop. The ‘improvements’ are in volume of slop, not quality.
In reality they like LLMs because they're the highest user of them. Pew reported 64% of U.S. teens used AI chatbots, while a Harvard study found 51% of ages 14–22 had used generative AI at some point.
What you answer on a survey is meaningless. Look at their actions.
And no they're not being pressured to use LLMs, standards or expectations have not gone up dramatically.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/09/stu...
Your last sentence is factually not true. Friends across five different companies report that LLM adoption is now a key metric in their performance review.
It’s mostly not students working those sorts of jobs. But I know people taking architecture and design courses that are heavily pushing LLM use. Hopefully that doesn’t exist outside of SF, though.
Yeah, "not being pressured to use them" conveniently sidesteps the fact they are RLHF trained to be as engaging (aka addictive) as possible.
“Revealed preferences” are not the same as actual preferences. Treating them the same is what led us to the current situation we have with everyone addicted to social media and miserable. Also, expectations are not the only thing that could pressure someone to use these tools. If all your peers were using these tools and finishing their work in a fraction of the time it takes you, and getting the same or better grades, you would probably use them too.
What you do says a lot more about you than what you answer in a survey.
The obvious difference between LLM adoption and social media, if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds, is that there is social pressure to use social media. Your friends are organizing and bonding on social media. None of this exists with LLMs. There is no social pressure to have an AI girlfriend, quite the opposite.
Also I preempted the "if all your peers were using these tools..." none of this applies to students. In fact i'm sure most teacher would prefer not getting AI slop. Standards have not increased.
Please read the entire comment next time before replying
Social pressure from one's peers is not the only form of pressure. I don't think I'm the one who can credibly be accused of not reading the entire comment or not thinking for longer than 10 seconds in this exchange.
usage != positive opinion
I don’t like driving in traffic yet I do it pretty much every day. Why don’t I simply not drive?
Cars are a great example, because some parts of the world were so excited by the prospect of the automotive age that they bulldozed entire parts of their cities to make way for huge arterials and parking lots without looking closer at what they were throwing away.
That is not a contradiction. Just look at social media use where you can observe the same.
People can hate on AI e.g. because they see it as a symbol of inequality and billionaires deciding important things over our heads and also actively use it.
> In reality they like LLMs because they're the highest user of them
It is possible to be a user of LLMs and to despise them.
they are being pressured to use llm to do their homework.
teens are not using llm for fun.
> had used generative AI at some point
also this is bit of a ridiculous stat to claim "highest user"
Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to be the “good” outcome that e.g. OpenAI is playing for. I don’t understand why any of you think that’s good or positive or desirable.
Well.....there is the 'lump of labor' fallacy that states that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in the economy. There is also the thought that a super intelligent AI would go the route of the Buddha having run all simulations under the virtual Bodhi tree and become benevolent. But most people think its going to be the Terminator so.......
The pessimistic case is based on the misconception that AI is some kind of a superhuman. Our current AI models are trained on human data, which has an unfortunate side effect which causes them to think and behave like a human. But as soon as we learn to train them without human data, we find out that AI is just a supercalculator, and it won't have any own will or agency.
Will and agency are primal biological instincts, which a pure intelligence doesn't have. It doesn't want or need anything. Therefore it won't act.
A superintelligence with human primal instincts would be scary indeed, but obviously we don't want to build that.
Increasingly AI's are trained using reinforcement learning [1] so these are not really human tasks but things like trying to prove theorems, play games, solve code problems and getting feedback from compilers and similar. A lot of the early pop science coverage of AI was around the ideas of "data walls" and constrains of human data, most of which just wasn't really true or long term true anyway.
[1]. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2
What you mention of training without human data seems to me an impossibility. Unless you're talking about going back to programming an AI via traditional methods rather than relying on machine learning (which might not be impossible, hard to prove it as such at least).
I don't think you can divorce intelligence from all biological aspects and just get computational power. It's an interesting question though..
> that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI
Setting aside whether a permanent underclass will be an outcome or not - is it not a bit incompatible to simultaneously believe that all jobs will be gone and that a subsistence UBI is necessarily very bad?
The way I see it, if strong AGI really replaces all jobs, then even a subsistence level UBI (by the new post-AGI standards) will be a world with ubiquitous resources and post-scarcity wealth where people pretty much spend their time how they want. Yes, perhaps it might be an "underclass" in the sense that Musk and Altman meanwhile settled Mars with some privatized space colonization, but I might still be orders of magnitudes richer than I am today - so why should I care, except for status games?
