Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack.

Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's radar here. The data center is about 300 MW, if I'm not mistaken.

Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW.

Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem!

This is an all too common pattern.

What does this have to do with his argument? If anything, criticism from the inside of the machine is more persuasive, not less. Ad hom fail.

The astroturf in this thread is unreal. Literally. ;)

Google had achieved carbon neutrality and committed to wiping out their carbon legacy until AI.

My guess is the scale has changed? They used to do AI stuff, but it wasn't until OpenAI (anyone feel free to correct me) went ahead and scaled up the hardware and discovered that more hardware = more useful LLM, that they all started ramping up on hardware. It was like the Bitcoin mining craze, but probably worse.

Rob left Google a couple of years ago.

I do wonder about how we as individuals influence this stuff.

We want free services and stuff, complain about advertising / sign up for the google's of the world like crazy.

Bitch about data-centers while consuming every meme possible ...

Even if I don't share the opinion, I can understand the moral stance against genAI. But it strikes me as a bit unfaithful when people argue against it from all kinds of angles that somehow never seemed to bother them before.

It's like all those anti-copyright activists from the 90s (fighting the music and film industry) that suddenly hate AI for copyright infringements.

Maybe what's bothering the critics is actually deeper than the simple reasons they give. For many, it might be hate against big tech and capitalism itself, but hate for genAI is not just coming from the left. Maybe people feel that their identity is threatened, that something inherently human is in the process of being lost, but they cannot articulate this fear and fall back to proxy arguments like lost jobs, copyright, the environment or the shortcomings of the current implementations of genAI?

There aren't any rules that prevent us from changing course.

The points you raise, literally, do not affect a thing.

Rob Pike retired from google a few years back. As per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398351

The dose makes the poison. Data centers are just now being built haphazardly without cause because they anticipate demand that does not yet exist.

Yeah, I'm conflicted about the use of AI for creative endeavors as much as anyone, but Google is an advertising company. It was acceptable for them to build a massive empire around mining private information for the purposes of advertisement, but generative AI is now somehow beyond the pale? People can change their mind, but Rob crashing out about AI now feels awfully revisionist.

(NB: I am currently working in AI, and have previously worked in adtech. I'm not claiming to be above the fray in any way.)

AFAIK Rob Pike has been retired for years.

Someone making a complain does not imply that they were ok with it prior to the complaint. Why are you muddying the waters?

Everything has been doing has been bad faith and harmful since a looong time

They are building data centers of TPUs now, not general purpose processors.

The difference in carbon emissions for a search query vs an LLM generation are on the order of exhaling vs driving a hummer. So I can reduce this disingenuous argument to:

> You spent your whole life breathing, and now you're complaining about SUVs? What a hypocrite.

Pecunia non olet.

Rob retired from Google years ago fwiw.

Data centers seem poised to make renewable energy sources more profitable than they have ever been. Nuclear plants are springing up everywhere and old plants are being un-decommissioned. Isn’t there a strong case to be made that AI has helped align the planet toward a more sustainable future?

OpenAI's internal target of ~250 GW of compute capacity by 2033 would require about as much electricity as the whole of India's current national electricity consumption[0].

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

I really hate this kind of lazy argument: Oh. do you use toilet paper? Then kindly keep your mouth shut while we burn the planet down.

Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure?

The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal.

You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries can be cached, too).

This reminds me of how many Facebook employees were mad at Zuckerberg for going MAGA, but didn’t make any loud noise at the rapid rise of teenagers committing suicide or the misinformation and censorship done by their platform. People have blinders on.

There is a difference between providing a useful service (web search for example) and running slop generators for modified TikTok clips, code theft and Internet propaganda.

If he is currently at Google: congratulations on this principled stance, he deserves a lot of respect.

Oh look, the purity police have arrived, and this time they're the AI-bros. How righteous does one have to be before being allowed to voice criticism?

Can't speak for Rob Pile but my guess would be, yeah, it might seem hypocritical but it's a combination of seeing the slow decay of the open culture they once imagined culminating into this absolute shirking of responsibility while simultaneously exploiting labour, by those claiming to represent the culture, alongwith the retrospective tinge of guilt for having enabled it, that drrove this rant.

Furthermore, w.r.t the points you raised - it's a matter of scale and utility. Compared to everything that has come before, GenAI is spectacularly inefficient in terms of utility per unit of compute (however you might want to define these). There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be. The egarness and will to throw money and resources at this surpasses the crypto mania which was just as worthless.

Even if you consider Rob a hypocrite , he isn't alone in his frustration and anger at the degradation of the promise of Open Culture.

They claim they have net zero carbon footprint, or carbon neutrality.

In reality what they do is pay "carbon credits" (money) to some random dude that takes the money and does nothing with it. The entire carbon credit economy is bullshit.

Very similar to how putting recyclables in a different color bin doesn't do shit for the environment in practice.

The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now.

I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages.

His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience.

It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact.

It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless.

There’s more but that’s the gist of it.

That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.

Uh, have you missed the tech news in the past three years?