Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-dont-say-mean-things-about-the-ai-that-i-just-invested-a-billion-dollars-in

by randycupertino • 6 months ago

678 278 6 months ago

mcsweeneys.net

jaybyrd3• 6 months ago

guys were just trying to take jobs away from you.... please stop being mean to us - richest people on earth 2026

GolfPopper• 6 months ago

You forgot... "by stealing from artists and writers at scale".

malfist• 6 months ago

Techbros trying to replace wage theft as the largest $ crime in the US

jacquesm8• 6 months ago

You forgot about 'open source contributors' and 'musicians'.

jaybyrd3• 6 months ago

well if all the talent is stolen and put into our water destruction machine we can make significantly worse and more expensive versions of just giving the job to a wagey

tsunamifury• 6 months ago

Something something… great artist steal.

Mars008• 6 months ago

The picture will be incomplete if we don't mention that those 'artists and writers' are using the results at scale.

pesus• 6 months ago

On one hand, we're actively destroying society, but on the other, billionaires are getting richer! Why are you mad at us!?

Sharlin• 6 months ago

Sonething something for a brief moment we created a lot of value for the shareholders

donkey_brains2• 6 months ago

Today a manager at my work asked all his teams including mine “please write up a report on how many engineers from your teams we could replace with AI”.

Surprisingly, the answer he got was “none, because that’s not how AI works”.

Guess we’ll see if that registers…

sublinear• 6 months ago

All of them because cost cutting is a red flag in business regardless of what year it is.

MobiusHorizons• 6 months ago

I would love to have responded something like “only one: yours”

But in all seriousness, ai does a pretty good job at impersonating VPs. It’s confidently wrong and full of hope for the future.

consumer451• 6 months ago

I use various agentic dev tools all day long, mostly with Opus. The tools are very capable now, but when planning mid-complexity features, I find the time estimates hilarious.

Phase 1: 1-2 weeks

Phase 2: 1 week

Phase 3: 2 weeks

8 to 12 hours later, all the work is done and tested.

The funny part to me was that if I had an AI true believer boss, I would report those time estimates directly, and have a lot of time to do other stuff.

seizethecheese3• 6 months ago

There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society

The article is certainly interesting as yet another indicator of the backlash against AI, but I must say, “exists to scam the elderly” is totally absurd. I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth.

I say this as someone whose father was scammed out of a lot of money, so I’m certainly not numb to potential consequences there. The scams were enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not.

gllmariuty• 6 months ago

article forgot to mention the usual "think about the water usage"

seizethecheese3• 6 months ago

It mentions ecological destruction, which I must say is way better than water usage, AI is a power hog after all.

rootnod3• 6 months ago

If it's the "usual reply", maybe it's because....I dunno...water is kinda important?

Retric• 6 months ago

What’s the point of attacking a straw man while ignoring the actual points being brought up?

The water usage by data centers is fairly trivial in most places. The water use manufacturing the physical infrastructure + electricity generation is surprisingly large but again mostly irrelevant. Yet modern ‘AI’ has all sorts of actual problems.

awesome_dude• 6 months ago

I think that maybe the point isn't that the scams/distrust are "new" with the advent of AI, but "easier" and "more polished" than before.

The language of the reader is no longer a serious barrier/indicator of a scam (A real bank would never talk like that, is now, well, that's something they would say, the way that they would say it)

ryanobjc• 6 months ago

I mean... explain sora.

internet101010• 6 months ago

Revolutionizing cat memes

ryan_lane2• 6 months ago

Scammers are using AI to copy the voice of children and grandchildren, and make calls urgently asking to send money. It's also being used to scam businesses out of money in similar ways (copying the voice of the CEO or CFO, urgently asking for money to be sent).

Sure, the AI isn't directly doing the scamming, but it's supercharging the ability to do so. You're making a "guns don't kill people, people do" argument here.

seizethecheese3• 6 months ago

Not at all. I’m saying AI doesn’t exist to scam elderly, which is saying nothing about whether it’s dangerous in that respect.

criley22• 6 months ago

Sure, phones aren't directly doing the scamming, but they're supercharging the ability to do so.

