The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room.
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
lokar 5 hours ago [-]
A bit off topic, but about commencement speeches...
Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.
Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.
rvz 3 hours ago [-]
> Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation.
I don't know about mentioning that one.
justin66 3 hours ago [-]
He’s a seminal figure!
LogicFailsMe 2 hours ago [-]
Now why'd you'd have to ejaculate that into the conversation?
Anyway, Minsky, perceptrons, great debunking of AI hype at the time, but a horrible person, ya know, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.
Anyway, they're all dead. Can we move on? Although I remain astonished that Foundation got made when they cancelled Sandman and Good Omens after Neil Gaiman turned out to be pretty awful too. Maybe you have to still be alive to matter? What exactly are the rules here? I am so confused by this.
justin66 1 hours ago [-]
I believe the remains of Asimov's literary legacy are probably managed by his daughter along with an agent. Presumably most of the money goes to her too, but I have no idea. In any case she always seemed nice enough.
LogicFailsMe 1 hours ago [-]
So when Roman Polanski finally dies, all his works will be okay given they're managed by a non-offending descendant?
warumdarum 38 minutes ago [-]
If you have a monsters hunger you produce a angels worth of work to be "tolerated" by society that rightfully despises you?
chabes 2 hours ago [-]
Eww, I see what you did there
kakacik 5 hours ago [-]
Its not a rambling but sad fact of life, one of the failures of mankind so far.
And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.
When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
I just yesterday watched a scathing video about why the US has always had a major strain of anti-intellectualism, starting from the very first colonists:
Asimov wrote about it[0], and talked about it quite a bit.
So did Sagan. If you haven't watched Cosmos in awhile it might hit a little different these days, for multiple reasons (not all bad). The book is great too. Not to mention Sagan wrote "The Demon Haunted World".
There's a new form and an old form of this same thing happening today too. We have flat earthers, but other cults too. One of the common features of this cult of ignorance: having a little knowledge and thinking it is much more general. We all know those people who read a sentence or two and extrapolate. This happens all the time. Even in flat earthers. It's often seeking evidence to support the prior belief rather than updating that belief. Updating that belief can either strengthen the belief it weaken it. But if you're seeking truth you need you be willing to throw your beliefs out the window. Resistance to that is ego
I feel like I wasted 25 min watching that (at 2x).
If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:
- Some of the early colonists were religiously-driven
- The inconvenient examples otherwise (e.g. the Enlightenment-influenced founders) can be ignored because some people at the time disliked them
- Some presidents since have been populists
Then that's a weak argument.
... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.
amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago [-]
You missed the education related points.
Different strokes. I found it extremely entertaining.
registeredcorn 46 minutes ago [-]
>I found it extremely entertaining.
Forgive me for being nitpicky, but I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.
Example: I can be extremely engaged while listening to a stand-up comedian deliver an anecdote about why they believe what they believe. It can be incredibly interesting, engaging, and well put. It is not, however, an argument which supports their assertions, but merely a conduit which makes that position more palatable.
Insight is often dreary and frustratingly complex in terms of nuance and substance because what matters is everything, and what doesn't makes headlines. Entertainment is a broad stroke of a premise; a hand wave that says "like this".
b00ty4breakfast 56 minutes ago [-]
there is a specific, very modern strain of mostly anglosphere protestant christian religion that can hinder intellectual progress. When I say "very modern" I mean within the last 2-300 years. Most of intellectual history in post-Roman Europe is linked to religious institutions. countless philosophers, mathematicians and scientists were clergy or members of religious orders.
The conflict thesis is, at best, a reaction to this modernist milieu and at worst an ahistorical narrative cooked up by 19th century edgelords.
(inb4 "MUH GALLEY LEGO TRIAL!")
lokar 5 hours ago [-]
Rambling in the sense of not being well prepared, like he had an idea and some points to hit, but not a script. The content was good, for me.
prewett 4 hours ago [-]
Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world. (And if we cannot flourish with materialist consequences, that is some evidence that the materialist assumption is incorrect.) So religion is not just some silly, backwater thing, and Marx was absolutely wrong.
The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)
pfannkuchen 3 hours ago [-]
The modern west is still very religious, they just switched to a new religion without a mascot.
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
wagwang 2 hours ago [-]
It's a strange christian sect that is generally atheistic but borrows values from the western tradition.
wolvoleo 38 minutes ago [-]
That's nothing to do with religion. It's just having values. You can have values without religion.
wasabi991011 2 hours ago [-]
> it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".
phainopepla2 2 hours ago [-]
This is a strange definition of religion, to basically mean anything that isn't science. Are all aesthetics and ethics a matter of religion?
pfannkuchen 53 minutes ago [-]
People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.
People who don’t believe it are bad.
If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.
People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.
People think we should spread it to other people.
Functionally, how is that different from religion?
Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
phainopepla2 48 minutes ago [-]
> we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.
And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.
soperj 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, life has no inherent meaning in and of itself. It's up to you to find what's meaningful. If that's praying to the FSM, father of all pastas, hoping his sauce never goes bad, so be it, if it's a more mainstream religion, or something else entirely that's all on you. I don't understand how you connect that to not flourishing though.
BobaFloutist 3 hours ago [-]
>However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world.
Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.
You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.
And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
warumdarum 33 minutes ago [-]
You need stories, preferable positive stories. Not those about endless wars and horrors, those stories work like a contraceptive. They are pure poison, no matter how true, scientific and educational.
partyficial 3 hours ago [-]
> I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life
"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"
(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)
People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.
Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.
abc123abc123 2 hours ago [-]
This is the way!
chabes 2 hours ago [-]
I’m sharing this because you may not be aware yet…
Minsky, while a significant contributor to science and technology, is also a known participant in Epstein sex trafficking.
Him and a few other men at MIT are responsible for the long relationship between the university and the notorious child sex trafficker.
StilesCrisis 7 hours ago [-]
I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.
kevinsync 7 hours ago [-]
Anecdata, but of the clips I've seen going around from Woz's speech, there were quite a few comments from people who claimed to have been there for the whole ceremony, most of which said that he was rambling and all over the place lol. Not bad necessarily, just that they felt like he wasn't really all that engaging, they were bored out of their minds, and some barely even knew who he was. Again, internet comments, so take that for what it is, just tossing my own pointless internet comment into the mix!
blanched 6 hours ago [-]
I've only been to the low tens of graduations, but in my experience this is pretty common for a speaker. A couple highlights and otherwise a little boring :)
Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
StilesCrisis 5 hours ago [-]
In my case, I was not even graduating, I just heard that Woz was speaking and decided to attend. I don't regret attending, as I managed to get a picture with Woz after the ceremony and thank him for his amazing work, but the speech itself was extremely forgettable.
renticulous 49 minutes ago [-]
Actual Intelligence eg "mitochondria is a Powerhouse of cell". Cached thoughts and facts.
beej71 5 hours ago [-]
Same, except not at a graduation speech. He was just all over the place, but I loved every second of it. :) As a nerd of the 80s, I'd take that over the sterile CEO BS any day.
hirvi74 4 hours ago [-]
> He was just all over the place
I feel like that is a trait necessary to do what Woz did throughout his life.
johnnyanmac 4 minutes ago [-]
The Game Developers Conference report takenn in March reported noted 74% of students felt their careers were at risk. To paraphrase:
> 74% of students who answered feel their future in this industry is at risk. The top fears were no entry level jobs, laid off seniors competing for the same jobs they're going for, and AI displacement.
There is so much anxiety for the future of society and it's a real shame this seems to be going on ignored.
ericmay 51 minutes ago [-]
> I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
Right... which they aren't going to be helped by continuing to find external causes or external enemies which are keeping them down instead of focusing on what they can control and what they can do to make money or make careers.
It's nice and it feels good to say these things, but it's not going to get those same students a job or help them build the next startup. Of course those students matter, and they should feel as such, but if they take away the wrong lesson here than Mr. Wozniak is doing them a disservice. Populism is incredibly dangerous.
scandox 4 hours ago [-]
I've been thinking about the expression "Reading the Room" for the last ten years. I've come to the conclusion finally that it is extremely pernicious.
germinalphrase 3 hours ago [-]
Communication is not deterministic. Communication cannot take place without a selection of communication method, and there are inherently subjective and lossy parts to any communication attempt. Aligning my communication method to the specific audience could be "just telling them what they want to hear", or it can be telling them what I intend to communicate in a manner that are prepared to/capable of understanding, i.e. "reading the room".
pasquinelli 4 hours ago [-]
i've been waiting for you to share your conclusion for the last ten years. finally, i can sleep again.
2 hours ago [-]
BobaFloutist 3 hours ago [-]
Pray elaborate.
scandox 3 hours ago [-]
Because, in practice, it turns telling people what they want to hear into a first-class virtue.
>> "We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, 'Endeavor to persevere!' ... We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union."
johnfn 2 hours ago [-]
In this case, yes, a bunch of college students probably don't want to hear that AI is taking their job. Probably good to read the room, and it is used with your meaning.
But I also think there's an alternate meaning which is "this is not the correct time for this" (with an implicit "there will be a better time"). If your friend is upset they got laid off at their job, it's not the right time to start telling them about your promotion. Read the room, man! You can wait.
dopamean 3 hours ago [-]
Depending on what the event is and why you were asked to speak telling the audience what they want to hear may be appropriate. If you're a consultant giving a presentation on how a business needs to change it's operations some hard truths may be necessary. At a graduation where students are going into an uncertain job market while loaded with debt... maybe save the hard truths. A little encouragement may be appropriate in that circumstance.
jpalawaga 2 hours ago [-]
Or, it is saying things in a way that will be actually heard by an audience, regardless of content.
Waterluvian 6 hours ago [-]
I also saw video of some school president being booed so badly that he never actually gave the speech, while some other admin had to come hold his hand and yell at the tuition paying students.
What did he do to deserve this, there’s no context?
HumblyTossed 5 hours ago [-]
the students were:
> ... protesting recent staff layoffs, severe program cuts, a mounting structural deficit, and the administration's controversial push for generative AI adoption through corporate tech partnerships
1 hours ago [-]
dyauspitr 1 hours ago [-]
Poor guy, running a school where AI can do the entirety of what you’re teaching very cheaply and infinitely. I also looked into it and those tech partnerships were set up with the view of placing these folks into jobs once out of college. The youth just have no concept of the real world.
AdamN 2 hours ago [-]
It's probably not so much the AI thing as the latent disgust at the social media landscape and the toxicity driven by Meta and others.
oulipo2 6 hours ago [-]
It's not that hard to "read the room" when you're a humanist, and not a sociopathic tech CEO... you just speak your mind, and you realize that your fellow humans are onboard with you
stellamariesays 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
joe_mamba 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
romaniv 6 hours ago [-]
>Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet lie of Wozniak?
What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.
abirch 6 hours ago [-]
"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed."
AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.
mold_aid 4 hours ago [-]
>If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they.
Did you just tell a "how many X does it take to change a lightbulb" joke about yourself?
soulchild37 3 hours ago [-]
it takes 10 prompts, 5 fuse jumps, and hiring one electrician to change a lightbulb
ihumanable 5 hours ago [-]
For the last 15 years you could take a picture of a lightbulb and pop it in google search and it would tell you what kind it was.
I know because I bought a house in 2013 where the builder delighted in using a dozen weird fixtures and the cheapest bulbs they could find and I spent a lot of 2015 doing just that.
There are lots of things that LLMs are genuinely good at, searching by image isn't something we need LLMs for. I asked Google's LLM when google image search launched and it reported
> Google officially launched its "Search by Image" feature—allowing users to upload a picture or image URL to find related content—in 2011
dingaling 6 hours ago [-]
> It's reduced technical debt
I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase.
AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.
However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.
In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.
abirch 6 hours ago [-]
You are completely right that AI can be misused/abused. If done right it can fix things like code bases that were created by multiple people and groups each with their own conventions. Before I had to know which group did what to know the variables. Claude fixed that.
There used to be pushback to have 100% test coverage. If you don't have that, then you can't merge. AI can write the tests but a programmer must own them.
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
Nitpick, but it's not <your> AI. Would be nice if that were true, but it's not
mekoka 5 hours ago [-]
I imagine how you intended your comment to come across and I get it to some level. But I can't help feeling that there's something a bit dystopian in a world where all friction is removed just to more quickly get to the juicy bits.
_factor 5 hours ago [-]
You’re still free to walk to your destination instead of driving, it would just be a lot of time friction.
Funny how reducing the friction with technology eventually increased the friction of the older transportation methods.
mekoka 3 hours ago [-]
Your analogy is apt in more ways than one. It comes down to how often the point of a journey is to get to the destination. Most old wisdoms teach that the latter is more often just a MacGuffin to embark on the former. If they're right, AI offers tremendous potential for new adventures, but also as a catalyst for completely missing the plot. Yes, we're "free" to choose, but I'm skeptical that a culture conditioning us to eschew friction necessarily equips us to distinguish when the grind and frustration might be "good" for us.
I once made a travel friend who just didn't get the point of me taking eight hours to slow travel by train or by bus across a country that we were both visiting, when she could just hop on a plane and get to the next city in an hour. Earlier in my youth, transportation choices were economically motivated, but what I got from it would influence all future visits to other countries. When chilling with other travelers, exchanging tips and stories, it was as if my friend was visiting a completely different place. She left the country shortly after, confiding to me in the end that she really didn't see what the big deal was with it and that she would probably never be back.
I understand that some people may not resonate with this outlook -- and maybe it's just me getting older -- but I've grown to see that there's indeed such a thing as going through life in a hurry. I do think that the jury's still out as to the overall impact of AI on what I would label "useful friction".
kakacik 5 hours ago [-]
There are some of us who still prefer actually learning stuff, even about light bulbs.
AI is mental comfort zone so deep it will be extremely hard to ever get out of it, basically back to beginning of rat race. Maybe not applicable to you in your blissful ignorance, but sure as hell I won't put literally all my eggs into one tiny foreign-owned basket.
wat10000 6 hours ago [-]
I've been making some good use of this stuff, but identifying light bulbs, really? That wasn't exactly difficult in the Before Times.
abirch 6 hours ago [-]
The G9 was completely new to me. Sure I could try to figure it, but I'd rather be focusing on the things I care about. This is the thing that I'd historically procrastinate.
To quote Adam Grant, "Procrastination is an emotional management problem not a time management problem"
wat10000 4 hours ago [-]
Search "light bulb base types," you'll get a page showing what they all look like, G9 among them. I get that it's useful (and it's amazing it can do this), but it hardly seems enough to justify calling it "so much easier."
abirch 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry, this was one small example. Yes, the lightbulb by itself isn't hard, but when you have a full-time job, long commute, and are a parent these little friction points add up. Yes I can drive 30-minutes each way to take this to a hardware store to have someone knowledgeable help me or I can order it online.
There are so many examples of this. Removing small friction points that significantly make me happier and my life better. It means I have time to go grab a beer with friends instead of driving. The lightbulb was a recent example so it was fresh in my mind.
brendoelfrendo 5 hours ago [-]
As the old joke goes, "How many output tokens does it take to change a lightbulb?"
kjkjadksj 4 hours ago [-]
Or you take the old bulb to the store and buy the same kind. Funny how everytime someone says the AI made their life easier, it really didn’t seem like it when you paint out what the “old way” actually looked like.
You should ask how ai people make their slides. It is a crazy exercise in micromanaging what used to be a couple minute task. And the people engaging in that think they are saving time somehow or ending up with a better thing than they could make themselves.
pesus 3 hours ago [-]
I honestly can't tell if this is satire or not. If so, great job. If not - destroying the world so you can look up a lightbulb is not worth it, and you could have done that before anyway.
oulipo2 6 hours ago [-]
"AI has had a limited improvement over my life, so I'm happy fucking over the rest of the world by polluting water, using huge amounts of energy, and reinforcing class hierarchies, just so that I can change a lightbulb a bit easier" is peak tech-bro
dfxm12 5 hours ago [-]
Additionally, Schmidt is not just opining that this future is inevitable, he represents people in a position of power to actually impose this future upon the grads (as opposed to something more mutually beneficial).
bko 7 hours ago [-]
I agree Woz is a sweet lie how everyone is unique and a snowflake. But regarding "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", I think the problem is the work hard part.
Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or spend time learning every aspect of production from design, lighting, pacing and everything in between. Probably not a lot. And chances are if you do spend the time (on even a vapid dream like being an influencer), you'd do pretty well and learn a very valuable set of skills.
My experience is the bar is pretty low. It's hard enough to find someone that's competent in their field of expertise and is easy to work with. A lot of people are just missing the basics. They don't put in the work or are willing to take instruction.
zamadatix 6 hours ago [-]
A lot of people work extremely hard towards their dream to fail. Which is fine, but when you start out life being told if you just keep trying and it'll happen then it can quickly destroy the golden years of your career/life. This is often varying per goals too. Just because you love football does not mean you're going to be able to be a pro player just because you spent every hour on it. You're probably better off e joying football, doing enough to get a scholarship, and finding something else to build your life goals around.
If you want to take yourself from where you are to the best chances at your dream, work as hard as you can towards it. But it's also more than fine if you don't want to take that risk, you can often have a perfectly good life without working yourself to death on the promise it'll make your dreams come true if you do.
aerodexis 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jmathai 7 hours ago [-]
Truth is the wrong word for a future outcome. But…
Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
comfysocks 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, and potentially extracts the wealth at the cost of the new grad’s job prospects.
Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!
blipvert 2 hours ago [-]
The college graduation version of the company owner speaking to an employee:
“You see that Ferrari out there on the parking lot? If you work really, really hard this year and meet all of your targets, then next year I’ll be able to afford another one.”
BearOso 5 hours ago [-]
> Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
There are no wealth extraction capabilities yet. It's a money pit. They're certainly hoping it'll surpass some breakpoint and become profitable by brute-forcing compute power, but that's very optimistic. The propaganda Schmidt is pushing envisions that future in hopes of raising current stock prices so they can afford the brute-forcing that's very unlikely to succeed.
My prediction is that we'll keep the tools we've acquired, probably refined a bit, but the LLM path is eventually a dead-end. After this, if they still try to monetize, remote models will be extremely expensive.
LargeWu 7 hours ago [-]
Not only benefits from it, but the very one causing it to happen.
lanyard-textile 5 hours ago [-]
The graduation speech is a spiritual ceremony.
It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge.
In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.
leonidasrup 7 hours ago [-]
As much as it costs Woz nothing to be AI sceptic, Erich Schmidt has to loose much if AI investments don't deliver.
Only correcting this because I’ve seen three people make the mistake now - it’s Eric, not Erich.
sda2 6 hours ago [-]
more like Erlich ;)
kolinko 7 hours ago [-]
Which, one might argue, shows he believes it.
He's putting money where his mouth is.
al_borland 6 hours ago [-]
Up until the reality of the technology doesn’t align to the expectations and promises. That’s when true belief shifts to hype and lies in an effort to salvage the investment. I think that’s where we’re at now.
naravara 6 hours ago [-]
For people like Schmidt I think the hype is a true belief. You can see it in his posture and tone while being booed by the entire crowd. I’ve only seen that kind of self-satisfied smugness from evangelical religious nuts right before they tell someone they clearly regard with disgust that they’ll “pray for them.”
Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted in anything the technology or methods do.
kolinko 4 hours ago [-]
Btw. they were booing him before he even got on a stage. There was a leaflet and a student action to boo him not because of his AI stance, but because of his ex accusing him of abuse (sic)
Yea, it's the smug grins from these guys that I can't stand. It's not enough that they won and they know they won, but they have to rub everyone else's noses in it, too.
gnerd00 5 hours ago [-]
agree but it is military thinking that makes him smug like that
foltik 6 hours ago [-]
More like his mouth goes wherever the money is.
Obvious to the grads he’s yet another “visionary” corporate hack waxing to them about how they’d better not miss the AI rocket ship.
6 hours ago [-]
GuinansEyebrows 4 hours ago [-]
i don't think you appreciate the degree of cynicism required to become a billionaire.
lr4444lr 6 hours ago [-]
I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
Doesn't that just mean that the merits will be unspoken and implied by what the enemy is saying as they speak to your deficits?
If I'm short with a bad temper, then implicitly I'm NOT a bad enough public speaker, or that would have been mentioned top of mind.
Shalomboy 7 hours ago [-]
Eric Schmidt has no clearer a crystal ball than Woz has; to say one is telling the truth while the other is lying is not particularly objective of you.
compiler-guy 3 hours ago [-]
Even if Schmidt was telling the truth, and Woz was lying, there is a time and a place for everything, and Graduation speeches are a time for celebrating the graduates, not telling them their lives will suck.
Even if it is true.
The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.
mold_aid 4 hours ago [-]
Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet (unintentional)lie of Wozniak?
Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"
baxtr 7 hours ago [-]
How can you be sure Eric Schmidt is telling “the truth” and Wozniak is lying?
What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?
itsalwaysgood 7 hours ago [-]
The economy
lukecarr 7 hours ago [-]
And famously, the economy never changes course. Something, something, stocks always go up.
itsalwaysgood 6 hours ago [-]
Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?
Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?
Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete.
The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.
I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going overseas... businesses always go with the cheapest labor.
The world is dog eat dog, and those that prepare for the future are better equipped to deal.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
I get it, you think that LLMs are going to fulfill all the threats that it's proponents have been giving us. That's yet to be seen.
itsalwaysgood 4 hours ago [-]
If you consider things like Mythos (I know it was partly hype), and cyber security using AI to find old vulnerabilities in open source tools, and others using that information to actively disrupt the economy (this is already happening)....
And governments pushing quantum computing, presumably to be first to crack Internet security: it's easier to imagine some of those future threats.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
It's a massive long shot pipe dream, but we might somehow end up with legislators who have backbones and actually represent the people, and they'll enact regulation to reign in the applications of AI, provide a safety net for the millions who will be affected by it, and/or at least find a way to spread the prosperity that comes from AI across the population rather than into the hands of the few. I'm not betting on it, but it theoretically could happen.
itsalwaysgood 5 hours ago [-]
I doubt it. There is so little care for monopoly or copyright because AI is a race, as much as it is a tool. And nobody wants to restrict the race. Policy may pass that limits the use of AI for the general public, but the 'whatever it takes' race to 'superintelligence' goes on.
watwut 5 hours ago [-]
> Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?
Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought.
>The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.
It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people.
> Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?
In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.
itsalwaysgood 5 hours ago [-]
I agree with most of your points except the last one.
Probably easier to ask a question than argue a point:
How eager are you to use Government services?
Businesses are only well-run if they make profit: hiring the cheapest labor to produce something people will actually spend money on. And the more frictionless that process, the more our economy advances it. AI fits in there very well.
I also want to point out: startups are usually happy to be bought up by the bigger guys.
al_borland 6 hours ago [-]
The economy looked really good before the dotcom crash too. The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions.
Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.
itsalwaysgood 6 hours ago [-]
A lot of businesses depend on the Internet.
AI will be the same in the future. Not sure what to say about the ups and downs of stock price, or hype cycles.
skinfaxi 6 hours ago [-]
> The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions.
The crash did not make the internet go away. I don't foresee a world where we will go back to the pre-AI times either. In the same way that post dotcom crash, you would be a fool to not have your business online, I think we will find similar things to be the case around AI. Even if the bubble bursts AI is here to stay and that will have major consequences for labor.
itsalwaysgood 5 hours ago [-]
The irony of the dotcom crash is that a lot of 'dark fiber' service started rolling out decades later. Fiber that was laid during the dotcom era.
There are lots of datacenters going up in similar fashion. I don't know if they'd have the same utility decades later (very unlikely), but it's interesting.
joe_mamba 7 hours ago [-]
Economic, market and product results.
Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs.
From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek who was a one trick pony with the Apple computer but hasn't been in touch with the tech economy and jobs market for decades?
crispyambulance 6 hours ago [-]
> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?]
The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.
In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.
tmp10423288442 5 hours ago [-]
Woz should have a lot more money than that for being such a large early shareholder of Apple, so that actually speaks poorly to his reputation as a "successful entrepreneur/investor". Some of the reason why his net worth is below expectations is noble (giving $10m of shares to early employees), but most of it is not - 4 marriages as opposed to Steve Jobs' 1 marriage, an impractical attitude in general, and never having any success after Apple, even as an investor.
coldpie 5 hours ago [-]
No one should have more than $140MM. That is a ludicrous amount of money.
jjulius 5 hours ago [-]
Additionally, it's kinda funny to see someone arguing that an individual who's famous for talking about how uncomfortable he is with massive wealth, including his own, should be more wealthy than he is.
LocalH 3 hours ago [-]
That's what happens when someone views the world through the lens of "wealth is the only way to measure success"
joe_mamba 6 hours ago [-]
>By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors",
So are a lot of people who invested(gambled) early in Bitcoin and Tesla, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from them just because they managed to make a lot of money.
But if you design and developed several successful tech products in your career, I think people should at least listen because it's a pattern rather than just luck.
>and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them
So is Taylor Swift, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from her.
When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver successful products repeatedly, like Erich Schmidt or Steve Jobs, not one trick ponies like Woz who managed to get lucky once in a completely different era, then coast the next 50+ years on past glory giving speeches.
Again, I really like Woz as a person, he's my spirit animal, but that doesn't mean he's correct and in tune on the status of the tech market, the challenges people and entrepreneurs will face today. His experience being a HW tinkerer in his garage in the 1970's isn't relevant anymore today. The world has changed massively since then.
A more modern day woz would be Palmer Luckey of Anduril. Love him or hate him he's more up to date on what the industry rewards today if you want to be a garage tinkerer made billionaire entrepreneur founder than Woz.
crispyambulance 6 hours ago [-]
> When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly...
That's fine, I guess, if your idea of "success" is apple-scale product home-runs (good luck with that).
For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.
jjulius 6 hours ago [-]
Right? OP asked a very subjective question on a public forum and is bristling that other's worldviews/desires/goals are different from his.
itsalwaysgood 5 hours ago [-]
This is a topic about predicting and preparing for the future.
If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit. Bring some logic into the discussion and stop fishing for points.
jjulius 4 hours ago [-]
>This is a topic about predicting and preparing for the future.
This is a discussion that started about preparing for the future and has spawned multiple[2], fluid threads[3] of conversation[4] that aren't quite in line with "predicting and preparing for the future", some even with their own throwaway responses unrelated to "the topic"[5]. Should we lambast the person who posted the Lisp joke, too?
This particular conversation chain is about how one measures success, which I've discussed with logic in a separate[0] response. Future success looks different for all of us, and there are a wide variety of ways for us to get wherever those goals are.
>If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit.
Oh, no snark was intended. OP asked a question on a public forum and started getting snarky themselves[1] towards people who shared their subjective response, and my intent was to point out that it's OK for us all to view success differently.
>... stop fishing for points
Is this not snark based on your own assumption that I care about meaningless internet upvotes?
The only people I see bristling are the ones who don't want to hear an uncomfortable viewpoint.
"When it comes to jobs, I'd rather listen to a business wizard from 2011 than a technical wizard from 1981" is hardly contentious, but if people liked hearing "AI has changed the world and you're all fucked", the students wouldn't have been booing in the first place.
Honestly, if you don't like what Eric Schmidt was saying, you should have a long hard think about whether unchecked capitalism is really as great as advertised.
naravara 6 hours ago [-]
Funny thing about Steve Jobs is that he actually didn’t deliver a single home run until his return to Apple late in his career.
The Apple II was Woz, the Mac was okay but mostly got shepherded into what it was by the other Apple leadership, the Lisa was a flop, Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby, NeXt went nowhere until the Apple acquisition.
The guy had somehow managed to make a successful career out of shipping very opinionated, interesting, and cool products that were commercial failures. If you were going purely by commercial performance you would not have picked him, you’d be picking him based on that ineffable reality distortion field of his that makes you BELIEVE everything he’s doing will change the world.
StilesCrisis 5 hours ago [-]
Did you forget Pixar? Jobs transformed the company with his extremely bold bet on Toy Story. They were doomed to obscurity without this big bet and now all children's movies are made this way.
naravara 2 hours ago [-]
I covered this when I said “Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby.”
LargeWu 7 hours ago [-]
I want advice from the one questioning whether we should, not just whether we can.
joe_mamba 6 hours ago [-]
OK, and who's stopping you? Take your advice from whoever you want.
History tends to shows the pragmatists wiping out the luddites out of the gene pool/business market, but you are free to make your choice the way you see fit, nobody is forcing you to follow anyone.
6 hours ago [-]
jjulius 6 hours ago [-]
Wozniak, every time. Gigantic financial success at the expense of everything Google has negatively impacted isn't something I would be proud of.
Everyone defines success differently, and Schmidt's "success" is, frankly, unappealing and gross to myself and, I'm sure, many others.
There's a lot more to life and the world than the economy and massive financial gains. Focusing on "economic, market and product results" yet mentioning nothing about the impact to people and customers is how Zuckerberg sleeps at night, and that's ugly to me.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
Dude: Eric schmidt is somebody who turned a cool technology company whose motto was "don't be evil" into an advertising company.
wat10000 6 hours ago [-]
I'm fairly allergic to advice in general, but if I were to take some, I'd take it from the happy extremely rich guy over the ridiculous ultra rich guy.
watwut 6 hours ago [-]
Google turned from company that at least pretends to not do evil ... into one who does it without care.
I think that taking advice from a sociopath able to amass a lot of money is usually bad idea. Their advice is designed to make you make him a lot of money. His advice is not about what is good for you - he does not care. And if you succeed you are his competitor.
7 hours ago [-]
rowanG077 7 hours ago [-]
TBH this is also how I feel. There is no way to put the AI genie back in the bottle. There will be sweeping changes in society because of it. Fighting against it is seems like a fools errand imo.
watwut 6 hours ago [-]
Trying to limit harm of something that is likely to happen 100% makes sense.
rowanG077 5 hours ago [-]
I agree, this is why you need to tell students a realistic outlook. And of these two I believe Wozniak is in fantasy land and Schmidt is closer to reality.
HumblyTossed 5 hours ago [-]
> ... unpopular truth...
It is only a "truth" if we allow the oligarchs to make it a truth. This is capitalism run amuck. Late stage capitalism if you will.
The serious question that keeps getting kicked aside, is when the majority have no jobs (or low wage jobs at best) and can't afford your freaking "tokens" and trinkets, what then? But nobody cares because that isn't what's happening this quarter.
kakacik 5 hours ago [-]
You should step out of SV bubble for a while, check how rest of humanity fares compared to our ultra comfy extremely well paid jobs and maybe be a bit more humble, not expecting whole world to roll exactly as per your expectations, whatever they are.
To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results.
And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.
joe_mamba 4 hours ago [-]
>You should step out of SV bubble for a while
I live and work in Europe.
We have internet here.
bell-cot 4 hours ago [-]
Harsh Old Geezer Take:
- You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. Once you know (say) that the US has >300M people, but only 50 state governors - it's kinda obvious that it can't literally be true for even the children of the 0.01%. But if you're a well-intended parent/teacher/councilor without any special knowledge of the future, the "work hard and apply yourself" is still good general advice. Statistically, there have been very few situations where being an idle layabout turned out better, long-term.
- At least in people who care about children, there is a very real cognitive bias toward keeping kids happy. Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. And telling them certain things about Santa Claus and such. Whether this bias is genetic, culturally transmitted, or both - natural selection seems to favor it.
- Over the long term, societies vary greatly in how equitably their wealth is distributed...but large, externally-secure societies have a very strong bias toward the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting poorer. Basically that's because the most sociopathic and greedy folks keep doing whatever it takes to move up and "satisfy" their longings, vs. decent folks aren't motivated enough to keep fighting back hard. Though as things get worse and worse for the 99%, it gets tougher to keep the poor from rising up and overthrowing in their masters. Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today...
joe_mamba 4 hours ago [-]
>you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century.
Sure, maybe I am. Though, the history taught in school books is a warped, "history is written by the victors" take on how events actually unfolded back then, not an objective source of truth. So you being a product of an ungutted education(more like indoctrination) system doesn't really put you in a better light as you think it does, especially when you look at how boomers vote and how in touch(or otherwise) they are with current day reality. At least Gen-Z had access to alternative sources from all over the world thanks to the internet, for better and for worse, so they have diverging opinions on this topic, rather than only what the schools programed in their brains.
>Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
The question is how much you want to bet that humanity will repeat the same mistakes that led to those events? I bet 100%.
>- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children.
And what happens to people who've been groomed with that mindset since childhood? Do you think they suddenly flip a maturity switch and forget all that indoctrination when they turn 17/18 and get access to student loans? Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed till 25. If you want kids to make mature choices you need to hit them with mature harsh reality which nobody wants to do because we coddle kids till it's too late.
>Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be.
Kids making the world look better, should be about keeping your environment clean and planting trees and such, not programming their minds with unreal platitudes that ignore the way current economy is set to work(against them). Because you're gonna create a lot of unhappy and disgruntled young adults that will want to see the world burn to the ground once they realize they've been duped their whole lives.
>Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today.
So then we should clap for people who ignore this known fact, and lie to kids that the world doesn't work like that, when we all know it does?
gyanchawdhary 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tmp10423288442 5 hours ago [-]
> how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview
As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.
bko 7 hours ago [-]
Where's a link to the actual speech? There's no link in the article. Surely you saw the speech to comment how strong of a public speaker he is, and it wasn't based off this one line right?
I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.
oxag3n 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
> I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology.
When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting.
Back then changes happened more gradually.
It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison.
> Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different.
AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not.
Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.
Cabal 47 minutes ago [-]
> Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful
Not unlike trying to cajole a probabilistic text generator into writing code that isn't atrocious. And failing.
regnull 2 hours ago [-]
It's not just AI. It's AI on top of society discontent that existed for a long time, but accelerated recently. The big underlying problem is, since at least 1970s every subsequent generation had to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as their parents. For a few decades it was balanced by the increasing women's participation in the workforce. But then, since 2008, we got banking crisis, both political parties focusing on outrage, pandemic, great resignation, generation of workers lost due to the lack of in-person contact, and now AI.
tim333 29 minutes ago [-]
There hasn't been a tech nearly as disruptive in recent times and possibly in all human history. Agriculture and industry both had obvious benefits serving humanity whereas AI can be a bit more of a competitor to it.
dchftcs 8 hours ago [-]
Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear.
But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
whack 7 hours ago [-]
> They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.
If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
graemep 7 hours ago [-]
A view that is not shared always by LLM cheerleaders. Part of Sam Altman's defence of the environmental impact of AI is that it is less than that of a human life.
"He said it was unreasonable to focus on "how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query."
"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart," he said. "And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."
It took a 100 billion people and their knowledge,experience to generate the data to train an AI. So that cost also comes under the environmental costs to build his version of AI.
unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
sam1r 4 hours ago [-]
>>> the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
Wow! Well said! so shouldn't we focus on ... fixing humanity first?
casey2 6 hours ago [-]
It's odd that whenever someone discovers a way to generate value from public noise, costs already paid, that they feel like they are being stolen from even though PPP for the average person will rise due to AI, not fall.
Sharlin 7 hours ago [-]
His human costume is really starting to fall apart at the seams, isn’t it?
croon 7 hours ago [-]
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde
Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."
F3nd0 7 hours ago [-]
> A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
So the opposite of a Lisp programmer then!
anthk 4 hours ago [-]
A Lisp programmer it's very aware of the value of nil or ().
doginasuit 7 hours ago [-]
> The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value.
People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering?
I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular effort, but there should be no question about their worth as a person. It should not be a part of how we understand people and ourselves.
It is a healthy conclusion that your value doesn't depend on your practical utility, because that will come and go and is sometimes beyond your control. Your value isn't a question at all.
hajile 4 hours ago [-]
> There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive.
> there should be no question about their worth as a person
Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
There's no value in life, but life should be allowed to exist. Who's to say otherwise?
The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.
doginasuit 2 hours ago [-]
Life is valuable to life. Or to say it another way, there is no concept of value beyond the reckoning of living things, even the value of dust and rock on the moon.
exitb 7 hours ago [-]
Every year half a million children die of diarrhea. There are so, so many people in the world, who are capable of joy and suffering, who "we" don't care much at all. However I have a feeling that "we" might be joining that group eventually.
Sharlin 7 hours ago [-]
Still, it’s vastly fewer now relative to the total number of children born than any previous time in human history. It could be even fewer had birth rates begin to drop instantly as a response to child mortality dropping dramatically even in most developing countries, rather than with a few-generation delay.
NewsaHackO 3 hours ago [-]
Yea, and I will take it a step further; it is really easy to start to worry about the “worth of a human life” when it’s yours. When we are in the position to not care about the worth of a human for our gain(such as children working to make iPhones for us to use cheaper) we call it economics.
vitally3643 7 hours ago [-]
> Our value isn't predicated on our utility.
In the moral sense, sure.
But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists.
The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you don't get to participate in society and are left to starve to death. No amount of flowery language is going to feed and house the unemployed. And we are running full speed into a situation with the explicit and overt goal of cresting as many unemployed people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that there are no resources or help offered to those unemployed people.
Flowery language will cover up the starving bodies in the streets the same way a can of febreeze will cover up a landfill. This is an enormous problem and if we don't fix it, people will die. Whether or not a human has intrinsic moral value by simply existing, we require money to survive in this society. A human life may be a mystical beautiful and valuable concept, but our society has determined that if you don't have money, you literally do not deserve to live.
That's what these students are so angry about. They're being pushed into a world that refuses to employ them and which delivers a death sentence for the crime of unemployment.
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
You're conflating society with the white collar job at hand. Yes, if you don't provide value for shareholders, your life is worthless _to that company_. The company is in the business of making money. The businesses goals are a microcosm; a small subset of society. There are many other ways to live (and live well, I might add).
card_zero 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's quite right, unless you personally value joy for its own sake. I value knowledge, and joy is useful to creating knowledge, and suffering is harmful to it. But I don't want to have some futile joy, and I don't need to avoid some irrelevant suffering.
Otherwise you get effects like;
* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
* Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
I'll admit that knowledge isn't practical, and you can't always identify when you're creating it, and a lot of people don't think in these terms and there's a lot of intuition involved, along with societal mores about caring for people which help the growth of knowledge as general rules without getting all bean-counting about it. But I think it matters that hedonism is an incoherent motivation and that creating knowledge is a far clearer one (and hedonism tends to turn into creating knowledge, anyway, if you like meaning). Hedonism, utilitarianism, same difference.
9dev 7 hours ago [-]
> Otherwise you get effects like;
> * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
> * Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
These are entirely valid positions to take though. Obtaining knowledge for knowledge's sake isn't objectively more meaningful, even if it may be subjectively more valuable to you.
You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)
Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.
card_zero 7 hours ago [-]
Oh, the Sapiens guy. I read Sapiens, thought it was OK, then other people picked holes in it and persuaded me that it was worse than that. But I suppose that doesn't preclude this Nexus book being good.
But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)
I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.
I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.
Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.
9dev 5 hours ago [-]
I think you missed my point. The distinction I made in terminology was on purpose: I used "joy" to describe the inherent motivation for trying to accomplish something, and "bliss" for the state some may try to reach by using drugs.
And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.
And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.
card_zero 5 hours ago [-]
Obviously you'd want to name "joy" as a separate thing, to propose it as the thing we're motivated to do, but the problem is that you didn't describe it. So now I'm at: the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it. Of course I'm open to some pluralism, like it can be a string bag of mixed motivations, but I do think the motivations in our culture all agree with creating knowledge, and become vacuous without that element. What is "gain", "pleasure", etc., without meaning? (I don't know what you mean by meaning. I mean the process of explaining and learning and creating ideas.) Without it those are mechanical processes of the "number go up" type. Yes, I am skeptical that anything of that kind is anybody's deep motivation, though it may be a superficial one.
Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.
9dev 3 hours ago [-]
> the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it.
That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.
Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.
> Why are you trying to avoid morality?
I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?
(Which is itself a poor rendition of Nichomachean Ethics...this conversation you two are having is ancient)
danaris 5 hours ago [-]
....I think it's a fairly widespread view to value joy for its own sake. In fact, I would say that's pretty much how normal people would say they view joy.
card_zero 5 hours ago [-]
So normal people don't make sense, what else is new.
The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.
danaris 3 hours ago [-]
Your examples make it clear that you do not understand normal people in the slightest. And when I say "normal" here, I'm not talking about the Blazing Saddles-style "salt of the earth; you know, morons." I mean roughly the middle 50-60% (by width) of the bell curve. The vast majority of humanity.
Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.
HumblyTossed 5 hours ago [-]
None of that buys groceries.
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
THIS is going to be the limitation of capitalism. Capitalism isn't compassionate. It's a really good economic framework though, so it will be interesting how that's reconciled in the coming years
hajile 4 hours ago [-]
Money and monetary systems aren't compassionate -- people are.
Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).
One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).
This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.
itsalwaysgood 7 hours ago [-]
The problem with public policy is that it allows other countries to get ahead of you. 'AI' isn't just a tool, it's also a race.
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
What do you win at the end of the race? I've never heard it concisely put. 'Dominance' is the word that comes to my mind, but I don't want to put words in your mouth and don't really know why that would inherently be a valuable trophy, so that's probably not what you were thinking of, right?
itsalwaysgood 5 hours ago [-]
As always, influence for the future
iAMkenough 56 minutes ago [-]
Not if you don’t set your country’s children up for success.
Top of the line AI without educated, healthy, economically-stable children means no future for the country or our society.
iAMkenough 7 hours ago [-]
The bigger race is education, which some countries are really falling behind on.
itsalwaysgood 5 hours ago [-]
That is always going to be a personal race. You can get in the currents of education, but your success will always depend on your own paddling.
iAMkenough 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t personally set education standards for today’s youth or budgets to invest in the country’s youth.
The United States is falling behind in both.
beepbooptheory 6 hours ago [-]
Why should we care about that? Even if you wanted to argue our individual fates are tied to our country's, we don't all live in the same country, so how, actually, could we all care? Are you really convinced its so zero sum like this?
We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?
itsalwaysgood 6 hours ago [-]
We're you around for the space race?
It's a world prestige thing, and also a competitive edge, for better or worse.
ToValueFunfetti 6 hours ago [-]
"Other countries" means China here, I think. China got a little on board with the global capitalism (and lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty along the way, if we're looking for the point), but never really embraced Liberalism and so ideally isn't the one aligning superintelligence. It would be lousy if Russia or North Korea or Somalia was in that position and it would be fine if the UK or Denmark or Brazil or Ghana was, but none of that matters because none of them will be in that position. Only the US and China are playing the game.
itsalwaysgood 6 hours ago [-]
And it's a pretty big game
beepbooptheory 5 hours ago [-]
If this speculated intelligence is so "super" why would it matter what its host country's commitments are? I would hope it would at least be intelligent enough to sort things out there? How can something be so potentially threatening, so "super," but also be like a baby, where we need to worry how its raised? Its super intelligent about everything except ideology? That doesn't really sound like (super)intelligence to me..
But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?
itsalwaysgood 5 hours ago [-]
I think it's more of a prestige discussion. Who leads, who follows, between countries. Not whose super intelligence is better. Who got their first, and how are they using it?
ToValueFunfetti 4 hours ago [-]
A supervillain is nevertheless super. Intelligence doesn't correlate with morality- most probably there doesn't exist a 'true ideology' that can be solved for in absolute terms. Do you imagine a superintelligence could calculate how beauty 'ought to' be traded off against truth?
When I say China is a bad choice because it's not as liberal as ~the west, I do imagine a reader in China thinking the opposite. I don't think they're dumb and I don't think they've been duped; they have a coherent ideology that fits their values. I just don't want it to stomp out mine.
Maybe I'm wrong and you can solve for morality or at least the meta-morality of Liberalism/pluralism where you permit various moralities to coexist. Hopefully so. Maybe the value system in China is closer to mine than I imagine and it's just operating under different constraints. But I don't want to gamble on that when winning is within reach and is a guarantee given alignment to any human values is achieved at all.
inglor_cz 6 hours ago [-]
"Value" is a word with many meanings. Your value as a human or a living being may be very different from your value to your employer or your value to the taxman or anywhere else.
It is very easy to get lost in between them, especially when listening to a good speaker who can flitter between those meanings at will.
What is worse is that those values interact. We indeed we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled, but only up to a point, and there is a reasonable discussion how exactly should countries divide their limited resources between vulnerable groups, including families with young kids. In that context, the future economic and societal value of a 5 y.o. vs. a 85 y.o. inevitably creeps up.
anal_reactor 7 hours ago [-]
> Our value isn't predicated on our utility.
Yes it is. If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist because the entity that sees it as valuable would be willing to spend resources on maintaining it.
> The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
Most social programs keep expanding until they become unsustainably expensive. You can't just make a law "everyone gets free money" and expect this to have no negative consequences.
eloisius 4 hours ago [-]
>If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist
This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.
I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.
Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.
ToValueFunfetti 6 hours ago [-]
If human lives weren't inherently valuable, the concept of charity wouldn't exist. Where does that leave us? I think probably the line of argument doesn't work in either direction.
Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?
port11 2 hours ago [-]
We’ve also done true intelligence a disservice by using AI to name the current implementation of LLMs. It’s stretching ‘intelligence’ quite a bit. They can be super useful, but we’ve downplayed how phenomenal the human brain is.
I really like ‘Actual Intelligence’, that’s a clever one from Woz. People need to be reminded to use their brains, they’re a brilliant product of evolution (or your favourite god’s work).
websap 8 hours ago [-]
Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil.
Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.
HarHarVeryFunny 5 hours ago [-]
Something changed with Dario a year or so ago. I think he started out with good intentions, although really hard to tell. Maybe it was really all about power and control for him from day one. Certainly now he's a different person - appears totally corrupted by money and power.
Dario used to at least emphasize the potential positives of AI while being worried about the negatives, but unlike Hassabis/DeepMind he has done nothing to bring about the positive part and is now just accelerating the harmful part as fast as he can. Google is an AI company, bringing us things like AlphaFold, and Anthropic (also OpenAI) are just LLM companies.
malfist 2 hours ago [-]
It's just the worst version of capitalist game theory. If I don't do the bad thing and get rich, then someone else will do the bad thing and I won't get rich.
throwatdem12311 7 hours ago [-]
I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt.
“You’re right - I overstepped”
Is the new “You’re absolutely right”.
I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.
malfist 7 hours ago [-]
I have a script at work that writes out some config files and I'm having Claude run them after making changes. The script if it detects breaking changes will spit out a message saying what the breaking changes are, and not do anything, telling you to rerun it after validation with the override flag.
If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.
So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.
This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.
sandos 7 hours ago [-]
This is one of a few reason I strongly prefer GPT and its codex variants. It seldom frustrates me, sure its not omnipotent in any way, but it just feels very "tuned in" when it comes to understanding intent and scope.
PunchyHamster 7 hours ago [-]
Imagine worker that did loop of "you're absolutely right -> same fuckup again" multiple days every week, wasting time of whoever told them to do the task
They'd be out of company after a week
doubled112 7 hours ago [-]
> They'd be out of company after a week
I really wish this were true.
ahartmetz 7 hours ago [-]
Such workers exist. AI is cheaper and faster than such workers, though, so management might still like them. Ugh.
throwatdem12311 7 hours ago [-]
I do want to fire Claude at this point and switch to Codex. Unfortunately the guy with the purse strings is ride or die full Claude psychosis and our business can’t afford to just buy anything and everything for funsies.
joquarky 3 hours ago [-]
That depends on the company. I worked at an S&P 500 company that muddled along like this. They still make critical software for local and state governments.
bravetraveler 7 hours ago [-]
Contractors?!
comfysocks 4 hours ago [-]
But this new tool is not a blacksmith’s tool in the traditional sense. It’s more like an automated blacksmith that works fast, for cheap, does mediocre work, but has this mediocre skill level in an exceptional broad range of tasks.
manmal 7 hours ago [-]
Blacksmiths is not the best analogy here.
jcgrillo 7 hours ago [-]
Why not? Blacksmithing and coding have a hell of a lot in common. In both disciplines toolmaking is extremely important. Often you have to make custom tools to accomplish a design--e.g. a twisting wrench or a form tool. Sometimes you have to make tools that get used once and thrown away, like a jig temporarily welded to a piece to hold it in place while you build its sibling assembly. Sound familiar? I do this kind of thing all the time in code.