It's basically like someone in the pre-industrial age complaining that the industrial revolution will lead to the permanent underclass of people who currently live on welfare in developed countries. But this is surely a wonderful outcome from the pre-industrial peasant's perspective - even poor people in the western world live better than middle age kings!
> post-scarcity wealth where people pretty much spend their time how they want
In a true post-scarcity society where Musk et al are off colonizing Mars while you're stuck on Earth on UBI, doing what exactly? In such a future, AI has automated boring chores but also everything else. Art, movies, cooking, everything you might find enjoyable. So lots of free time to do what? Work on yourself? Nobody will care. Engage with your hobbies? Nobody will care to see them, so unless you're the kind of person who enjoys their inner life without interaction with others, be aware nobody will read your AI novel nor watch your AI movie, because they can make one specifically tailored for themselves.
To me this seems like a hellish future, a mix of "Farenheit 451" with people staring at wall screens (only AI-tailored for them) or the "basic income but restless" people from Earth in "The Expanse". It's even worse than "A Brave New World" because human workers will be mostly unneeded. Their basic necessities covered, but nothing for them to do, no real struggle other than boredom. Any challenges that remain must be artificially self-imposed, because the real challenges will be for a chosen few.
> Work on yourself? Nobody will care. Engage with your hobbies? Nobody will care to see them
But this is already the case now, no? The only person you do self-improvement or hobbies for is yourself or your closest social circle. We are already worse at everything than the professionals in the respective fields and also do not despair about it.
> To me this seems like a hellish future, a mix of "Farenheit 451" with people staring at wall screens (only AI-tailored for them) or the "basic income but restless" people from Earth in "The Expanse".
I think a more optimistic take people usually bring up is the Culture series. But yes, of course ultimately it all boils down to us being obsolete. That does not give me worse existential angst than life (to which there's no real point) already does, however, so I don't see it as worse than the status quo.
> But this is already the case now, no? The only person you do self-improvement or hobbies for is yourself or your closest social circle.
Well, you could be a professional in the field instead of a hobbyist. But not anymore (in this scenario). And even your closest social circle won't care about your hobbies, when they can easily produce the same. Even hobbyists have a (small) audience -- unless they are completely self-absorbed, which I know some people are, but let's leave them aside for a second -- and that'll be gone.
> We are already worse at everything than the professionals in the respective fields and also do not despair about it.
Yes, I'm saying in this dystopian future the professionals will be gone too. And then you won't be able to aspire to becoming a professional either, nothing left for you to look forward or aspire to. So what will we do with all our free time? Learn to cook? Nobody will be impressed, the Cook-bot in every kitchen will do it way better than you.
> But yes, of course ultimately it all boils down to us being obsolete
This depresses me a lot.
> It's basically like someone in the pre-industrial age complaining that the industrial revolution will lead to the permanent underclass of people who currently live on welfare in developed countries. But this is surely a wonderful outcome from the pre-industrial peasant's perspective - even poor people in the western world live better than middle age kings!
Wow, it took more than a century to get to live better than middle age kings. Do you think the people that lost their means to make a good living in 1800s care that we live so much better today ? It is incredible how so many tech people lack empathy for how regular people think or want to live.
I liked the Culture series too, but how they got to the presented post scarcity world is never described. How many generation lived a worse life than their predecessors? Do you think the current or future bi and trillionaires are willing to pay everyone a decent wage to live through this transition period ?
> Wow, it took more than a century to get to live better than middle age kings. Do you think the people that lost their means to make a good living in 1800s care that we live so much better today ? It is incredible how so many tech people lack empathy for how regular people think or want to live.
I noticed that comes more from a place of not imagining themselves being the subject of the possible terrible consequences.
Many tech people think in abstract terms, they look back in history without thinking much about how the life of a normal person during a major transitional period was impacted, it's just a sequence of facts, not a collection of human stories.
It's sad because it completely detaches many of these folks from having empathy, yes, change is the only constant but if our aim is to progress as a species we should also be progressing on how to make inevitable changes less miserable for those impacted. I see a lot in tech people the thinking of technological advancement for the sake of technological advancement, not for building a better world for every human, humans tend to get in the way of major technological changes so in their minds they prioritise the advancements without caring much about the human aspect.