Phones are also a very popular mechanism for scamming businesses. It's tough to pull off CEO scams without text and calls.

Therefore, phones are bad?

This is of course before we talk about what criminals do with money, making money truly evil.

gosub100• 6 months ago

It doesn't exist for that express purpose, but the voice and video impersonation is definitely being used to scam elderly people.

Instead of being used to protect us or make our lives easier, it is being used by evildoers to scam the weak and vulnerable. None of the AI believers will do anything about it because it kills their vibe.

JumpCrisscross2• 6 months ago

the voice and video impersonation is definitely being used to scam elderly people

And like with the child pornography, the AI companies are engaging in high-octane buck passing more than actually trying to tamp down the problem.

solid_fuel4• 6 months ago

LLMs are fiction machines. All they can do is hallucinate, and sometimes the hallucinations are useful. That alone rules them out, categorically, from any critical control loop.

After you eliminate anything that requires accountability and trustworthiness from the tasks which LLMs may be responsibly used for, the most obvious remaining use-cases are those built around lying:

- advertising

- astroturfing

- other forms of botting

- scamming old people out of their money

ajross2• 6 months ago

[...] are fiction machines. All they can do is hallucinate, and sometimes the hallucinations are useful. That alone rules them out, categorically, from any critical control loop.

True, but no more true than it is if you replace the antecedent with "people".

Saying that the tools make mistakes is correct. Saying that (like people) they can never be trained and deployed such that the mistakes are tolerable is an awfully tall order.

History is paved with people who got steamrollered by technology they didn't think would ever work. On a practical level AI seems very median in that sense. It's notable only because it's... kinda creepy, I guess.

simianwords5• 6 months ago

Extremely exaggerated comment. LLMs dont hallucinate that much. That doesn’t rule them out of any control loop.

I mean, I think you have not put much thought into your theory.

muvlon• 6 months ago

The article names a lot of other things that AI is being used for besides scamming the elderly, such as making us distrust everything we see online, generating sexually explicit pictures of women without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, driving autonomous killer drones and more generally sucking the joy out of everything.

And I think I'm inclined to agree. There are a small amount of things that have gotten better due to AI (certain kinds of accessibility tech) and a huge pile of things that just suck now. The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.

pixl9710• 6 months ago

Here's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them.

This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.

n8cpdx• 6 months ago

You’re way off base. It can also create sexually explicit pictures of men.

notanastronaut• 6 months ago

The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.

When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more.

It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive.

Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.

ajkjk4• 6 months ago

if you make a thing and the thing is going to be inevitably used for a purpose and you could do something about that use and you do not --- then yes, it exists for that purpose, and you are responsible for it being used in that way. you don't get to say "ah well who could have seen this inevitable thing happening? it's a shame nobody could do anything about it" when it was you that could have done something about it.

anonymars• 6 months ago

you...could have done something about it

What is it that isn't being done here, and who isn't doing it?

jychang• 6 months ago

Yeah. Example: stripper poles. Or hitachi magic wands.

Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.

taurath• 6 months ago

I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth.

Do you think that it isn't used for this? The satire part is to expand that usecase to say it exists purely for that purpose.

drzaiusx11• 6 months ago

Training a model on sound data from readily available public social network posts and targeting their followers (which on say fb would include family and is full of "olds") isn't a very far fetched use-case for AI. I've created audio models used as audiobook narrators where you can trivially make a "frantic/panicked" voice clip saying "help it's [grandson], I'm in jail and need bail. Send money to [scammer]"

If it's not happening yet, it will...

evandrofisico• 6 months ago

It is happening already, recently Brazilian woman living in Italy was scammed thinking she was having an online relationship with Brazilian tiktoker, the scammers created a fake profile and were sending her audio messages with the voice of said tiktoker cloned via AI. She sent the scammers a lot of money for the wedding but when she arrived in Brazil discovered the con.

bandrami4• 6 months ago

It's already happening in India. Voicefakes are working unnervingly well and it's amplified by the fact that old people who had very little exposure to tech have basically been handed a smart phone that has control of their pension fund money in an app.

rgmerk3• 6 months ago

My hypothesis: Generative AI is, in part, reaping the reaction that cryptocurrency sowed.

zbentley2• 6 months ago

Could you expand on that?

mrnaught2• 6 months ago

> enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not.

