[aubanel]

This contrast is a bit sad. When Eric Schmidt told students the truth about the importance that AI will take in the future ("It will touch every profession, every lab..."), students booked him But the takes like "AI is not real/powerful, human intelligence is better", which are basically pleasant myopic lies, are cheered. Cope bias is powerful.

[dmazin]

The point of a graduation speech like this is to get students hyped up about themselves and their future. Surely you see the merit in, amongst a backdrop of a horrible job market, telling students that they have, inherent in them, the stuff of greatness, just as people did (checks watch) 3 years ago before vibe coding?

[jcgrillo]

> Cope bias is powerful.

Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.

[aubanel]

With what would I be coping? I'd much prefer (probably like most people) if AI were not that powerful. The harsh reality, and the stuff of cope, is that it's (too) powerful.

[jcgrillo]

The trouble with this narrative is the evidence doesn't actually support it. If it is so powerful where are the results? If it was actually all that powerful it would be obvious. There wouldn't be any question. Nobody says "nuclear explosions aren't really all that much bigger than conventional explosions" because it's measurable and absolutely obvious just looking at one that they are. I don't believe you when you say "AI is powerful". Show me a convincing demonstration--like a Trinity type test. Show me a company that is wildly exceeding what all the other companies can, or what any company could before AI. It doesn't have to be a hydrogen bomb, a low yield conventional test would suffice. But until you have that demonstration ready, all the talk is just noise.

[cheevly]

What would you even need to see? I struggle to find things that I cant do at scale with AI, and it’s dumbfounding to read posts about people that are unconvinced.

[jcgrillo]

Tech products improving, for one. If everyone is a 10x engineer now (and has been for years) why isn't everything better? Instead, we're seeing github outages increasing in frequency, consumer products degrading left and right (google, iOS, etc etc). What is taking so long? Where are the results?

Where is the impact on the real world? Where are the process improvements? Where are the efficiency gains? Why are prices going up, not down? If y'all are actually super-engineers now why aren't you actually making anything better? Hurry up and fix some shit already.

I'll tell you why: it's all bullshit. You aren't actually any more effective with AI than you were without it. You may feel that way, but it's delusional. I'd love to be proven wrong, you can do it by living up to the hype.

I'm confident that won't happen, though. The industry will continue to produce the same mediocre, enshittified slop it always has. It'll do it at approximately the same rate, achieving the same output per engineer, even if they make you do it via a chatbot middleman. AI has had this property for a long, long time before LLMs, before Deep Learning, while neural nets were in their infancy--before backprop even. It can do really impressive things, in the right context, but it is not a substitute for thought and work. You have to put in the effort--whether it's tuning an objective function or iteratively crafting and refining a prompt. All that was old is new again.

The difference now is that it's taken on some bizarre religious significance. These goddamn fucking acolytes running around praising the computer jesus because it speaks words and stuff!. Revolting.

If you really want to convince me, show me something better than that.