[afandian]

It’s heartwarming to see Rich Hickey corroborating Rob Pike. All the recent LLM stuff has made me feel that we suddenly jumped tracks into an alternate timeline. Having these articulate confirmations from respected figures is a nice confirmation that this is indeed a strange new world.

[hintymad]

AI coding tools are effective for many because, unfortunately, our work has become increasingly repetitive. When someone marvels at how a brief prompt can produce functioning code, it simply means the AI has delivered a more imaginative or elaborate specification than that person could envision, even if the resulting code is merely a variation of what has already been written countless times before. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that, as not everyone is fortunate enough to work on new problems and get to implement new ideas. It's just that repetitive work is bound to be automated away and therefore we will see the problems in Rich's rants.

That said, luminaries like Rob Pike and Rich Hickey do not have the above problem. They have the calibre and the freedom to push the boundaries, so to them the above problem is even amplified.

Personally I wish the IT industry can move forward to solve large-scale new problems, just like we did in the past 20 years: internet, mobile, the cloud, the machine learning... They created enormous opportunities (or the enormous opportunities of having software eat the world called for the opportunities?). I'm not sure we will be so lucky for the coming years, but we certainly should try.

[dvt]

This is all just cynical bandwagoning. Google/Facebook/Etc. have done provable irreparable damage to the fabric of society via ads/data farming/promulgating fake news, but now that it's in vogue to hate on AI as an "enlightened" tech genius, we're all suddenly worried about.. what? Water? Electricity? Give me a break.

The about-face is embarrassing, especially in the case of Rob Pike (who I'm sure has made 8+ figures at Google). But even Hickey worked for a crypto-friendly fintech firm until a few years ago. It's easy to take a stand when you have no skin in the game.

[hshdhdhj4444]

I don’t understand what your actual criticism is.

Is your criticism that they are late to call out the bad stuff?

Is your criticism that they are only calling out the bad stuff because it’s now impacting them negatively?

Given either of those positions, do you prefer that people with influence not call out the bad stuff or do call out the bad stuff even if they may be late/not have skin in the game?

[nunez]

It's worth mentioning that AI in its current form was not AT ALL a part of Google's corporate strategy until Microsoft and OpenAI forced their hand.

Remember their embarrassing debut of Bard in Paris and the Internet collectively celebrating their all but guaranteed demise?

It's Google+ all over again. It's possible that Pike, like many, did not sign up for that.

[MrMorden]

How did Microsoft and OpenAI force their hand? Google could just as easily not waste money on AI, use the corresponding lack of notice-me-sempai demands from their products that their users use AI everywhere as a powerful differentiator, and deliver the difference to shareholders.

[nunez]

They got punished hard in the markets after ChatGPT 3. Many saw (still see) it as a search killer, which is Google's bread and butter. They couldn't not respond.

[duped]

Both can be bad. What's hard to do though is convincing the people that work on these things that they're actively harming society (in other words, most people working on ads and AI are not good people, they're the bad guys but don't realize it).

[llmslave2]

Even ignoring that someone's views can change over time, working on an OSS programming language at Google is very different from designing algorithms to get people addicted to scrolling.

[dvt]

Where do you think his "distinguished engineer" salary came from, I wonder? There are plenty of people working on OSS in their free time (or in poverty, for that matter).

[llmslave2]

Shouldn't you be thinking "it's nice Google diverted some of their funds to doing good" instead of trying to tie Pike's contributions in with everything else?

[dvt]

This conversation isn't about Google's backbone, it's about Pike's and Hickey's. It's easy to moralize when you've got nothing to lose and the lecture holds much less water.