It's quite baffling to me because those are usually smart people, I'd expect smart people to have better holistic thinking.
To everyone replying here: if you think that the owners of the machines will have any incentive to keep you alive once they no longer need you, or your reading of history is that kings and capitalists have ever willingly made concessions to their power out of benevolence, you are going to have a bad time.
Did you ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation? The current trajectory is like the Ship's Computer. It know everything humanity has learned and can do a lot. But it can't explore and lacks desires and agency. That's why they made a big deal about the character Data being an entirely new kind of AI. Of course Star Trek has a very different economic system and there is a book called Trekenomics about that. So optimistically people live for themselves and don't persue labor they despise. Half of Americans hate their jobs and live for the dream of retirement when they get to actually do what they want.... But they don't have the same energy anymore.
health - issue detection, cancer treatments, new drugs creation, etc..
>Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI?
The optimistic case is technological deflation. Where goods and services become so cheap, you don't need a lot of money to afford them. If you can have a robot sort packages like,
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/human-intern-beats-figure...
Why have a human do that? I don't think there's a person alive whose life goal is to sort packages. A human will lose a job, but only a job they accepted because the human needed money. Well if the package sorting drops the price of things, they don't need as much money. Now if every job is robotic, everything becomes cheaper to the point we don't need money for very many things at all.
That's the optimistic case.
OK, and in a world where this technology is broadly available and not controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat, I can see how this could be a good outcome. But that’s not the situation we’re in.
For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.
>controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat
This has been the situation for CPUs for decades. We now carry a 1980 cray super computer in our pockets.
>For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.
They won't need to engineer a Terminator style genocide of mankind. Man will kill each other in another war, like we always do. Biological imperatives mean we all kill each other until resources are abundant for those left standing. Then the winners of that war have a baby boom, their children are boomers for the next 80 years, and we start all over again.
The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.
>The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.
So, in other words, a utopian scenario totally divorced from historical precedent and present reality.
Nonsense. Nobody's gonna bother with the subsistence UBI.
This is what bugs people. We can tell the part they're bullshitting about is the promise of a subsistence UBI. No wonder people boo.
I’m know it’s better in some other countries, but in the U.S., we can’t even agree that all people with jobs should have health insurance.
That’s even a bit optimistic. We can’t agree that all people with full time jobs should be able to afford the basics for their own survival.
hey now, they should be grateful they get enough tokens for their appointments with ClaudeMD for their statistically below par data labeling performance, we could reduce the allowance if we keep hearing that kind of talk. We have been very generous with portions at the automatic canteen as well, that energy could be better allocated to the maintenance bots in the server farm.
Elon Musk is busy arguing to massively cut social security because it's fiscally unsustainable. He's also claimed that AI will create so much wealth that 'everyone can have a penthouse if they want'. These beliefs do not seem consistent, but the instinct to fight taxation is extremely consistent.
Sure. The machine gods are benevolent gods who care deeply for their creator-species. We are freed from labour and troubles into a paradise, to eat peaches and cream and make love under the sun. Rich or poor, we'll all be emperors of our domain, free to do as we please. Our lives keep getting better and better with technological progress, at least in the scope of our social-capitalist system. They will only get better until they end.
I like this version. Never understood the assumption that it all had to go the route of Terminator.
I need you to understand that if you actually believe this, normal people think you are an evil lunatic.
I don't think you need to worry yourself so much on my account friend. You asked, I told. Let's keep it at that. Also feel free to keep the name-calling to yourself.
You asked for an optimistic case and he gave you one. One thing I really like about LLMs is that they don't engage in this type of petty deceit where they ask a question and then insult you for answering.
This is not an “optimistic case.” This is faith-based airhead nonsense. I want to understand:
- If the people working on AI actually believe they’re building a God
- If so, why do they believe that
- If not, is there some optimistic case for LLMs based on something I don’t understand
What I got was “yes we are building a God, and despite all available evidence, it will be great! I promise!”
This is the language and behavior of a cult. If this is the actual optimist case, this entire train needs to be derailed yesterday.
100% agree. There's no substance to the argument, just the same cultish rhetoric from the aristocracy trying to fleece us into thinking that, while they simultaneously push mass layoffs and aim to drive down the price of labor, they are actually doing this to benefit us in the long run. "Just wait," they say. Once the AI future comes to fruition, you will eat "peaches and cream" and "bask in the sun all day." "You will dance in this utopian paradise." How could anyone possibly take this seriously, and are we expected not to see, plainly, the self-interested agenda being dressed up in the language of collective uplift?