I think point article was trying to make: LLMs and new genAI tools helped the scammers scale their operations.

lostmsu• 6 months ago

So did the Internet

wat10000• 6 months ago

They're used for scams. Isn't that the basis in truth you're looking for in satire?

Before this we had "the internet is for porn." Same sort of exaggerated statement.

techblueberry2• 6 months ago

Porn was enabled by the internet’s but does the internet exist for this purpose?

Yes. Yes it does. That is the satire.

weebull• 6 months ago

Why you think the net was born? Porn porn porn

vitajex• 6 months ago

satire has to have some basis in truth

In order to be funny at least!

popalchemist• 6 months ago

While the employees of the companies that make AI may have noble, even humanity-redeeming/saving intentions, the billionaire class absolutely has bond-villain level intentions. The destruction of the middle class and the removal of all livable-wage jobs is absolutely part of the techno-feudalist playbook that Trump, Altman, Zuckerberg, etc are intentionally moving toward. I'd say that is a scam. They want to recreate the conditions of earlier society - an upper class (them, who own the entire means of production and can operate the entire machine without the need for peons' input) who does whatever they want because the lower class is incapable of opposing them.

If you aren't familiar, look into it.

thefz• 6 months ago

The scams were enabled by the internet, does the internet exist for this purpose? Of course not.

But did it accelerate the whole process? Hell yeah.

tim333• 6 months ago

The original the article is spoofing is interviewers asking Huang about the narrative that:

It's the jobs and employment. Nobody's going to be able to work again. It's God AI is going to solve every problem. It's we shouldn't have open source for XYZ... https://youtu.be/k-xtmISBCNE?t=1436

and he says a "end of the world narrative science fiction narrative" is hurtful.

panda-giddiness• 6 months ago

It's satire. It's supposed to be absurd. Why else do students still read A Modest Proposal nearly three hundred years after its publication?

Regardless, LLMs are already being abused to mass produce spam, and some of that spam has almost certainly been employed to separate the elderly from their savings, so there's nothing particularly implausible about the satirical product, either.

tremon• 6 months ago

The article doesn't specify which elderly they're referring to. They've certainly successfully captured the gerontocrats in Washington and Wall Street that keep bouying their assets.

johnnyanmac8• 6 months ago

I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in truth.

The Trump administration is using AI generated imagery to advance his narrative, and it seems like it's a thing that mostly the elderly would fall for. So yes, there is some truth to it.

In general, the elderly will always be more vulnerable to technological exploitation.

porkloin2• 6 months ago

I hate LLMs as much as the next guy, but this was honestly just not very funny. Humor can be a great vehicle for criticism when it's done right, but this feels like clickbait-level lazy writing. I wouldn't criticize it anywhere else, but I have enjoyed reading a bunch of actually good writing from mcsweeney's over the years in the actual literary journal and on their website.

jaybyrd3• 6 months ago

i think its a little on the nose but overall def worth reading and funny enough for a chuckle in my opinion

madeofpalk• 6 months ago

I think you just don’t like McSweeney’s style.

heliumtera2• 6 months ago

Agreed, it's almost non satire given how cynical it is. I loved it.

Froztnova• 6 months ago

It's that brand of humor that isn't really humor anymore because the person writing it is clearly positively seething behind the keyboard and considers the whole affair to be deadly serious.

I've never really been able to get into it either because it's sort of a paradox. If I agree, I feel bad enough about the actual issue that I'm not really in the mood to laugh, and if I disagree then I obviously won't like the joke anyways.

porkloin2• 6 months ago

For me I guess I don't really see what it's adding. You can watch an actual video clip of Jensen begging people not to "bully" or say "hurtful" things about AI while wearing a stupid leather jacket. It's a million times funnier to watch him squirm in real life.