Another similarity is the relative simplicity of the underlying structure of the system. You essentially have two hammers (one small one you swing with your hand and another big one that is planted on the ground), some material, and some heat. You build the rest.
Another similarity is the resistance to automation. A skilled blacksmith is a versatile worker. You can create assembly lines to automate any one thing they might produce. The end product will not have the same quality--it will not truly be wrought iron, each piece will not be unique, there will be nothing of the aesthetic taste of the artist in it, but if you're just some bean counter who doesn't care about those things you'll be able to sell it. But if you need the optionality to produce any of those things.. automation is not your friend. And some things just cannot be automated, at least not without extreme costs or very poor results--shoeing horses comes to mind.
JTbane 5 hours ago [-]
No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
bentcorner 1 hours ago [-]
I maintain a part of my team's CD process and I've observed a 30% increase in PR velocity since we started adopting agentic tools but it was a "one-off" increase (as-in, it hasn't continued to increase beyond that since about a half-year ago).
I'm guessing though that there are other improvements in code quality and feature velocity. I've noticed personally that AI is really good at catching smaller things that are easy to miss (e.g., if you ask it to rename fooTheBars it also updates all the relevant comments or enums that you might have missed).
disgruntledphd2 5 hours ago [-]
> My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.
> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.
ACCount37 3 hours ago [-]
Less and less true with every new generation of AI systems.
AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.
bigstrat2003 3 hours ago [-]
That simply isn't true. LLMs are completely incapable of operating without supervision, same as they were 3 years ago.
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
The scope and scale of the tasks LLMs can be trusted to do without supervision has increased massively in the meanwhile.
Of course, it will never be enough. The goalposts will move until we run out of them.
remix2000 8 hours ago [-]
I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, not with Markov chains (next token prediction), not otherwise. Especially not now when the current ML hype is already winding down. And yes this is a matter of belief since I don't think any science precludes agi from existing nor is there any reason to be sure it could someday materialize. I honestly would rather believe societal collapse hits us before agi can even be theorized.
KptMarchewa 7 hours ago [-]
I don't believe there will be self driving cars that will be perfect and never get into any accident or cause someone to die.
That does not matter when discussing its practicality; or whether they will cause drivers to lose jobs.
gruez 7 hours ago [-]
>I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, ...
Sounds like you're talking about AGI, not AI. AI is here today.
HarHarVeryFunny 7 hours ago [-]
AI was here in the 1970's too for that matter, in the form of expert systems. "AI" is the label that perennially gets applied to whatever current technology does something that was previously considered similar to human intelligence, then later on gets removed and applied to something new.
You'll know were making progress towards AGI when LLMs start being called LLMs again, and something new starts being called AI.
anthk 39 minutes ago [-]
As a die hard Schemer -and Prolog newbie-, I agree.
startpage_com 7 hours ago [-]
"AI" is a marketing buzzword. Real AI doesn't exist.
sjsdaiuasgdia 7 hours ago [-]
A thing that people have chosen to call AI is here today.
gruez 7 hours ago [-]
That just continues a tradition of moving the goalposts for "AI" to just beyond what's currently possible.
HarHarVeryFunny 7 hours ago [-]
Kind of, but I wouldn't exactly put it like that since AI has never meant anything more than automated intelligence/decision making of some sort. The bar isn't moving, just this almost meaningless label is just forever getting slapped on the latest shiny new thing.
You could legitimately call a thermostat "AI". Expert systems were previously called AI. Today it's Large Language Models. Tomorrow it'll be something else.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
I think the issue is that technologists use the term AI to mean one thing, which is something we've had since the 60s with lisp, forth, and prolog. And the average person uses AI to mean something more like Data from Star Trek, which we don't have and may or may not have this century. We're all talking past each other.
nutjob2 3 hours ago [-]
There is no rigorous definition of intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence. What you're referring to is people simply not knowing what they're talking about.
More to the point, there has always been a cottage industry in predicting an amazing future, just around the corner. 'AGI' is just the latest incarnation.
sjsdaiuasgdia 7 hours ago [-]
If you want to lean into the lie, you do you. I will not.
wnevets 2 hours ago [-]
>the students needed to hear this.
I thought that was the objective of these celebrity speeches.
bayindirh 8 hours ago [-]
Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it.
AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.
"Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.
We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
limflick 8 hours ago [-]
Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.
vanilla_nut 7 hours ago [-]
Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.
Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.
All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.
Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
mancerayder 7 hours ago [-]
One angle I'm exploring, as a non-dev who nonetheless works in tech, is using Claude as a professor. Make learning timelines for me for Leetcode, break it down in phases, start with theory, ask me questions, then give me a coding challenge. Save that to an html artifact I can export and read on my phone.
It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems.
But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with.
That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.
disgruntledphd2 5 hours ago [-]
Yup, I used to believe that people would all use the Internet to educate themselves, and we all know how that turned out (loads of people did, but the majority didn't).
holtkam2 8 hours ago [-]
The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
HarHarVeryFunny 6 hours ago [-]
> At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think
That's reasonable, but it doesn't mean that LLMs are close to being brains.
For a start, when humans think/talk, we often think ABOUT something - whatever is swirling about in our mind, or what we are currently seeing/feeling/etc. An LLM generating tokens/words is doing so only based on it's weights and the word sequence it is currently generating ... the human parallel would be more like a rapper spitting out words based on prior words, essentially on auto-pilot, or when we get triggered into spitting out stock phrases like "have a nice day".
If you want to compare an LLM to a human brain, it's basically equivalent to our language cortex if you ripped out all the external connections and ripped out all the feedback paths that make it capable of learning.
Of course there is a lot more to our brain than just our language cortex, but that alone should make you realize there is no real comparison beyond the fact that our language generation is also going to be based on prediction, and partly auto-regressive.
ahartmetz 7 hours ago [-]
We have spatial / quantitative and social / emotional aspects in our intelligence that are not at all like next token prediction.
If LLMs had shame, they'd surely not repeat mistakes (in the same context window) as much as they do.
sjsdaiuasgdia 7 hours ago [-]
Having shame would require the LLMs to actually be able to recognize mistakes they make.
People love to put a lot of meaning on what an LLM responds with when asked why it made a mistake, but it's critical to remember that the answer to that prompt is just another series of probabilistic tokens, and has no actual relation to how the error happened.
ahartmetz 5 hours ago [-]
They "recognize" mistakes just fine because you explicitly tell them. They recognize them well enough to correct (...sometimes). The way in which mistakes don't register is "Oh shit, that bad result was a result of my inappropriate actions. I must pay attention to not doing that again or the user will think I'm an idiot. I should even think about it some more to avoid the whole class of mistakes". Think of emotions as an attention mechanism that LLMs lack.
sjsdaiuasgdia 3 hours ago [-]
And many times, after an error is pointed out and an LLM offers an "explanation" for what happened, the LLM then gives the exact same erroneous result.
The LLM does not understand itself in any way.
ElevenLathe 7 hours ago [-]
It's language. Language itself is the thing that makes us smart in the unique way that we are among the other animals, and it weirdly turns out to be transferable to machines to at least some degree.
HarHarVeryFunny 6 hours ago [-]
At least 50% of humans have no "inner voice" and are not thinking in the same way as you. Many animals like dolphins, dogs, rats, crows are also very intelligent yet appear to only have primitive language capabilities.
A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.
ElevenLathe 5 hours ago [-]
I personally think that the "inner voice" is a non-falsifiable claim, and therefore more of a religious belief than something which can be part of any materialist theory. In this regard, I'm a strict empiricist and wouldn't be able to claim that I have one myself. In fact, I find that thinking "out loud" or "on paper" produces much better results in most instances, probably because I'm grounding my thinking in natural language, which is a fantastic medium for thought. If my "inner voice" were comparable in efficacy to actually speaking or writing, we wouldn't notice this effect, but I'm definitely not alone in this regard.
Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on.
It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it.
For the religious angle, look no further than John 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
(This is admittedly less falsifiable!)
HarHarVeryFunny 4 hours ago [-]
Well, humans developed language. Language is just a tool that let's us leverage our innate intelligence.
I'm sure that we will eventually build artificial brains, capable of bootstrapping communications and language for themelves (if run en-masse in a simulation where the benefit of communication would emerge). An LLM can't do this since it is by definition/construction something only capable of learning a pre-existing language.
An artificial brain, just like a wet jiggly one, is always going to be more intelligent than a one-trick pony like an LLM - a language processor, but it is notable how intelligent that one-trick pony nonetheless appears to be.
ElevenLathe 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's interesting that you think we could bootstrap an artificial brain with no inputs from human culture. I disagree, but am open to an existence proof of this kind. Such an artificial brain would be totally alien to us, of course. I wonder how differently it would perform versus something more grounded in "real" culture and writing?
adjejmxbdjdn 7 hours ago [-]
I think you’re right but I wanted to note that we are discovering that other animals also have language.
ElevenLathe 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, this to me is also a good sign for the "it's language that's smart, not us" argument. It's an emergent trait that has evolved several times, like flight or carcinization. There's something about language that attracts evolution toward it. One would expect such a trait to have a big survival value (disclaimer: IANA biologist, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, or linguist).
roenxi 7 hours ago [-]
> I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.
PunchyHamster 7 hours ago [-]
average person is absolutely awful judge on anything you put in front of average person tho.
And if anything, average AI user is vastly overstating how good/useful it is. Papers about it pretty much always show huge gap between "productivity person thinks they are achieving" and "actual growth of productivity"
stringfood 6 hours ago [-]
Yes! We need them to have hope, but hopefully there can be substance behind it, otherwise it's like when the Hitler Youth got those badges before Hitler killed himself. In the sense that we are awarding people medals when their future is bleak
aaron695 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
8 hours ago [-]
lnsru 8 hours ago [-]
Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.
827a 5 hours ago [-]
This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my friends cobbled together an agent that runs in an infinite loop, grabs whatever song they're actively listening to on Spotify, writes it in a file, then instructs the agent to emit tokens for 2-3 minutes on what that song and previous songs that day might mean for that person's mental state, like a little music-based diary. Repeat, run all day, 24/7. Kinda cool. But its just a way to use tokens, because the first thing all these AI labs built was a good coding model, and the second thing they built was a dashboard for admins to track how much their users are using the good coding model.
A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 3 hours ago [-]
In case this anecdote is not made up, I would implore you or your friend be a bit more subtle at tokenmaxing (ugh). At $JOB, I'm under the same mandate, and it turns out that every prompt is logged and aggregated. When someone else at $JOB asked the team PM who's in charge of the logging, s/he replied that the log is only used to correlate with commits, and nothing else, trust us (wink). I doubt this is unique to my $JOB.
Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.
827a 2 hours ago [-]
The situation is insane at the company my friend works at. There's no central oversight, because, as I understand it, someone in leadership had the idea that they didn't want to prescribe which AI tools their engineers should use. So they just let their engineers expensify any tools they want. Afaik he hasn't yet hit the upper-bound; last month he said he reimbursed a ~$500 anthropic bill. The same company also makes their engineers go to the Apple store to buy laptops, with their own money, then reimburse it. The credit card points must go crazy over there.
But definitely yeah, normally: be careful about these things. In his case when I said "admin dashboard" i moreso meant the general idea of admin oversight; he's said he's been complimented internally about how much he's using AI.
blowscum 2 hours ago [-]
> Many will not survive.
Thankfully the people responsible have already prepared a golden parachute to land safely to destroy something else.
eloisius 8 hours ago [-]
It may be useful outside the current tech rat race. One possibility is that a decade of openly user-hostile business decisions will reach their logical conclusion even faster, and those that haven’t fried our brains with CC may be in a position to pick up customers from these behemoths as they disintegrate.
kuerbel 7 hours ago [-]
I work in infrastructure (backups, networking etc) and no longer in software. I just don't see llms being that useful right now. If I have a problem and ask an LLM the answer is either fabricated or useless, rarely does it know what it's talking about. And yes I know how to describe the problem so that it has a chance to give an useful answer.
Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.
Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.
jve 7 hours ago [-]
Well Coding agents are being tackled. Infrastructure agents that would read your host event logs, device configuration, ilo, etc, etc - that is probably the missing piece.
Having a chat with chatgpt may give you clues or ideas when you have gone throught your own checklist of what could have went wrong, but can go only as far.
Agent on the other side will decompile .dll to find out issues if needed to go deep enought.
ratorx 6 hours ago [-]
Providing access to the data is easy. It is just an MCP or equivalent, and coding such CRUD is cheap now.
Applying the actions is unsolved. Unless you YOLO the LLMs, taking stateful actions automatically requires a lot of protective infrastructure, solid testing infra etc.
It’s all just more code, but a “create me a shopping website” LLM is likely not going to be doing the infrastructure level thinking required to handle it for now.
kuerbel 7 hours ago [-]
Might be but I just can't imagine a customer being fine with a loose cannon agent in their environment. E.g. coding agents are ignoring instructions. Who is to say that Claudes solution to a, say, slow backup isn't deleting the backup?
foobar10000 6 hours ago [-]
Imagine an agent shadowing all your terminals, providing ideas and asking to run commands that will let it verify the hypotheses it comes up with, while at the same time doing research on vendor docs, etc...
Quite safe, and already a force multiplier - this would be a harness. Maybe have it be able to write to a shadow system with similar (ideally same) hardware to verify it's hypothesis on how the system works, etc...
locopati 8 hours ago [-]
It is also possible to walk away from tech. To stop chasing the demands of anything for a buck and focus on something real.
seanclayton 7 hours ago [-]
Some people live paycheck to paycheck in tech. Where do they walk away to that isn't or won't be impacted by AI? Or are you assuming they have the financial support for such a risky switch?
liotier 7 hours ago [-]
Yes - it is easier than ever thanks to AI !
blowscum 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed, here’s a prompt snippet to help you afterwards”.
“Create me a resume for [newjob]. Ensure that it is properly embellished so that my two years of superficial, directionless AI-driven learning seem equivalent to the multi-decade experience and domain expertise the company is actually hiring for”.
ponector 7 hours ago [-]
You don't even need to do anything: layoffs will hit you anyway.
liotier 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks to AI too - wow, it really is versatile !
archagon 3 hours ago [-]
If you run your own company — even a tiny one — you don't have to do any of that shit (unless you want to).
Jtarii 8 hours ago [-]
Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.
datsci_est_2015 8 hours ago [-]
I agree, with the caveat that I don’t think any company is using AI well at the moment, specifically because I think our tooling around AI is woefully inadequate and immature.
Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.
ungreased0675 8 hours ago [-]
Right now LLMs are heavily subsidized. When that ends, the actual cost of the service may exceed its usefulness for many use cases.
hellohello2 3 hours ago [-]
Computation halves in price every ~2 years so maybe in the short term but not in the long term
dawnerd 2 hours ago [-]
How is that possible when the cost of memory and hard drives have gone up 3x+ in the last six months? Maybe cheaper if you're OAI or one of the lucky companies Nvidia is propping up. Everyone else is getting screwed.
almostdeadguy 8 hours ago [-]
I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.
foobarian 7 hours ago [-]
> I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.
foobar10000 6 hours ago [-]
A lot - and over the coming 2 years, even more. Utilization rates are under 50% across the board, and special and cheaper chips are coming out all the time for inference. And a truckload of research - TurboQuant, HC (deepseek), etc, etc..
contravariant 7 hours ago [-]
You've somehow confused using AI well with using it extensively.
Sometimes using something well involves not using it at all.
bdangubic 7 hours ago [-]
not using it at all is no longer an option, companies that are not using it at all will die slow/fast
death but death nonetheless.
dawnerd 2 hours ago [-]
That's like saying farmers that don't use pesticides will die out. There's whole industries around doing things not the way big companies say you have to. Human-centric firms will pop up and proposer.
contravariant 5 hours ago [-]
That's just a baseless assumption. To use AI well you should do the things that allow you to use stuff well. You shouldn't just use it any way you can because you assume that 'not using it at all' is not the best option.
This is literally the same with every single technological development.
bdangubic 3 hours ago [-]
> This is literally the same with every single technological development.
yup, there are a lot of successful companies today not using the internet :)
SecretDreams 6 hours ago [-]
Ironically, companies overusing it will probably die at a similar speed. Maybe faster, even, depending whether cash burn or technical debt catches up to them first.
bdangubic 5 hours ago [-]
100%
throwatdem12311 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe. But I used to have unlimited Claude Code usage but now I’m relegated to whatever the subscription happens to give me and when I run out of tokens I need to trad code until my limits reset. My manager saw the bill and nearly fell out of his chair. Small companies just can’t afford the added cost of AI at the real price (and we aren’t even in the real price territory yet).
Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.
There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.
I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.
dawnerd 2 hours ago [-]
The copilot token pricing is going to wake a lot of companies up. Even with our smaller company only using around 1/3 of our allotted requests, next month the bill will easily twice as much.
eloisius 7 hours ago [-]
Say the line, Bart!
LtWorf 8 hours ago [-]
If by "using AI well" you mean kill off customer service; maybe customers will want to switch to other companies that are more expensive but have customer service.
paganel 8 hours ago [-]
> internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts
That is absolutely insane. Thing is I can honestly believe that it happens, which makes it even more insane.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
This is basically the next step of all the AI trainings and hacktons that many of us are now required to take part into, with KPI metrics on how each one is using their tokens.
It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers.
I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
throwatdem12311 7 hours ago [-]
Technical Debt is not a developer skill issue. It’s a management planning, capacity and budget issue. It’s a bet that the cost of servicing the debt will be less than the cost of paying for it outright with cash. I’ve been in the industry for decades and 95% of the dysfunction in an engineering organization is always management.
AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse.
That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper.
Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.
acdha 8 hours ago [-]
It’s a question of degree: technical debt has a carrying cost trying to balance features against your ability to support the codebase. LLMs change both sides of that equation but I think most companies are going to struggle with maintaining a balance when it’s so easy to push past concerns and get something which seems to work.
bayindirh 8 hours ago [-]
Tech debt is a debt taken to reduce development time. It's a time debt actually. Patching something that would work until the team has the time to do it correctly.
...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
akudha 7 hours ago [-]
Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category."
Woz isn't some kind of monk. He enjoys his tech toys that he can only afford because he's rich. He's just bad at managing his money and lost a lot of it through multiple divorces.
jjulius 5 hours ago [-]
It's easy for us to judge from the outside. It's also entirely possible that the quote OP posted is true enough to the point that he didn't "lose" it through multiple divorces, because he didn't care about it.
How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
Aboutplants 7 hours ago [-]
This past fall I overheard a conversation between some high schoolers where one of the students was taking classes remotely for a while as she was dealing with some mental issues. She complained that while she needed the time away, it was just so easy to cheat with ChatGPT and be done with school for the day, and she went on to say that she really felt like she wasn’t learning anything and really was looking forward to returning to the classroom. This has stuck with me as the group of kids were just your average punk/emo high school kids.
Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
kaffekaka 5 hours ago [-]
The kids are smarter than many of us think. We owe to them a world where they can feel hope and see a future. But much of the AI hype is built around declaring how dangerous and futile everything is.
The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.
morkalork 4 hours ago [-]
This is positive compared to the college students I overheard lamenting that chatgpt ruined everything because now every evaluation is an in-class essay rather than something they could do at home at their leisure. And by lamenting, I mean loudly swearing about the bar and cursing their instructors.
firefoxd 5 hours ago [-]
I bet Eric's used AI to review his speech, and it told him it was brilliant. He had never bombed before, so him being booed was not in the training data. In a sense, kids booing shows is exactly the difference between AI and our unpredictable mind. This is innovation as far as commencement speeches are concerned.
wolvoleo 2 hours ago [-]
Haha this is a totally Woz thing to do <3
He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.
thinkingemote 7 hours ago [-]
Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it.
But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
kartoffelsaft 7 hours ago [-]
As a recent graduate, both headlines read as plausible and non-contradictory. Students right now are faced with two things:
1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.
2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.
The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
827a 5 hours ago [-]
One of the "grown up" moments everyone needs to make their way through is: Realizing that the vast majority of people are not internally consistent, and that by the way includes you.
Every single student who boo'd Eric Schmidt the other day was regularly using AI for their schoolwork. People are not cistercian monks.
Its easy to draw a conclusion from this like "revealed preferences outweigh spoken ones, we can ignore the boos" but much like the tech executives, you're not thinking deeply enough. The tech industry will face the music for relentlessly creating products that the world hates to be forced to use. But, for now, the industry is too addicted to it. It sounds crazy, but: There are vanishingly few companies left who have the ability to manufacture products & services that their customers are excited to use. Its a lot easier to monopolize a space, re-baseline the industry around the expectations of your product's existence, then deploy capital and lawyers to put up fences.
mold_aid 1 hours ago [-]
Both happen at the same time, by the same people. The reason for usage differs by major, but usually it's an expedient to either get past tasks that represent busywork or just the cheating you've seen described. Students have explained to me how much they hate in the same explanation of what they do with it.
(just FYI: There's no "traditional learning" to return to; you will definitely hear a lot of faculty going to "paper and pen" situations - kinda uncritically, if you ask me! - but I ask folks to remember that writing itself is a technology, and the media/means historically associated with it are technological advances in their own rights).
InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago [-]
If some students use LLMs to do tasks faster and at higher quality, that changes the grading curve, so everybody else might have no choice but to do so as well if they want to graduate. It's the "and yet you participate in society" meme.
limflick 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. Good chance that a few students that cheated or at the least used AI in a major capacity to graduate, still booed when that former Google CEO brought up AI at the graduation speech. Being pro AI when it benefits them and anti AI when it doesn't is just human nature. I'm being a little reductive here though.
HarHarVeryFunny 6 hours ago [-]
> Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
Sure, both are true, although I think you'll find that they differentiate between "cheating" on their math homework by using AI, and kids who are cheating on exams by sneaking in a smartphone and giving a photo of the problem to ChatGPT.
As far as homework goes, AI is just the new Google, useful perhaps, but hardly outweighing all the anxiety of their future being taken away by AI, or all the societal enshittification by AI that they see all around them.
testfrequency 8 hours ago [-]
I cannot stress how much the deep internal Apple loyalists loathe Woz. I personally find him one of the best parts of (old) Apple, and it’s a shame the company internally continues to think of him as a loose cannon.
evilduck 7 hours ago [-]
How many people from that era still exist at Apple to be holding a grudge like that? Genuinely curious, since it's been a very long time since he was last involved at Apple.
testfrequency 6 hours ago [-]
A lot. Apple has pretty impressive retention, more than everywhere else I’ve worked in the Bay Area. Many people work there to retire, so the age demographic skews older. I worked there close to 20 years and that’s not even in the longer end comparatively.
Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.
2b3a51 4 hours ago [-]
Very successful large company retains staff until retirement. I find that vaguely reassuring. Hope the trend catches on. Thanks for posting this observation.
Loose cannons have their uses in organisations (they can say things senior people find uncomfortable without fear of repercussions).
datakan 7 hours ago [-]
I worked at apple a couple decades ago. He isn't loathed so much as acknowledged as being uncontrollable. Internally at Apple it is very strict in terms of what you can say and do, like being in a communist country where you never go against Dear Leader. Woz speaks his mind and that is ultimately why he left early on. He also has a conscience and cares about people, something Apple does a great job of pretending to do.
testfrequency 6 hours ago [-]
I worked there just shy of 20 years, and I agree “uncontrollable” is a good way to frame it.
To be clear I think Woz is great, I was just referring to listening to years of behind his back comments made by leaders at the company who look down on him for being too open, which as you know is not “allowed”.
archagon 3 hours ago [-]
Having worked at Apple, any event where he was present was completely packed.
gnerd00 6 hours ago [-]
Tim Cook Apple with Palo Alto money and constant surveillance does not jibe with jovial intellectual prankster.. do tell
keeda 1 hours ago [-]
Personally, I think Jensen Huang had the most relevant message in his 2024 graduation speech; it transcends AI or any other contemporary issues, and it is simultaneously something people might not want to hear yet something they need to:
"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."
namenotrequired 8 hours ago [-]
The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title
qlm 8 hours ago [-]
In case it gets edited, the title of the HN submission is "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence".
I laughed when I read this, imagining a weird act of self-congratulation in front of a silent audience.
xboxnolifes 44 minutes ago [-]
Thankfully, humans have AI and can understand the title from context.
CalRobert 8 hours ago [-]
I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline.
But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.
nvme0n1p1 8 hours ago [-]
English isn't ambiguous here either. It's the fault of journalists who have this weird obsession with removing as many words as possible from headlines.
sumeno 7 hours ago [-]
The actual headline is not ambiguous at all
> Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'
Modern journalism deserves a lot of criticism, but this headline is not one of those cases
xxs 8 hours ago [-]
>I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this.
most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.
weird-eye-issue 8 hours ago [-]
Not to me... Maybe a ESL thing
master-lincoln 8 hours ago [-]
"Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence "
Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker.
The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know.
Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific.
How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?
rjh29 8 hours ago [-]
While it's technically ambiguous, most native speakers would immediately understand that Steve was not the person cheering. Firstly, Steve cheering makes no sense. Secondly, it's a very common construction for newspaper/article headlines.
For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..."
Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.
orphea 7 hours ago [-]
While it's technically ambiguous
Is it? To read it as intended, shouldn't it be "Wozniak is cheered"?
rjh29 6 hours ago [-]
I mean technically in the sense that you -can- interpret it two different ways, even if most people wouldn't.
The 'is' is not required because it's using newspaper headline grammar.
randallsquared 7 hours ago [-]
I'm a native speaker, and read it the "Wozniak gave a little cheer after" way at first, though the more likely meaning did occur to me immediately after. As for it making no sense, I differ. There are scenarios I can conjure in which that exact sequence could happen, either because he was cheering the students after telling them they're great, or because he forgot what he was doing -- dementia wouldn't even be "early onset" at his age. Further, if something is utterly mundane and expected, there are no headlines about it, as in the old saying about the difference between "Dog bites man" and "Man bites dog".
robrain 8 hours ago [-]
Could also mean that he was cheered by the response to his comments and his disposition improved. There are layers of ambiguity in this headline.
jcgrillo 7 hours ago [-]
Language is often ambiguous! You have to guess the intended meaning based on context clues. Unambiguously phrased language sounds less natural, because it is. Incidentally, this is part of what makes natural language such an awful fit for controlling a computer.
booleandilemma 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I agree with you. To me it was immediately obvious what it meant. It never occurred to me that he would "cheer himself", that doesn't even make any sense. ESL is right.
rebekkamikkoa 10 hours ago [-]
I really like how he approaces AI. Not the tone other leaders are talking, but much more human and much more collaborative. How young people actually can help with the AI shaping. For example Eric Schmidt was really terrible at his speach in front of University of Arizona.
ramon156 9 hours ago [-]
Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"
block_dagger 9 hours ago [-]
Ah, so the students were saying “moo,” not “boo.”
embedding-shape 8 hours ago [-]
To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place.
Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.
limflick 8 hours ago [-]
I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.
master-lincoln 8 hours ago [-]
This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product
bayindirh 8 hours ago [-]
Adding non deterministic layers on top of a painfully deterministic layer to make more betterer deterministic things is an oxymoron.
...and many people choose to ignore that fact.
jappgar 8 hours ago [-]
They can start by voting for politicians who will rein in big tech
aduwah 8 hours ago [-]
There is no politician who stands against big tech and by extension big money
coffeefirst 8 hours ago [-]
We are about to test that theory.
master-lincoln 8 hours ago [-]
not even Bernie Sanders?
mythrwy 4 hours ago [-]
probably not
maratc 8 hours ago [-]
In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."
limflick 7 hours ago [-]
"Citizens United" might be the most ironic name in the history of western democracy.
twoodfin 2 hours ago [-]
Do you know what the Citizens United organization wanted to do? Why didn’t they have a right to do it?
jappgar 7 hours ago [-]
They don't need money they just need votes.
If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate.
You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.
maratc 6 hours ago [-]
> If money can buy votes
It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."
Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
jappgar 14 minutes ago [-]
That's why political parties were invented, so you don't need to create name recognition for every candidate.
Those signs aren't changing anyone's mind. But a party is something people can talk about and understand. It's unifying.
Giving a fuck means engaging with party politics and making it part of your day to day life (at least during election season).
Signs are the laziest and most inconsequential way of supporting a candidate. By far the best way is to convince everyone that you know in person to vote for a particular candidate.
sweetheart 9 hours ago [-]
They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
muddi900 8 hours ago [-]
Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?
darkwater 8 hours ago [-]
Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...
sweetheart 8 hours ago [-]
I think it’s possible.
mherkender 8 hours ago [-]
If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.
globalnode 8 hours ago [-]
Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
sweetheart 8 hours ago [-]
Okay!
SecretDreams 8 hours ago [-]
Now, more than ever, I think young people are cows for the economic meat grinder. It takes me to one of my favourite quotes:
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.
Jtarii 8 hours ago [-]
The world is a significantly better place than it was when my parents were my age.
SecretDreams 7 hours ago [-]
By what metrics?
Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable.
But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad.
Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.
limflick 9 hours ago [-]
I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit.
On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
tracerbulletx 8 minutes ago [-]
From the bicycle of the mind, to the Rascal scooter of the mind.
simonh 8 hours ago [-]
It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI.
Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.
Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.
limflick 8 hours ago [-]
How good is AI integration in Apple products? Did they drop the ball as hard as Microsoft did? I naively assumed a few years ago that Microsoft could pull it off perfectly because they had more than enough in terms of resources & engineers (yes, I was this naive in college)
evilduck 7 hours ago [-]
Like most MS vs. Apple differences, it comes down to a matter of taste. They've added quite a few AI enhancements across their apps and operating system, but they are mostly feature enhancements and not major AI branded efforts. Having a Summarize button in Mail.app where it's contextually relevant or having text improvement menu options in text fields vs. slapping a major "Copilot" tab into everything.
Their use of AI so far has been much less "let AI take the wheel and brand it as a product itself" and more "use AI to improve an aspect of <user need>".
limflick 7 hours ago [-]
I think that's the best thing they could have done as a company. Sounds like the end-user first philosophy is still there.
embedding-shape 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, hard to guess how a person would react to transformative technology, together with whatever context it'd be brought up, their reaction could differ.
I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.
Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.
cheschire 8 hours ago [-]
His reaction probably still would not have been solidified yet, given how long his response took to other tectonic shifts in technology. That isn’t to say he wouldn’t have an opinion to voice, I just suspect it wouldn’t have resulted in a product direction for at least a few more years.
jorvi 8 hours ago [-]
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.
Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.
I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).
Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.
> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..
Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.
You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.
In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.
jcgrillo 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is natural language is a horrendously bad human-computer interface. Even if they're running nondeterministic software, computers are very precise machines. You wouldn't talk to your lathe or milling machine and expect good things to happen. So why would you have that expectation of a computer? It's ridiculous sci-fi fantasy nonsense.
It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.
porknbeans00 8 hours ago [-]
no this is a fair question. he was enough of a sociopath to disown his own kid, but his narcissistic tendencies and love of the arts would have been a weird counter point to that.
latexr 8 hours ago [-]
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.
Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.
Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.
> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.
Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.
> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.
Forgeties79 7 hours ago [-]
The difference is it’s incredibly easy to opt out of apples AI-like services. For instance, I have never had Siri on on my iPhone no matter how many years go by. And every time I’ve gotten a new one, it stayed off. One tap, that’s it.
They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.
Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
Good point. Yes, I also have all of that turned off and can ignore it. Not that Apple is without its pushiness, though, I still get frequent nags to “upgrade” to Tahoe and iOS 26 without an option to turn those off, and every time I go to System Settings to update to a new macOS 15 version and click to show more details, they sneakily select macOS 26 checkbox.
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings.
Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.
lousclues 4 hours ago [-]
I have been seeing so many bad commencement speeches that it's good to see someone actually deliver a nuanced and grounded approach that speaks to the issues of our time. Woz has definitely improved a lot in his public speaking over the years.
Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.
porknbeans00 8 hours ago [-]
good ole woz. being just a wonderful fuzzy warm hearted human being.
LatencyKills 8 hours ago [-]
I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time.
He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
pera 8 hours ago [-]
It's a real shame there are no many people like Woz in the bay area
8 hours ago [-]
rognjen 7 hours ago [-]
This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange.
Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
kartoffelsaft 6 hours ago [-]
I described a bit of this in reply to thinkingemote, but to:
> And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).
recursive 2 hours ago [-]
Don't hate the player.
m0llusk 5 hours ago [-]
Seems more like the issue is nuance and consideration or not. One side is saying that it is possible to do things that have value using LLMs. The other side is pointing out that this technology has increasing costs, is requiring data centers that have strongly negative environmental, social, and economic impacts, is promoting rampant, industrialized theft of intellectual property, is inserting errors, hallucinations, and psychotic ideas into all usage, and is at a number of levels doing damage to kids, elders, and professionals who are exposed.
add-sub-mul-div 7 hours ago [-]
If they did use it then maybe in hindsight they regret it, realize they didn't learn much, realize the temptation to cheat yourself will always be there and that's not a good thing.
He seems to be a nice guy and this contrasts with big tech CEOs, but this is pretty demagogical. AI is going to causing disruption but is here to stay, so what should be done about it? "Think different", "you have actual intelligence" may be comforting and enough to be cheered but is not a very actionable advice.
anonyfox 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe I am in a minority position here, but despite me vibecoding for many months now (havent written a single line by hand and forced me todo so in the beginning), I still have my IDE open right next to Codex/CC and while the LLM is crucnching along and doing TDD loops I actually read whats created/changed and just sit with it judding if its only right on surface or semantically stupid underneath, essentially realtime-architecting and steering the code agents sometimes even midflight. so I do end up with these 200k+ LoC projects now since typing is lightning fast and 2/3 of my codebase is tests (I insist on regression tests after every steer) but in fact I perfectly know what each piece is doing and where it is, as well as the still not optimal parts and have a mental list for refactoring it later when I have time or a spare parallel agent can do it when feature work isn't crossing the same areas.
so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.
cm2012 7 hours ago [-]
Real "plutonians cheering being told that Pluto is a real planet" energy.
dude250711 6 hours ago [-]
Plutonians are busy making circular stock deals with ceresians.
onfir3 6 hours ago [-]
I always thought it means "authentic Italian"
feverzsj 8 hours ago [-]
He also said he's not impressed by LLM, which I totally agree.
konschubert 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know what to say. I may not like it, you may not think it's actually intelligent, you may not think it's going to change the world - but how can you not see that this is revolutionary?
psvv 5 hours ago [-]
I see it as more iterative than revolutionary.
I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this.
And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search.
The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.
hackable_sand 2 hours ago [-]
How so?
What can LLM's do that can't be done by a human?
1 hours ago [-]
65 3 hours ago [-]
No. Nondeterministic output is not revolutionary. Technology forced down our throats by a few companies and executives who are licking their lips at the idea of laying off people, even if laying those people off means garbage products, is not revolutionary. Slop is not revolutionary.
Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
2 hours ago [-]
maxdo 4 hours ago [-]
Populist , let’s invent Make intelligence great again :)
This one looks completely different from the short as well. There are now 3 known versions of this same line and all are different. Is it possible he gave the same speech to multiple audiences on that day?
Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligence,
Artificial Intelligentsia - I’d argue that one of them is not real.
noIdeaTheSecond 7 hours ago [-]
One perhaps unpopular opinion: Could it be that the current AI is beneficial for young people in the sense that it is making them stop looking at their phone for a bit, and realize that certain tech is not that important for human well beeing? The change is in their/our hands after all, we just need to become aware, believe and vote with our wallet and the whole society will change in the blink of an eye. The hard part is the awareness and believing.
Tade0 6 hours ago [-]
My experience as a parent is that gen alpha took note of the fact that their parents being on their phones means less attention, so it's possible they'll have a more sober view of the entire thing.
stonecharioteer 3 hours ago [-]
This title makes me feel he cheered, not that he was cheered at.
Out of all of the OG “pirates of Silicon Valley” - Woz was always the coolest to me.
aubanel 8 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
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 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
>have AI actual intelligence
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone.
>Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.
AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works.
This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.
lenerdenator 7 hours ago [-]
Man... it's gonna absolutely suck when that guy dies.
imagetic 2 hours ago [-]
Wiz is the shit. The end.
casey2 6 hours ago [-]
These students? They are the worst students in decades if there is any generation that could be replaced by machines it's the latest.
martythemaniak 6 hours ago [-]
There's been a massive mask-off shift amongst elites* the last few years where displaying open contempt and hatred towards normal people - employees, students, public servants, etc. You can see this most clearly near the epicentre of the SV executive class where layoffs are celebrated and the life of the remaining employees is made as shitty as possible (ie, Meta's keyloggers), but it is everywhere. Speakers gleefully mocking and chiding graduates about how fucked they are due to AI, opinion columns from oligarch-owned mass media about how ungrateful everyone is towards the president, democratic senators (!!) mocking their constituents for wanting health insurance, just absolute disgust and hatred dripping everywhere.
* Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".
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watwut 9 hours ago [-]
The kind of rhetoric that equates criticism of Israel policies with antisemitism is literally populism.
The kind of rhetoric where you twist what people said or agreed with into something else so that you can mock them ... is the dangerous populism.
gambiting 9 hours ago [-]
>>In between going on Jew-hating Propal marches
Just reminder that being against Israel or its actions in Gaza is neither antisemitic nor Jew-hating.
dijit 9 hours ago [-]
It's a valid reminder, but there are plenty of people who despise Jews who are currently operating with total indemnity with this as their defensive line.
And even if you call them out, there are people who will openly defend them.
I do think that this topic is much too disgusting for anyone to think that there are hero's in the conflict. I'm not Jewish, nor am I Arab, I have no skin in the game.
But I don't like how readily we accept that cililians, women, children: are totally acceptable casualties as long as it's "$otherSide, they deserve it, $ourSide is just defending themselves". Gazans supporting Hamas and Israeli's defending the IDFs worst actions are all guilty in my mind and playing games implying one is worse is subtly letting the other side off the hook.
If there is a god, Allah or Yaweh- the people who defend child murderers and rapists no matter the "side" are going to have defend their reasoning, I hope they're comfortable with that.
keybored 9 hours ago [-]
Both-sides nonsense. We’re decades past assuming good faith from people who equate criticizing Israel with racism.
dijit 9 hours ago [-]
There's so much documented evidence of people attacking jewish people who they call zionists without cause that I find this line of reasoning stupid.
In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish and has visited Israel but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish.
I'd totally buy your argument, criticising Hamas isn't the same as being racist to Muslims, and criticising the actions of Israel is not the same as being anti-semetic.
I also buy the fact that Israel will defend themselves by claiming racism, something I've seen Muslims do in the UK too.
I'm absolutely saying both sides, because ultimately both sides seem to think it's ok to murder children, or to use people as pawns to be be killed to further their expansionist efforts.
But It's absolutely true that people are just abusing random jews under the mistaken belief that all jews are zionists, or all jews support israel.
Fuck, even people who live in Israel will condemn IDF actions.. There exists nuance of people on the Palestinian side online, yet that affordance is not afforded to Jews.
I find that quite ironic, and I'm personally not very chill with hypocrites.
Anyone defending rape or child murder is a fucking monster.
There is never valid justification, not even if the kid is carrying a suicide vest.
keybored 7 hours ago [-]
> There's so much documented evidence of people attacking jewish people who they call zionists without cause that I find this line of reasoning stupid.
Attacking people for any reason is unacceptable. Including for being Jewish of course.
Assuming that they were truly attacked and not just disagreed with or something.
> In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish
Being Jewish or not (or any ethnicity) is irrelevant.
> and has visited Israel
Has lived in Israel.
> but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish.
I can’t know what all people who criticize a celebrity has done. But the people I’ve seen has criticized him solely for his politics. Not for his ethnicity.
Yes, exactly for being a Zionist. Because that’s what he expresses. Not a light or milquetoast kind either. He might say that he wishes that Palestinians have a good life, blah blah. That’s irrelevant when he defends Israel’s actions and argues against the fact that Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel.
His wife served in the IDF and voluntarily, at her own request, moved from an office job in “Israel proper” to a more operative role in the West Bank because she was bored. And got to experience the excitement of being a ride-along on an armed raid in the West Bank.
And as opposed to his critics, I have seen antisemitic remarks from Ethan Klein from his time in Israel.
dijit 6 hours ago [-]
Ethan Klein is a terrible example for your argument. He debated Hasan Piker for five hours a year ago and clarified, clearly, an anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian position on the record. You seem to have decided he's a Zionist anyway. You just proved my point.
Defend any entity that harms children without accountability (Israeli government, Hamas) -- you've picked a side.
That's not conviction. That's tribalism.
And sure, let's litigate world affairs from a link aggregator. These aren't factions in a strategy game; they're people with guns doing horrid things to people who can't fight back, hiding behind whoever will defend them.
The killed, starved and sexually abused are actual humans. We're somehow expected to say one side is more justified in this? It's not Red vs Blue man. Gtfo.
keybored 1 hours ago [-]
I just proved your point by disagreeing with you. Do you hear yourself? No he’s a Zionist judging by what his positions are; you can’t have so many Zionist opinions and then null and void them by saying “but I am not a Zionist”.
> Defend any entity [...] The killed, starved [...]
Thousands upon thousands of pro-Palestinian have enough on their minds just lamenting the untold numbers of innocent civilians that Israel has murdered. They hardly have time to talk about Hamas, or whoever it is that you are both-siding, even if they wanted to.
dijit 54 minutes ago [-]
Disagreeing with me doesn't prove the point. Deciding he's a Zionist based on what you think he believes, rather than what he's actually said on record, that proves it. Come back with receipts or don't bother.
And that's the thing isn't it: you're not actually against suffering, you're against suffering by the right people. Klein catches flak for being Jewish and insufficiently hostile, meanwhile the bar for the other side is apparently just... existing. That's not a principled position.
"Too busy grieving to talk about Hamas", that's exactly how some Israelis feel when they hide IDF soldiers from justice, and I condemn them for it too.
You've just described the problem and handed it to me as a defence. Pathetic.
juanani 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dedRtheGods 6 hours ago [-]
I actually disagree with Steve here.
This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect.
Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them.
I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).
jdmoreira 8 hours ago [-]
It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore.
I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.
And yet, here we are.
Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.
You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
What have we done?
People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
simplyluke 7 hours ago [-]
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?
The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.
CamperBob2 4 hours ago [-]
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?
Funny, I don't feel "disenfranchised" by AI. If you do, well... in the words of the other Steve, you're holding it wrong.
simplyluke 30 minutes ago [-]
Nor do I, but the loudest voices in public have spent the past 4 years telling anyone with a microphone that white collar work is dead. How would you expect that to make a new graduate feel?
pjc50 8 hours ago [-]
> But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
> What have we done?
Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.
It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.
goolz 8 hours ago [-]
Modernity is soulless for the most part. Social media, the 24/7 news cycle, unaccountable mega-corps, the list goes on. I suspect people are tired of the constant psychic damage you endure for just trying to exist in 2026.
mplanchard 7 hours ago [-]
Hopefully people are understanding that technology, no matter how cool, does not exist in a vacuum. Technology is defined by who controls it, how it’s used, and what power it enables them to wield. Those concerns are far more important to society than how neat the tech is.
An obvious example is nuclear weapons. Amazing science, incredible engineering, awe-inspiring power. But I doubt you would make the same critiques of people who were anxious about the world they create. A world in which MAD exists is fundamentally different than one where it doesn’t.
Regarding your grandfather, it’s a pretty well-supported hypothesis that younger generations are less happy and more depressed because of technology from the very industry pushing AI onto them! Why should you expect them to be excited about a new world-changing tool from the same set of companies that brought them an infinite doom-scrolling feed of self-doubt, the increased polarization of politics, the viral spread of conspiracy theories, and a higher rate of youth and teen suicide than ever before?
Technology isn’t fundamentally good or bad, but it can have very negative impacts on society. It seems like people are catching on to that fact.
etempleton 7 hours ago [-]
I have noticed a certain personality gloms onto AI and unlike other technologies, it is so easy old people and the technologically illiterate can do it! In fact, old people and morons seem to love it. And it gets annoying really fast. The same people who were web 3, crypto, block chain, nft bros are the biggest supporters of AI. Utility or not when scammy people act the same way as they did for all the other tech trends it is a massive turnoff. I am tired of seeing AI writing and AI images, and instead of people talking about how we are going to use AI to make people’s lives better the only thing people can talk about is how much money some tech bros are going to make and how everyone else is going to lose their jobs because we won’t need them anymore. And your idiot friend from HS has an awesome business idea, which amounts to AI art on a t shirt or AI youtube videos and just needs you to be in on it with them to actually do the work like they are selling Amway.
I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.
So, yeah, I can see why the kids are over it.
sph 7 hours ago [-]
No, young people do not have to be optimistic. They have to think with their own brain, and form their own opinions.
People in the 1980s were optimistic in technology because they didn’t have the chance to see the social upheaval that youth in the 2020s have grown with. Only a complete idiot would remain steadfastly optimistic after seeing what the rise of the internet, social media and mass surveillance has done in the name of this promised technological utopia. Only the sociopath would tell a young person to happily embrace AI in the worst economy in decades while headlines about AI-related job losses are everyday news.
Blind faith in anything leads to terrible outcomes, and that includes technology.
insane_dreamer 5 hours ago [-]
you are so starry-eyed about what the tech can do that you're missing the societal impact
it's like marveling at the wonders of nuclear fission (truly a marvel) and wondering why people are angry about a nuclear arms race that has literally put us one button press away from global destruction
apical_dendrite 7 hours ago [-]
I was inspired by technology when I was young, but not anymore. When I was young it felt like the tech industry was about empowering human beings - Steve Jobs liked to say that a computer was like a bicycle for the mind. Today it feels like the tech industry is about wonton destruction ("move fast and break things") for the purposes of making a tiny number of people fantastically wealthy.
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.
badc0ffee 44 minutes ago [-]
> wonton destruction
Just as I was wondering what to have for lunch.
subjectsigma 7 hours ago [-]
If you’re still writing things like this you are stupid or willfully ignorant. All the boomers at work expose similar opinions and it’s because when the younger generation tries to explain why they feel this way, the boomers stick their fingers in their ears and start yelling.
shafyy 8 hours ago [-]
People are not excited because those companies blatantly disgregard the law, exploit and fuck people over and try to concentrate as much power as possible in their hands. Young people are not stupid, they can see that the increasing wealth gap makes their lives suck more. And they also understand that AI is a hypercapitalistic tool, that, if left unchecked, will only accelerate this trend.
So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?
dmacj 8 hours ago [-]
Are you seriously going to compare AI with shoes?
jdmoreira 8 hours ago [-]
did I compare AI to shoes anywhere in my text? They also used to teach comprehension when I went to school.
NichoPaolucci 7 hours ago [-]
You chose shoes as your comparison point.
Using two symbols of technology:
AI (advanced modern technology)
Shoes (cheap, basic materials)
You were saying the following, in essence, no?
"My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."
jdmoreira 7 hours ago [-]
No I wasn't.
This is the whole paragraph:
> People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty).
This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.
theow838484jj 8 hours ago [-]
There was study that big percentage of university graduates, strugles to comprehend written text. In AI terms: take 20k token paper, feed it to well rested graduate, and they will strugle with basic memory recall, reasoning and comprehension! My laptop performs better than that!
nvme0n1p1 8 hours ago [-]
My car runs faster than any human. Therefore exercise is a waste of time.
theow838484jj 8 hours ago [-]
I love this example.
Car (like humans) requires a lot of care and maintenance. You have to feed it (gas), park it, and jump through many legal hoops just to use it.
Walking is very often faster, and if not you can just fly or take a taxi.
limflick 8 hours ago [-]
I haven't read the study, but I wonder if one reason comprehension went down was because of over-reliance on AI among students.
theow838484jj 8 hours ago [-]
Ai is around for a few years. This type of studies goes back decades.
irishcoffee 8 hours ago [-]
Ah studies, those things nobody ever cares to reproduce.
At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.
Give it a bit more effort next time.
theow838484jj 8 hours ago [-]
20k tokens is about 40 pages of text. Weekly i do about 1000x that. (I am very low lever user)
I really do not think there is a point to argue here.
Also why you have to be unicorn to comprehend 40 pages paper? I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
irishcoffee 6 hours ago [-]
> I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
Yes, I can tell.
Rendered at 19:31:23 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.
Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.
I don't know about mentioning that one.