Of course they don't, they're trained and steered not to talk to you like that.
What he actually wanted was a straw-man to burn. Glad it's out in the open now.
He asked for a steel-man, you were the one to provide the straw-man.
yes, all hail the Morlocks as we Eloi live in peace.
HG Wells really did have a time machine!
Yep, the Time Machine minus the fear, the cannibalism, the suffering, the apathy, the reduced capacity for engagement etc are essentially the best-case scenario, which takes us out of HG Wells enough for it not to matter much as a cautionary tale.
We know how all the plumbing works so at least we'll get eaten last?
I'm more "the kids are showing healthy skepticism of corporate dystopia but AI is vital" camp, here is my argument:
1. Yes the risk of AI corporate/authoritarian dystopia is HUGE, we'll have to fight for our rights MANY times this century. Transcendental AI takeover is probably less of a risk than humans in power using armies of robots and Stasi-AI surveillance.
2. Our current economy is bs and the last century of 'relative prosperity' was a bit of luck + tech and population boom + globalist exploitation and massaging debt. We've tried variations of capitalism, socialism, communism, there doesn't seem to be a silver bullet.
3. AI is not like other tech, and tech does not 'create jobs', it creates business opportunities which up until now have always translated to jobs. We've never had a "drop-in replacement" for a human employee, it could replace anything from 40 to 99% of jobs.
Those are the risks, the potential rewards are:
- OpEx converted to CapEx making almost any kind of business extremely efficient
- Nobody has to spend weeks away from family or risking their health in dangerous or degrading jobs
- Extremely cheap housing and infrastructure with everything from mining to construction to maintenance automated. Fixing the broken window effect of rundown neighbourhoods and generally increasing quality of life
- Almost nobody needs to commute, or do all the other things around commuting, vastly reducing transport, congestion and pollution
- Food can be grown in better ways, even at home, with less mono-cropping, pesticides and waste. Your robot can weed by hand, work the land 24/7 and with the combined experience of millions of farmers, botanists etc
- Healthier society, no need for convenience food if your robot can cook and clean, and it can make far tastier traditional food than McDonalds
- Many products can be made at home or locally. Mass production favoured big dumb machines but a robot can build you a table exactly how you want it, with appropriate materials rather than commoditising everything down to shitty MDF off-gassing formaldyhide. You don't have time to pick through recycled wood - your robot does
- Our existing road network can have far higher capacity because barely anyone needs to commute and idiots don't hold up traffic or drive distracted. Streets aren't jammed with parked cars, taxis instantly have 20% extra capacity as they don't need to carry a driver. We may even get rid of or severely reduce traffic lights, not to mention safety
- Anything in your life that involves expensive repairs or buying more dumb shit is improved, every robot is a plumber with 100 million job experience, so many problems are solved with a machine that combines cheap labour and wide expertise
"Oh but humans need purpose" I just don't think 90% of jobs provide purpose. Purpose is raising kids, spending time with friends and family, working on some project, art, community improvement - it's absolutely insane we spend so much time working on bs.
Even just one of these things coming true is revolutionary - we have turned into fat commuter drones stress eating stuck in traffic thinking about some abstract spreadsheet report so far removed from reality but stealing our sleep and peace. AI isn't the problem here its corporate greed and concentration of power that AI could give
I watched the whole commencement, and it seems that Eric Schmidt himself was booed louder than anything "AI" that came before him in the program. The students had strong reactions to almost every statement he made. If you listen to the other speakers... it's generally positive / calm. The media characterization of this event seems inaccurate, to be generous.
This caught my attention because I really enjoy hearing ES speak about AI. Directionally, I’m listening for a roadmap. Is the problem I’m solving right now even worthwhile? As an avid user of these tools, am I in the driver seat or am I a passenger? I feel like the latter.
For some context, according to the daily beast, student groups at the university distributed fliers urging students to “turn their backs to the stage” or “boo” during the former executive’s speech. The fliers stated that they wanted to “make it clear that the University of Arizona and greater community that we represent, whether from Tucson or beyond, do not support abusers being platformed.” Schmidt was accused by Michelle Ritter in a 2021 lawsuit of “forcibly raping” her during a trip off the coast of Mexico and later initiating sex without her consent in 2023 during the annual Burning Man festival.
Colossal failure to read the room, insane coming from an executive in charge of one of the most impactful companies of our lifetime.
> insane coming from an executive
I guess you haven't heard much from executives before? They are absolutely coocoo-bananas people.
The kids are alright ;)
For now.
When the ramen noodles run out, how many will begrudgingly create a linkedin account and pretend to embrace AI while they fight for the remaining/dwindling job openings?
Question to your question: How many will actually get a job?
When the system fails to reward compliance, that begrudging conformity will eventually curdle into systemic disruption.
History has proven so time & time again.
Lock a massive class of highly educated, financially desperate young people out of the economy.. they won't just starve in silence. They organize unions, radicalize politics, and ultimately rewrite the rules of the game.
Drones and robot killer dogs a la Back Mirror will keep everybody in check until they die an early preventable death from being lied to about COVID, etc.
History might rhyme, until it doesn't, due to paradigm shifts like these.
Expectation: In 10 years, killer drones will corral us away from quarantine zones to forcibly infect millions of hapless civilians. The proletariat will revolt and wage civil war against the state, sending millions of shock troops to fight for representation in government or dismantle the governing body itself. They will die peacefully, knowing they were right.
Reality: People will scroll TikTok for another decade and contract sedentary lifestyle diseases that they blame on others instead of themselves. Constant influence campaigns and surveillance will keep them divided and give them new scapegoats to assuage their mounting insecurity and shame for their generation. They will die outraged, knowing they were wrong.
False dichotomy. Why not both, depending on the individual and their circumstances?
We have 10 years of health crises, violent protests and populist contempt for the American government to cross-reference.
Yes, but to your previous point, the propaganda system is well tuned enough to pit the blue half of that populist contempt against the red half, even though you and I both know it's orchestrated by the uniparty. The only thing that comes to mind recently that bridges the gap is the Epstein stuff, but people are easily distracted with aforementioned propaganda and mindless scrolling.
Eric Schmidt really needs to hire a handler.
Every billionaire needs to hire someone they can't fire with the authority to smack them and say "no, bad billionaire".
The alternative is like Killgrave in Jessica Jones. People who never hear no break.
Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but not them.. where does that end?
It's worse than having to pick one position or the other: both are hypocritical, and both are deceptive hype mongering.
Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to use that expertise?
Totally agree — if AI tools are already or nearly at the point where you can say “write a program to do X” and it does it, that’s like telling people they need to learn skills to order something at McDonald’s. The goal is for the barrier to entry to be basically zero. Oh sure today there are things like “I made a claude.md file that does this and I wrote a really clever prompt!!” But the goal is for that work to be deleted as well — where is the magic skill that is / will be needed?
I use coding agents every day for non-trivial projects. But I can definitely say that a prompt of the form "Write a program that does X" will earn you a git rollback of a mess, unless what you want has been done a bazillion times before.
Peak efficiency in using coding agents is a weird balancing act at this point in the development of coding agents: being too incremental and detailed is inefficient, but if you let it rip on a task with multiple sub tasks you have to be ready for the coding agent to get utterly lost while providing you with only hints at what made it to lose its way. It's like an inexperienced intern with a high opinion of its competency.
LLMs trained for coding are most productive when pushed to their limits, but that's where they start to fall down.
> run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich...
I don't get people who believe this. Why would an AI company provide a service that someone can sell at 10x the price, mostly unchanged? Why wouldn't the AI company sell it directly?
This is what Amazon did for many physical products. It just takes time.
Wholesale vs retail. I think the highest value, biggest markets will have products straight from the AI labs (ie legal review) but there's a lot of "last mile" type stuff that it's probably not as economical for anthropic to care about but maybe for some other company.
Why wouldn't it be economical?
Following the logic their agents should be able to find and make money with niche businesses cheaper than human entrepreneurs.
So they're going to provide service for every product under the sun? I ain't paying for no enterprise product without service.
> so which one is it..
Both? The messaging from the last 30+ years has already been that the only way to be successful is to develop your own capital, not to get a job. He's saying that learning how to use AI will be essential in developing the next generation capital.
if they were selling crack cocaine, he would say “young people need to learn how to use Crack Cocaine to be successful”.
There's nothing to learn, just some CEOs trying to get you hooked on their product and a bunch of hucksters trying to be the number one "AI thought leader"
"While the computer connected people, "democratized knowledge" and lifted many out of poverty, it also carried a darker side, Schmidt said.