Anyway, Minsky, perceptrons, great debunking of AI hype at the time, but a horrible person, ya know, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.
https://www.christopherkremmer.com/post/to-sir-with-love
https://web.archive.org/web/20240519113411/https://skepchick...
Anyway, they're all dead. Can we move on? Although I remain astonished that Foundation got made when they cancelled Sandman and Good Omens after Neil Gaiman turned out to be pretty awful too. Maybe you have to still be alive to matter? What exactly are the rules here? I am so confused by this.
And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.
When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.
https://youtu.be/j9MubNsh3rs?si=wpG1YLDz_Y9cOECQ
So did Sagan. If you haven't watched Cosmos in awhile it might hit a little different these days, for multiple reasons (not all bad). The book is great too. Not to mention Sagan wrote "The Demon Haunted World".
There's a new form and an old form of this same thing happening today too. We have flat earthers, but other cults too. One of the common features of this cult of ignorance: having a little knowledge and thinking it is much more general. We all know those people who read a sentence or two and extrapolate. This happens all the time. Even in flat earthers. It's often seeking evidence to support the prior belief rather than updating that belief. Updating that belief can either strengthen the belief it weaken it. But if you're seeking truth you need you be willing to throw your beliefs out the window. Resistance to that is ego
[0] https://aphelis.net/cult-ignorance-isaac-asimov-1980/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:
Then that's a weak argument.... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.
Different strokes. I found it extremely entertaining.
Forgive me for being nitpicky, but I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.
Example: I can be extremely engaged while listening to a stand-up comedian deliver an anecdote about why they believe what they believe. It can be incredibly interesting, engaging, and well put. It is not, however, an argument which supports their assertions, but merely a conduit which makes that position more palatable.
Insight is often dreary and frustratingly complex in terms of nuance and substance because what matters is everything, and what doesn't makes headlines. Entertainment is a broad stroke of a premise; a hand wave that says "like this".
The conflict thesis is, at best, a reaction to this modernist milieu and at worst an ahistorical narrative cooked up by 19th century edgelords.
(inb4 "MUH GALLEY LEGO TRIAL!")
The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".
People who don’t believe it are bad.
If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.
People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.
People think we should spread it to other people.
Functionally, how is that different from religion?
Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.
And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.
Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.
You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.
And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"
(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)
People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.
Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.
Minsky, while a significant contributor to science and technology, is also a known participant in Epstein sex trafficking.
Him and a few other men at MIT are responsible for the long relationship between the university and the notorious child sex trafficker.
Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
I feel like that is a trait necessary to do what Woz did throughout his life.
> 74% of students who answered feel their future in this industry is at risk. The top fears were no entry level jobs, laid off seniors competing for the same jobs they're going for, and AI displacement.
There is so much anxiety for the future of society and it's a real shame this seems to be going on ignored.
Right... which they aren't going to be helped by continuing to find external causes or external enemies which are keeping them down instead of focusing on what they can control and what they can do to make money or make careers.
It's nice and it feels good to say these things, but it's not going to get those same students a job or help them build the next startup. Of course those students matter, and they should feel as such, but if they take away the wrong lesson here than Mr. Wozniak is doing them a disservice. Populism is incredibly dangerous.
>> "We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, 'Endeavor to persevere!' ... We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union."
But I also think there's an alternate meaning which is "this is not the correct time for this" (with an implicit "there will be a better time"). If your friend is upset they got laid off at their job, it's not the right time to start telling them about your promotion. Read the room, man! You can wait.
Ah, here it is. It was CalArts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vTVWyY47s
> ... protesting recent staff layoffs, severe program cuts, a mounting structural deficit, and the administration's controversial push for generative AI adoption through corporate tech partnerships
What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.
AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.
Did you just tell a "how many X does it take to change a lightbulb" joke about yourself?
I know because I bought a house in 2013 where the builder delighted in using a dozen weird fixtures and the cheapest bulbs they could find and I spent a lot of 2015 doing just that.
There are lots of things that LLMs are genuinely good at, searching by image isn't something we need LLMs for. I asked Google's LLM when google image search launched and it reported
> Google officially launched its "Search by Image" feature—allowing users to upload a picture or image URL to find related content—in 2011
I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase.
AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.
However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.
In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.
There used to be pushback to have 100% test coverage. If you don't have that, then you can't merge. AI can write the tests but a programmer must own them.
Funny how reducing the friction with technology eventually increased the friction of the older transportation methods.
I once made a travel friend who just didn't get the point of me taking eight hours to slow travel by train or by bus across a country that we were both visiting, when she could just hop on a plane and get to the next city in an hour. Earlier in my youth, transportation choices were economically motivated, but what I got from it would influence all future visits to other countries. When chilling with other travelers, exchanging tips and stories, it was as if my friend was visiting a completely different place. She left the country shortly after, confiding to me in the end that she really didn't see what the big deal was with it and that she would probably never be back.
I understand that some people may not resonate with this outlook -- and maybe it's just me getting older -- but I've grown to see that there's indeed such a thing as going through life in a hurry. I do think that the jury's still out as to the overall impact of AI on what I would label "useful friction".
AI is mental comfort zone so deep it will be extremely hard to ever get out of it, basically back to beginning of rat race. Maybe not applicable to you in your blissful ignorance, but sure as hell I won't put literally all my eggs into one tiny foreign-owned basket.
To quote Adam Grant, "Procrastination is an emotional management problem not a time management problem"
There are so many examples of this. Removing small friction points that significantly make me happier and my life better. It means I have time to go grab a beer with friends instead of driving. The lightbulb was a recent example so it was fresh in my mind.
You should ask how ai people make their slides. It is a crazy exercise in micromanaging what used to be a couple minute task. And the people engaging in that think they are saving time somehow or ending up with a better thing than they could make themselves.
Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or spend time learning every aspect of production from design, lighting, pacing and everything in between. Probably not a lot. And chances are if you do spend the time (on even a vapid dream like being an influencer), you'd do pretty well and learn a very valuable set of skills.
My experience is the bar is pretty low. It's hard enough to find someone that's competent in their field of expertise and is easy to work with. A lot of people are just missing the basics. They don't put in the work or are willing to take instruction.
If you want to take yourself from where you are to the best chances at your dream, work as hard as you can towards it. But it's also more than fine if you don't want to take that risk, you can often have a perfectly good life without working yourself to death on the promise it'll make your dreams come true if you do.
Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!
“You see that Ferrari out there on the parking lot? If you work really, really hard this year and meet all of your targets, then next year I’ll be able to afford another one.”
There are no wealth extraction capabilities yet. It's a money pit. They're certainly hoping it'll surpass some breakpoint and become profitable by brute-forcing compute power, but that's very optimistic. The propaganda Schmidt is pushing envisions that future in hopes of raising current stock prices so they can afford the brute-forcing that's very unlikely to succeed.
My prediction is that we'll keep the tools we've acquired, probably refined a bit, but the LLM path is eventually a dead-end. After this, if they still try to monetize, remote models will be extremely expensive.
It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge.
In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-...
He's putting money where his mouth is.
Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted in anything the technology or methods do.
Here's the link to the leaflet: https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOdBRJlPe6/
Sure the AI comment brought a bit more boos, but he would be booed regardless of what he said.
Here is a link to uncut version of his speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1eM3jv0vWY&t=7984s
Obvious to the grads he’s yet another “visionary” corporate hack waxing to them about how they’d better not miss the AI rocket ship.
If I'm short with a bad temper, then implicitly I'm NOT a bad enough public speaker, or that would have been mentioned top of mind.
Even if it is true.
The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.
Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"
What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?
Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?
Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete.
The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.
I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going overseas... businesses always go with the cheapest labor.
The world is dog eat dog, and those that prepare for the future are better equipped to deal.
And governments pushing quantum computing, presumably to be first to crack Internet security: it's easier to imagine some of those future threats.
Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought.
>The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.
It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people.
> Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?
In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.
Probably easier to ask a question than argue a point: How eager are you to use Government services?
Businesses are only well-run if they make profit: hiring the cheapest labor to produce something people will actually spend money on. And the more frictionless that process, the more our economy advances it. AI fits in there very well.
I also want to point out: startups are usually happy to be bought up by the bigger guys.
Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.
AI will be the same in the future. Not sure what to say about the ups and downs of stock price, or hype cycles.
The crash did not make the internet go away. I don't foresee a world where we will go back to the pre-AI times either. In the same way that post dotcom crash, you would be a fool to not have your business online, I think we will find similar things to be the case around AI. Even if the bubble bursts AI is here to stay and that will have major consequences for labor.
There are lots of datacenters going up in similar fashion. I don't know if they'd have the same utility decades later (very unlikely), but it's interesting.
Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs.
From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek who was a one trick pony with the Apple computer but hasn't been in touch with the tech economy and jobs market for decades?
The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.
In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.
So are a lot of people who invested(gambled) early in Bitcoin and Tesla, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from them just because they managed to make a lot of money.
But if you design and developed several successful tech products in your career, I think people should at least listen because it's a pattern rather than just luck.
>and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them
So is Taylor Swift, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from her.
When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver successful products repeatedly, like Erich Schmidt or Steve Jobs, not one trick ponies like Woz who managed to get lucky once in a completely different era, then coast the next 50+ years on past glory giving speeches.
Again, I really like Woz as a person, he's my spirit animal, but that doesn't mean he's correct and in tune on the status of the tech market, the challenges people and entrepreneurs will face today. His experience being a HW tinkerer in his garage in the 1970's isn't relevant anymore today. The world has changed massively since then.
A more modern day woz would be Palmer Luckey of Anduril. Love him or hate him he's more up to date on what the industry rewards today if you want to be a garage tinkerer made billionaire entrepreneur founder than Woz.
For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.
If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit. Bring some logic into the discussion and stop fishing for points.
This is a discussion that started about preparing for the future and has spawned multiple[2], fluid threads[3] of conversation[4] that aren't quite in line with "predicting and preparing for the future", some even with their own throwaway responses unrelated to "the topic"[5]. Should we lambast the person who posted the Lisp joke, too?
This particular conversation chain is about how one measures success, which I've discussed with logic in a separate[0] response. Future success looks different for all of us, and there are a wide variety of ways for us to get wherever those goals are.
>If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit.
Oh, no snark was intended. OP asked a question on a public forum and started getting snarky themselves[1] towards people who shared their subjective response, and my intent was to point out that it's OK for us all to view success differently.
>... stop fishing for points
Is this not snark based on your own assumption that I care about meaningless internet upvotes?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235299
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235315
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234258
[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234631
[4]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234238
[5]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234819
"When it comes to jobs, I'd rather listen to a business wizard from 2011 than a technical wizard from 1981" is hardly contentious, but if people liked hearing "AI has changed the world and you're all fucked", the students wouldn't have been booing in the first place.
Honestly, if you don't like what Eric Schmidt was saying, you should have a long hard think about whether unchecked capitalism is really as great as advertised.
The Apple II was Woz, the Mac was okay but mostly got shepherded into what it was by the other Apple leadership, the Lisa was a flop, Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby, NeXt went nowhere until the Apple acquisition.
The guy had somehow managed to make a successful career out of shipping very opinionated, interesting, and cool products that were commercial failures. If you were going purely by commercial performance you would not have picked him, you’d be picking him based on that ineffable reality distortion field of his that makes you BELIEVE everything he’s doing will change the world.
History tends to shows the pragmatists wiping out the luddites out of the gene pool/business market, but you are free to make your choice the way you see fit, nobody is forcing you to follow anyone.
Everyone defines success differently, and Schmidt's "success" is, frankly, unappealing and gross to myself and, I'm sure, many others.
There's a lot more to life and the world than the economy and massive financial gains. Focusing on "economic, market and product results" yet mentioning nothing about the impact to people and customers is how Zuckerberg sleeps at night, and that's ugly to me.
I think that taking advice from a sociopath able to amass a lot of money is usually bad idea. Their advice is designed to make you make him a lot of money. His advice is not about what is good for you - he does not care. And if you succeed you are his competitor.
It is only a "truth" if we allow the oligarchs to make it a truth. This is capitalism run amuck. Late stage capitalism if you will.
The serious question that keeps getting kicked aside, is when the majority have no jobs (or low wage jobs at best) and can't afford your freaking "tokens" and trinkets, what then? But nobody cares because that isn't what's happening this quarter.
To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results.
And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.
I live and work in Europe.
We have internet here.
- You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. Once you know (say) that the US has >300M people, but only 50 state governors - it's kinda obvious that it can't literally be true for even the children of the 0.01%. But if you're a well-intended parent/teacher/councilor without any special knowledge of the future, the "work hard and apply yourself" is still good general advice. Statistically, there have been very few situations where being an idle layabout turned out better, long-term.
- At least in people who care about children, there is a very real cognitive bias toward keeping kids happy. Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. And telling them certain things about Santa Claus and such. Whether this bias is genetic, culturally transmitted, or both - natural selection seems to favor it.
- Over the long term, societies vary greatly in how equitably their wealth is distributed...but large, externally-secure societies have a very strong bias toward the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting poorer. Basically that's because the most sociopathic and greedy folks keep doing whatever it takes to move up and "satisfy" their longings, vs. decent folks aren't motivated enough to keep fighting back hard. Though as things get worse and worse for the 99%, it gets tougher to keep the poor from rising up and overthrowing in their masters. Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today...
Sure, maybe I am. Though, the history taught in school books is a warped, "history is written by the victors" take on how events actually unfolded back then, not an objective source of truth. So you being a product of an ungutted education(more like indoctrination) system doesn't really put you in a better light as you think it does, especially when you look at how boomers vote and how in touch(or otherwise) they are with current day reality. At least Gen-Z had access to alternative sources from all over the world thanks to the internet, for better and for worse, so they have diverging opinions on this topic, rather than only what the schools programed in their brains.
>Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
The question is how much you want to bet that humanity will repeat the same mistakes that led to those events? I bet 100%.
>- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children.
And what happens to people who've been groomed with that mindset since childhood? Do you think they suddenly flip a maturity switch and forget all that indoctrination when they turn 17/18 and get access to student loans? Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed till 25. If you want kids to make mature choices you need to hit them with mature harsh reality which nobody wants to do because we coddle kids till it's too late.
>Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be.
Kids making the world look better, should be about keeping your environment clean and planting trees and such, not programming their minds with unreal platitudes that ignore the way current economy is set to work(against them). Because you're gonna create a lot of unhappy and disgruntled young adults that will want to see the world burn to the ground once they realize they've been duped their whole lives.
>Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today.
So then we should clap for people who ignore this known fact, and lie to kids that the world doesn't work like that, when we all know it does?
As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.
I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting.
Back then changes happened more gradually.
It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison.
> Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different.
AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not.
Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.
Not unlike trying to cajole a probabilistic text generator into writing code that isn't atrocious. And failing.
But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.
If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
"He said it was unreasonable to focus on "how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query."
"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart," he said. "And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/23/altman-you-t...
unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
Wow! Well said! so shouldn't we focus on ... fixing humanity first?
Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."
So the opposite of a Lisp programmer then!
People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering?
I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular effort, but there should be no question about their worth as a person. It should not be a part of how we understand people and ourselves.
It is a healthy conclusion that your value doesn't depend on your practical utility, because that will come and go and is sometimes beyond your control. Your value isn't a question at all.
> there should be no question about their worth as a person
Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.
The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.
In the moral sense, sure.
But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists.
The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you don't get to participate in society and are left to starve to death. No amount of flowery language is going to feed and house the unemployed. And we are running full speed into a situation with the explicit and overt goal of cresting as many unemployed people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that there are no resources or help offered to those unemployed people.
Flowery language will cover up the starving bodies in the streets the same way a can of febreeze will cover up a landfill. This is an enormous problem and if we don't fix it, people will die. Whether or not a human has intrinsic moral value by simply existing, we require money to survive in this society. A human life may be a mystical beautiful and valuable concept, but our society has determined that if you don't have money, you literally do not deserve to live.
That's what these students are so angry about. They're being pushed into a world that refuses to employ them and which delivers a death sentence for the crime of unemployment.
Otherwise you get effects like;
* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
* Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
I'll admit that knowledge isn't practical, and you can't always identify when you're creating it, and a lot of people don't think in these terms and there's a lot of intuition involved, along with societal mores about caring for people which help the growth of knowledge as general rules without getting all bean-counting about it. But I think it matters that hedonism is an incoherent motivation and that creating knowledge is a far clearer one (and hedonism tends to turn into creating knowledge, anyway, if you like meaning). Hedonism, utilitarianism, same difference.