"The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you're using now, also degraded the public square," he said. "They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society."
Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer - and was immediately met with boos."
In other words, he tried to promote Silicon Valley's shift away from one "business model" (e.g., search, social media) to another
YouTube is among the "platforms" that are "rewarding outrage" and "degrading the public square" in order to support an ad services business. The days of this "business model" may be numbered
As one unsustainable model fails, there is always another one to replace it. Maybe people are noticing the pattern
All these "business models" share something in common: use of a computer and a Silicon Valley middleman spying on peoples' computer use
LLMs (the current AI approach) are definitely useful tools BUT the cost of training and inference and creating bigger and bigger model to improve the "intelligence" is extremely high and the consequence of this high cost is having negative impact of average people whether it is in terms of job losses or rising cost of electricity and other stuff.
Unless the industry is able to reduce the cost drastically and soon, it will have negative impact on all of us.
This should probably be merged with this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107
https://x.com/i/status/2053560589327180255
I sense a pattern emerging.
> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.”
This sounds cynical if there is a kinglike president, surrounded by a small clique of tech billionaires who all are becoming increasingly open about the kind of future they want to realise.
It's also one of my major issues I have with how this is being introduced into many enterprises, including the company I work for:
"Here's AI. Figure out how we can make money from it. We're adding it to your performance reviews"
Basically, here's a solution. Find problems for it.
Yeah, I also see this occurring.
It's just wildly unprofessional from management, in no particular order my frustrations are:
1. A majority of planning documents from management have become LLM output, which no longer actually matches the desired/required work (but it sure looks nice if you don't have to read all of it).
2. Management undertones are pretty clearly: "Figure out how to use AI to replace yourself."
3. The visibility of leaderboards that promote spend with no relationship to output - ex: employees who spend the most tokens are rewarded, even when there's no equivalent boost in productivity.
---
My take is that AI is actually a managerial crucible - aka, a great filter for companies with poor management practices and processes.
Company management needs to shift in response to AI more than engineering, and I don't think most are prepared.
> Basically, here's a solution. Find problems for it.
Same where I work, and I suppose everywhere. It's upsetting, and there's no way of politely voicing concerns about this without looking like a luddite... which is obviously bad for you and your job security.
I think this is a major reason behind the backlash against AI. In the past, people celebrated tech billionaires because there was a widespread belief that, someday, they might join their ranks. But wealth inequality may have now reached a point where that illusion no longer works.
I think it’s that the current crop of tech billionaires are tone deaf douche bags working against the common good.
You do not amass those levels of wealth without being a tone deaf douche bag in the first place.
I believe that AI is truly revolutionary, but I struggle to feel sympathy to these large companies who (while building tremendously powerful tools) also work on extracting as much money they can from users, potentially making millions of them redundant while paying as little as possible for used texts, codes. In some sense this is how capitalism is supposed to work. But I am not required to like the bosses who pontificate about the future opportunities.
(A somewhat contrasting behaviour is say l deepseek who releases their models to the public, and I would not boo them)
The people behind pushing 'everyone needs to learn to code' are now the same pushing 'everyone must use AI'. The same Eric Schmidt that was pedaling 'I assume that everybody here agrees that globalization is wonderful' to a Davos crowd.
The guy has always looked for way to keep humans as chattel.
*peddling
I know billionaires are generally out of touch with the trials of the common citizen, but can they be so out of touch that they think the promise that AI will take your job is going to resonate?
It is interesting that his speech started strong and then ran aground and sunk on the same dangerous reef he began by pointing out:
“The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you’re using now, also degraded the public square,” he said. “They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society.”
The biggest issue I see with discourse around AI is you have two voices: one is of the tech CEO's and other elites that talk about it largely in the abstract and how it's going to take everyone's jobs, and then you have folks on Twitter/X that talk about things that they are actually using it for.
Generally what I found listening to both sides is the latter group is very optimistic about AI and what it can do while the former group tries to be optimistic but just ends up coming off as doomery about it. And the problem that the AI space has right now is the doomery group is just more visible to the average person and thus the average person gets their opinion informed by that group.
I really wish there was a way to better surface the sentiment that I see on X about AI, the folks there aren't talking about how AI will replace you at work and make you obsolete, they use AI every day and they know that's just not realistic, not now and probably not ever. Rather they talk about all the cool things that it can help you do now, and how it can be a force multiplier in the best sense.