You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)
Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.
But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)
I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.
I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.
Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.
And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.
And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.
Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.
That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.
Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.
> Why are you trying to avoid morality?
I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?
(Which is itself a poor rendition of Nichomachean Ethics...this conversation you two are having is ancient)
The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.
Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.
Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).
One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).
This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.
Top of the line AI without educated, healthy, economically-stable children means no future for the country or our society.
The United States is falling behind in both.
We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?
It's a world prestige thing, and also a competitive edge, for better or worse.
But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?
When I say China is a bad choice because it's not as liberal as ~the west, I do imagine a reader in China thinking the opposite. I don't think they're dumb and I don't think they've been duped; they have a coherent ideology that fits their values. I just don't want it to stomp out mine.
Maybe I'm wrong and you can solve for morality or at least the meta-morality of Liberalism/pluralism where you permit various moralities to coexist. Hopefully so. Maybe the value system in China is closer to mine than I imagine and it's just operating under different constraints. But I don't want to gamble on that when winning is within reach and is a guarantee given alignment to any human values is achieved at all.
It is very easy to get lost in between them, especially when listening to a good speaker who can flitter between those meanings at will.
What is worse is that those values interact. We indeed we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled, but only up to a point, and there is a reasonable discussion how exactly should countries divide their limited resources between vulnerable groups, including families with young kids. In that context, the future economic and societal value of a 5 y.o. vs. a 85 y.o. inevitably creeps up.
Yes it is. If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist because the entity that sees it as valuable would be willing to spend resources on maintaining it.
> The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
Most social programs keep expanding until they become unsustainably expensive. You can't just make a law "everyone gets free money" and expect this to have no negative consequences.
This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.
I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.
Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.
Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?
I really like ‘Actual Intelligence’, that’s a clever one from Woz. People need to be reminded to use their brains, they’re a brilliant product of evolution (or your favourite god’s work).
Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.
Dario used to at least emphasize the potential positives of AI while being worried about the negatives, but unlike Hassabis/DeepMind he has done nothing to bring about the positive part and is now just accelerating the harmful part as fast as he can. Google is an AI company, bringing us things like AlphaFold, and Anthropic (also OpenAI) are just LLM companies.
“You’re right - I overstepped”
Is the new “You’re absolutely right”.
I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.
If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.
So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.
This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.
They'd be out of company after a week
I really wish this were true.
Another similarity is the relative simplicity of the underlying structure of the system. You essentially have two hammers (one small one you swing with your hand and another big one that is planted on the ground), some material, and some heat. You build the rest.
Another similarity is the resistance to automation. A skilled blacksmith is a versatile worker. You can create assembly lines to automate any one thing they might produce. The end product will not have the same quality--it will not truly be wrought iron, each piece will not be unique, there will be nothing of the aesthetic taste of the artist in it, but if you're just some bean counter who doesn't care about those things you'll be able to sell it. But if you need the optionality to produce any of those things.. automation is not your friend. And some things just cannot be automated, at least not without extreme costs or very poor results--shoeing horses comes to mind.
My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
I'm guessing though that there are other improvements in code quality and feature velocity. I've noticed personally that AI is really good at catching smaller things that are easy to miss (e.g., if you ask it to rename fooTheBars it also updates all the relevant comments or enums that you might have missed).
That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.
> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.
AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.
Of course, it will never be enough. The goalposts will move until we run out of them.
That does not matter when discussing its practicality; or whether they will cause drivers to lose jobs.
Sounds like you're talking about AGI, not AI. AI is here today.
You'll know were making progress towards AGI when LLMs start being called LLMs again, and something new starts being called AI.
You could legitimately call a thermostat "AI". Expert systems were previously called AI. Today it's Large Language Models. Tomorrow it'll be something else.
More to the point, there has always been a cottage industry in predicting an amazing future, just around the corner. 'AGI' is just the latest incarnation.
I thought that was the objective of these celebrity speeches.
AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.
"Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.
We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.
All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.
Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems.
But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with.
That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.
That's reasonable, but it doesn't mean that LLMs are close to being brains.
For a start, when humans think/talk, we often think ABOUT something - whatever is swirling about in our mind, or what we are currently seeing/feeling/etc. An LLM generating tokens/words is doing so only based on it's weights and the word sequence it is currently generating ... the human parallel would be more like a rapper spitting out words based on prior words, essentially on auto-pilot, or when we get triggered into spitting out stock phrases like "have a nice day".
If you want to compare an LLM to a human brain, it's basically equivalent to our language cortex if you ripped out all the external connections and ripped out all the feedback paths that make it capable of learning.
Of course there is a lot more to our brain than just our language cortex, but that alone should make you realize there is no real comparison beyond the fact that our language generation is also going to be based on prediction, and partly auto-regressive.
If LLMs had shame, they'd surely not repeat mistakes (in the same context window) as much as they do.
People love to put a lot of meaning on what an LLM responds with when asked why it made a mistake, but it's critical to remember that the answer to that prompt is just another series of probabilistic tokens, and has no actual relation to how the error happened.
The LLM does not understand itself in any way.
A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.
Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on.
It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it.
For the religious angle, look no further than John 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
(This is admittedly less falsifiable!)
I'm sure that we will eventually build artificial brains, capable of bootstrapping communications and language for themelves (if run en-masse in a simulation where the benefit of communication would emerge). An LLM can't do this since it is by definition/construction something only capable of learning a pre-existing language.
An artificial brain, just like a wet jiggly one, is always going to be more intelligent than a one-trick pony like an LLM - a language processor, but it is notable how intelligent that one-trick pony nonetheless appears to be.
You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.
And if anything, average AI user is vastly overstating how good/useful it is. Papers about it pretty much always show huge gap between "productivity person thinks they are achieving" and "actual growth of productivity"
A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.
Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.
But definitely yeah, normally: be careful about these things. In his case when I said "admin dashboard" i moreso meant the general idea of admin oversight; he's said he's been complimented internally about how much he's using AI.
Thankfully the people responsible have already prepared a golden parachute to land safely to destroy something else.
Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.
Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.
Having a chat with chatgpt may give you clues or ideas when you have gone throught your own checklist of what could have went wrong, but can go only as far.
Agent on the other side will decompile .dll to find out issues if needed to go deep enought.
Applying the actions is unsolved. Unless you YOLO the LLMs, taking stateful actions automatically requires a lot of protective infrastructure, solid testing infra etc.
It’s all just more code, but a “create me a shopping website” LLM is likely not going to be doing the infrastructure level thinking required to handle it for now.
Quite safe, and already a force multiplier - this would be a harness. Maybe have it be able to write to a shadow system with similar (ideally same) hardware to verify it's hypothesis on how the system works, etc...
“Create me a resume for [newjob]. Ensure that it is properly embellished so that my two years of superficial, directionless AI-driven learning seem equivalent to the multi-decade experience and domain expertise the company is actually hiring for”.
Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.
I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.
We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.
Sometimes using something well involves not using it at all.
This is literally the same with every single technological development.
yup, there are a lot of successful companies today not using the internet :)
Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.
There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.
I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.
That is absolutely insane. Thing is I can honestly believe that it happens, which makes it even more insane.
I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse.
That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper.
Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.
...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak
Stark contrast to other tech leaders...
How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.
He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.
2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.
The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
Every single student who boo'd Eric Schmidt the other day was regularly using AI for their schoolwork. People are not cistercian monks.
Its easy to draw a conclusion from this like "revealed preferences outweigh spoken ones, we can ignore the boos" but much like the tech executives, you're not thinking deeply enough. The tech industry will face the music for relentlessly creating products that the world hates to be forced to use. But, for now, the industry is too addicted to it. It sounds crazy, but: There are vanishingly few companies left who have the ability to manufacture products & services that their customers are excited to use. Its a lot easier to monopolize a space, re-baseline the industry around the expectations of your product's existence, then deploy capital and lawyers to put up fences.
(just FYI: There's no "traditional learning" to return to; you will definitely hear a lot of faculty going to "paper and pen" situations - kinda uncritically, if you ask me! - but I ask folks to remember that writing itself is a technology, and the media/means historically associated with it are technological advances in their own rights).
Sure, both are true, although I think you'll find that they differentiate between "cheating" on their math homework by using AI, and kids who are cheating on exams by sneaking in a smartphone and giving a photo of the problem to ChatGPT.
As far as homework goes, AI is just the new Google, useful perhaps, but hardly outweighing all the anxiety of their future being taken away by AI, or all the societal enshittification by AI that they see all around them.
Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.
Loose cannons have their uses in organisations (they can say things senior people find uncomfortable without fear of repercussions).
To be clear I think Woz is great, I was just referring to listening to years of behind his back comments made by leaders at the company who look down on him for being too open, which as you know is not “allowed”.
"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."
I laughed when I read this, imagining a weird act of self-congratulation in front of a silent audience.
But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.
> Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'
Modern journalism deserves a lot of criticism, but this headline is not one of those cases
most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.
Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker.
The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know.
Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific.
How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?
For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..."
Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.
The 'is' is not required because it's using newspaper headline grammar.
Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.
...and many people choose to ignore that fact.
If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate.
You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.
It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."
Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
Those signs aren't changing anyone's mind. But a party is something people can talk about and understand. It's unifying.
Giving a fuck means engaging with party politics and making it part of your day to day life (at least during election season).
Signs are the laziest and most inconsequential way of supporting a candidate. By far the best way is to convince everyone that you know in person to vote for a particular candidate.
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.
Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable.
But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad.
Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.
On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.
Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.
Their use of AI so far has been much less "let AI take the wheel and brand it as a product itself" and more "use AI to improve an aspect of <user need>".
I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.
Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.
Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.
I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).
Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.
> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..
Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.
You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.
In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.
It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.
Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.
https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114
Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.
> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.
Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.
> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.
They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.
Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing
Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.
Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.
He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
> And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).
so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.
I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this.
And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search.
The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.
What can LLM's do that can't be done by a human?
Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
Is the short AI generated? This is confusing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sSfADusN40
1st of May, 7pm - https://youtu.be/LHEW8Da5550?t=2757
2nd of May, 10am - https://youtu.be/4sSfADusN40?t=2586
2nd of May, 3pm - https://youtu.be/-bn3ydOuMm4?t=2855
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.
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone.
>Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.
AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works.
This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.
* Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".
The kind of rhetoric where you twist what people said or agreed with into something else so that you can mock them ... is the dangerous populism.
Just reminder that being against Israel or its actions in Gaza is neither antisemitic nor Jew-hating.
And even if you call them out, there are people who will openly defend them.
I do think that this topic is much too disgusting for anyone to think that there are hero's in the conflict. I'm not Jewish, nor am I Arab, I have no skin in the game.
But I don't like how readily we accept that cililians, women, children: are totally acceptable casualties as long as it's "$otherSide, they deserve it, $ourSide is just defending themselves". Gazans supporting Hamas and Israeli's defending the IDFs worst actions are all guilty in my mind and playing games implying one is worse is subtly letting the other side off the hook.
If there is a god, Allah or Yaweh- the people who defend child murderers and rapists no matter the "side" are going to have defend their reasoning, I hope they're comfortable with that.
In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish and has visited Israel but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish.
I'd totally buy your argument, criticising Hamas isn't the same as being racist to Muslims, and criticising the actions of Israel is not the same as being anti-semetic.
I also buy the fact that Israel will defend themselves by claiming racism, something I've seen Muslims do in the UK too.
I'm absolutely saying both sides, because ultimately both sides seem to think it's ok to murder children, or to use people as pawns to be be killed to further their expansionist efforts.
But It's absolutely true that people are just abusing random jews under the mistaken belief that all jews are zionists, or all jews support israel.
Fuck, even people who live in Israel will condemn IDF actions.. There exists nuance of people on the Palestinian side online, yet that affordance is not afforded to Jews.
I find that quite ironic, and I'm personally not very chill with hypocrites.
Anyone defending rape or child murder is a fucking monster.
There is never valid justification, not even if the kid is carrying a suicide vest.
Attacking people for any reason is unacceptable. Including for being Jewish of course.
Assuming that they were truly attacked and not just disagreed with or something.
> In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish
Being Jewish or not (or any ethnicity) is irrelevant.
> and has visited Israel
Has lived in Israel.
> but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish.
I can’t know what all people who criticize a celebrity has done. But the people I’ve seen has criticized him solely for his politics. Not for his ethnicity.
Yes, exactly for being a Zionist. Because that’s what he expresses. Not a light or milquetoast kind either. He might say that he wishes that Palestinians have a good life, blah blah. That’s irrelevant when he defends Israel’s actions and argues against the fact that Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel.
His wife served in the IDF and voluntarily, at her own request, moved from an office job in “Israel proper” to a more operative role in the West Bank because she was bored. And got to experience the excitement of being a ride-along on an armed raid in the West Bank.
And as opposed to his critics, I have seen antisemitic remarks from Ethan Klein from his time in Israel.
Defend any entity that harms children without accountability (Israeli government, Hamas) -- you've picked a side.
That's not conviction. That's tribalism.
And sure, let's litigate world affairs from a link aggregator. These aren't factions in a strategy game; they're people with guns doing horrid things to people who can't fight back, hiding behind whoever will defend them.
The killed, starved and sexually abused are actual humans. We're somehow expected to say one side is more justified in this? It's not Red vs Blue man. Gtfo.
> Defend any entity [...] The killed, starved [...]
Thousands upon thousands of pro-Palestinian have enough on their minds just lamenting the untold numbers of innocent civilians that Israel has murdered. They hardly have time to talk about Hamas, or whoever it is that you are both-siding, even if they wanted to.
And that's the thing isn't it: you're not actually against suffering, you're against suffering by the right people. Klein catches flak for being Jewish and insufficiently hostile, meanwhile the bar for the other side is apparently just... existing. That's not a principled position.
"Too busy grieving to talk about Hamas", that's exactly how some Israelis feel when they hide IDF soldiers from justice, and I condemn them for it too.
You've just described the problem and handed it to me as a defence. Pathetic.
This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect.
Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them.
I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).
I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.
And yet, here we are.
Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.
You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
What have we done?
People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.
Funny, I don't feel "disenfranchised" by AI. If you do, well... in the words of the other Steve, you're holding it wrong.
> What have we done?
Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.
It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.
An obvious example is nuclear weapons. Amazing science, incredible engineering, awe-inspiring power. But I doubt you would make the same critiques of people who were anxious about the world they create. A world in which MAD exists is fundamentally different than one where it doesn’t.
Regarding your grandfather, it’s a pretty well-supported hypothesis that younger generations are less happy and more depressed because of technology from the very industry pushing AI onto them! Why should you expect them to be excited about a new world-changing tool from the same set of companies that brought them an infinite doom-scrolling feed of self-doubt, the increased polarization of politics, the viral spread of conspiracy theories, and a higher rate of youth and teen suicide than ever before?
Technology isn’t fundamentally good or bad, but it can have very negative impacts on society. It seems like people are catching on to that fact.
I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.
So, yeah, I can see why the kids are over it.
People in the 1980s were optimistic in technology because they didn’t have the chance to see the social upheaval that youth in the 2020s have grown with. Only a complete idiot would remain steadfastly optimistic after seeing what the rise of the internet, social media and mass surveillance has done in the name of this promised technological utopia. Only the sociopath would tell a young person to happily embrace AI in the worst economy in decades while headlines about AI-related job losses are everyday news.
Blind faith in anything leads to terrible outcomes, and that includes technology.
it's like marveling at the wonders of nuclear fission (truly a marvel) and wondering why people are angry about a nuclear arms race that has literally put us one button press away from global destruction
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.
Just as I was wondering what to have for lunch.
So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?
Using two symbols of technology: AI (advanced modern technology) Shoes (cheap, basic materials)
You were saying the following, in essence, no? "My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."
This is the whole paragraph:
> People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty).
This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.
Car (like humans) requires a lot of care and maintenance. You have to feed it (gas), park it, and jump through many legal hoops just to use it.
Walking is very often faster, and if not you can just fly or take a taxi.
At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.
Give it a bit more effort next time.
I really do not think there is a point to argue here.
Also why you have to be unicorn to comprehend 40 pages paper? I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
Yes, I can tell.