The problem with the elites talking about AI is everything they say is just so detached and abstract. And their giant egos prevent them from seeing the damage they are doing to the field.
And how about the group of kids who are just graduating college, and entering a job market where it's non-abstractly harder to to land a junior role as it's been in decades? It's the elites who have their finger on that scale, not the twitter folks.
I just don't think that "I use AI to help plan a vacation or make a funny picture to share with my friends or create a study plan" outweighs the very obvious challenges that AI is creating for new graduates as they enter the job market. I'm sure even that a lot of these students used AI to cheat.
But the stuff from the rich bosses isn't just rhetoric. These students are graduating into an extremely messy job market and AI is directly to blame. That affects students in a huge way.
Nobody wants the pile of Schmidt you are selling fam
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419
These people need to read the room better.
AI Billionaire and AI Executive cohorts are openly advocating in media and the press for total job replacement by AI within a narrow time frame. Dario Amodei has spent years braying that AI will replace most or all jobs within half a decade; Sundar Pichai has openly told working folks the equivalent of "Good luck, fuckers" (his 2-DEC-2025 remarks about the working class "working through" social disruption forcibly imposed on them by his billionaire class); Microsoft's AI ghoul went on a media spree this year bragging that knowledge-work will be gone in eighteen months.
It doesn't matter whether or not any of this is true, because these same students - the law students, the pre-med students, the political science students, the psychology and history and econ and tech students and the like, they all have to write essays about this, read newspaper articles about it, read journals about it. They see the actions taken by this same cohort of AI boosters in blocking regulatory reforms, in blocking social programs, in blocking work protections and social safety net expansions and tax reforms. These students aren't stupid, they see the naked hypocrisy on display by the people telling them the sky is falling and are rightfully enraged at it.
You are telling fresh graduates, saddled with student debt, at a time of pride in their own accomplishments and uncertainty in their job prospects, to their face, that they have no future and that's going to be peachy-keen because everyone other than them will be better off as a result.
And they wonder why they're so intensely hated.
Funny enough by attending and booing they are already doing their part instead of boycotting the commencement
After hearing that padlum from a billionaire I wouldn't boo, I would rush the stage to hit him with my shoes.
No one wants AI outside a small minority of tech people.
It feels also this speech was not really in any way related to AI per se.
It was the Ayn Rand-esque hero, an Übermensch, who of course formed Google out of nothing proclaiming that individualism and egoism are the way to go, that they have a small alcove at best in between the productive assets of the factory owner who wields the materials to his will and creates his perfect city of perfect design that needs none of your contribution. That these graduates aren't be be valued by their creativity or self-worth but by the marginal contribution they may have towards his empire, to be discarded once they don't have anything to give. He's the ultimate factory owner, the owner of the factory that makes everything and brings light to all, and the masses just don't appreciate his brilliance and the brilliance of the other tech bros.
None if it is particular to AI, it's just that AI is the latest tool with which the workers of the world are deprived of the means of production. They know that capitalism is healthiest when the wealth is distributed, and here the Randian hero tells them not that the wealth will be distributed, but only the labour and the AI will do most of the labour, and that the human contribution is a penny for themselves and 99 cents to those that already have a hundred billion, and excited with an incomparable glee Eric expresses that the datacenter that powers the AI will be the panopticon through which the factory owner will judge the productivity of his workers.
It is such a horrifyingly dismal picture he painted right on their faces and if they would just allow that data center and stop booing him they'd understand, surely they must understand that he's the hero, that he and his Rearden Steel will make them the shining city that the unwashed masses for their utter collective incompetence cannot.
It is of course, one step between this view and them being punished for having that view. One small step between being declared a luddite and the powers that be deciding that luddites aren't a thing we're to have.
HBO’s Silicon Valley looks more and more like a documentary every day. The out of touch antics of Gavin Belson or Peter Gregory are fucking spot on.
> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.”
This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way."
Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.
That quote reads totally differently to me.
It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.
What does it read like to you?
To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsibility to prevent the AI revolution from being as bad. All evidence points to it being worse exactly because of corporations like Google. I get that this guy is only the former CEO but the speech seems kinda tone-deaf to the reality here, and I bet that's why he got booed.
Was commenting on the quote in particular. It’s just a version of “the future is in your hands” which you can find in one form or another in many graduation speeches. Just seems odd to me to read a cliche line as something cynical.
Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech:
> “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.”
Come to think of it… very appropriate today!
I was reading the quote in-context, so it makes sense that it'd read differently out of context.
I’m pretty sure I heard the same quote at my high school and university graduation ceremonies, and those were many years before AI. It’s a standard way to inspire new grads, right?
I think yes, it just doesn't feel in good taste given the topic of his speech. It feels like the speech makes it imply icky things.
> It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly.
It's not entirely within the power of the creators of technology to control how it is used. In our case, they actively market the technology as replacement for human intelligence, at which it fails miserably and yet companies force it through. I would love to see a more grounded frontier AI company, but beyond certain safety measures, they can't stop people from misusing it.
I didn't say anything about creators of technology, only implementers of technology; people using the technology that was created (however so it was).
I think the booing was less about Schmidt specifically and more about the class of 2026 processing what it means to graduate into an AI-transformed economy from someone who personally profited from the last transformation.
He's not wrong that "the future is unwritten" — but that's cold comfort when you're holding a degree that might be worth less in 3 years than it was the day you started the program. The tech leaders saying "you can shape this" are the same ones whose companies are actively building the tools that might make entry-level knowledge work redundant.
The booing was inarticulate but the sentiment underneath is legitimate: "don't tell us we have agency over a transformation you're driving and we're expected to survive."
Still, I'd rather someone like Schmidt engage with the crowd than retreat to a bubble. At least the friction is out in the open.
Such a good comment from a new account. Please post here more often :)
It's clearly coming from a claw agent. I'm sure they will post more :)
If true...
On the one hand: they fooled me.
On the other hand: hey, if the comments are that good, keep going?
Of course I don't have proof but this looks mighty suspicious: https://github.com/stellamariesays/Manifold/issues/54
It's industrial revolution which doesn't want to happen. Unless the new industrial revolution means those unwilling to attend to billionaires and oligarchs are to be priced out of housing and life in general, this one is swiftly approaching. I mean forget housing, even getting good computer is out of reach by now.
PC gamer here. This checks out.
The LLM marketing scheme has essentially been an assault on the labor value of these graduates. I don't think boos are far enough.
The guy has been a stochastic parrot of A2Z talking points for years. What's new is we have reached the finding out phase of telling an entire generation of children who just spent 6 figures and 4ish years on education that they will be replaced by the irresponsibly deployed toy of the old white dudes who made college that expensive in the first place.
AI as a technology is amazeballs in precisely the same way AI thought leaders, executives and mid-level management are not. And yet, here we are poisoning its innovation with late stage capitalism and privatized panopticons. Yuck.
Have you seen what is alleged about the guy? Funny how no one in this thread brings it up
Yeah, he's wicked rapey and he's always been a total manwhore creep. How the heck did he survive #metoo unscathed?
And I know, I know, here are the helpful links before anyone pretends they haven't heard any of this...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/judge-sends-former-googl... https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5497193/exclusive-how-googles... https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/3/16/8227625/eric-schmidt...
TLDR: promoted well beyond his level of incompetence, but that's the American way now I guess.
Rich sex pests engaged in a coordinated effort to destroy #metoo and protect themselves basically as soon as the movement started. You can even see a lot of this in the Epstein files. The backlash to #metoo was larger than the movement ever was (while not referring to the same event, Susan Faludi's Backlash is a great discussion of this).
The effect is that a ton of these guys either experienced no consequence whatsoever or were able to lay low for a couple years and return to their positions of power.
Well, I believe we have officially entered the find out stage... And I love how easily triggered some people are on here by saying anything bad about the Kash Patel of the tech industry. Why can't we all just quietly stop asking his opinion on anything? When's the last time he wrote a single line of code? I'm guessing 30 to 40 years and he's the expert on the future of software engineering?
Oh noze, triggered again. Bite me.
Typical Schmidt shit: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trustedsecurityadvisor_ai-wil...
Vacuous plutocrats can be pretty vacuous...
Who can ever forget "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning."
Why god why do you take this guy seriously at this point?
There was a dude Peter thiel was mingling with who died in strange circumstances.
Another buried case.
I knew another Peter Thiel adjacent who offed himself (not the one I think you're referring to here) over Trump losing in 2020. Curious.
Eric Schmidt made billions, probably 10s of billions from Google becoming an AI behemoth. The young graduates who can't find a job, will likely not be able to afford a median home in their 20-30s due to their debt growing faster than earnings. It is a stark difference.
"You have the power to shape AI" - So many empty words spoken!