I find it unfunny for the same reason I don't find modern SNL intro bits about Trump funny. The source material is already insane to the point that it makes surface-level satire like this feel pointless.

ares6233• 6 months ago

You’re not the target audience then. It’s for those who can’t shake the feeling that something doesn’t feel quite right about the whole thing.

theLegionWithin• 6 months ago

nice satire

random_duck• 6 months ago

Is this a sign that us of the plebs are starting to grow discontent?

heliumtera2• 6 months ago

Starting? Society minus those who struggled with css is fully fatigued of AI.

blibble5• 6 months ago

it's certainly a change from the "inevitability" vomit the boosters were emitting this time last year

techblueberry2• 6 months ago

Oh, I mean they’re still doing that too:

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol...

Lerc2• 6 months ago

Perhaps things would work out better if people didn't say mean things regardless of who it's about.

You can still criticise without being mean.

thinkingtoilet• 6 months ago

Explain how to nicely criticize computer software that allows for the generation of sexually explicit images of children.

Lerc2• 6 months ago

I'm not sure what you are wanting here, are you actually requiring me to be a bully to affect change?

I can certainly criticize specific things respectfully. If I prioritised demonstrating my moral superiority I could loudly make all sorts of disingenuous claims that won't make the world a better place.

I certainly do not think people should be making exploitative images in Photoshop or indeed any other software.

I do not think that I should be able choose which software those rules apply to based upon my own prejudice. I also do not think that being able to do bad things with something is sufficient to negate every good thing that can be done with it.

Countless people have been harmed by the influence of religious texts, I do not advocate for those to be banned, and I do not demand the vilification of people who follow those texts.

Even though I think some books can be harmful, I do not propose attacking people who make printing presses.

What exactly are you requiring here. Pitchforks and torches? Why AI and not the other software that can be used for the same purposes?

If you want robust regulation that can provide a means to protect people from how models are used then I am totally prepared (and have made submissions to that effect) to work towards that goal. Being antagonistic works against making things better. Crude generalisations convince no-one. I want the world to be better, I will work towards that. I just don't understand how anyone could believe vitriolic behaviour will result in anything good.

chasd00• 6 months ago

Photoshop has been around for a long time.

xigoi4• 6 months ago

If someone generates sexually explicit images of non-existent children, who exactly does that harm?

donkey_brains2• 6 months ago

Woosh

irishcoffee2• 6 months ago

It is highly amusing to me that the same ~2,000 people who have the most to gain from LLM success also largely control the media narratives and the vast majority of the global economy.

Someone coined a term for those of the general population who trust this small group of billionaires and defend their technology.

“Dumb fucks”

daft_pink• 6 months ago

Maybe he shouldn’t have claimed if we could get in a moving vehicle with his ai driving no problem

rednafi• 6 months ago

"Oh, it's another tool in your repertoire like Bash" doesn't garner billions of dollars in investment. So they have to address it as the next electricity or the internet, when in its current form, it's much closer to a crypto grift than it is to electricity.

gip• 6 months ago

"immoral technofascist life"

Many people would rather argue about morality and conscience (of our time, of our society) instead of confronting facts and reality. What we see here is a textbook case of that.

tdb78932• 6 months ago

Is there a reason you seem to view conscience and confronting facts as seemingly opposed things? Also it seems to me like morality and conscience seem important to argue about, with facts just being part of that argument.

SpicyLemonZest• 6 months ago

I think that someone interested in discussing facts would not write the phrase "immoral technofascist life". If I took the discussion at face value, I might respond asking for examples of how e.g. Dario Amodei is a "technofascist", but I think we can agree that would be really obtuse of me.

johnnyanmac8• 6 months ago

instead of confronting facts and reality.

okay, what are the "facts and reality" here? If you're just going to say "AI is here to stay", then you 1) aren't dealing with the core issues people bring up, and 2) aren't brining facts but defeatism. Where would be if we used that logic for, say, Flash?

socialcommenter• 6 months ago

It's much easier for someone who blurs the facts to keep a clear conscience because they don't have to acknowledge (to themselves) what they've done.

Someone who's clear-eyed about the facts is much more likely to have a guilty conscience/think someone's actions are unconscionable.

I don't mean to argue either side in this discussion, but both sides might be ignoring the facts here.

kshri24• 6 months ago

just use my evil technology

Ridiculous to say the technology, by itself, is evil somehow. It is not. It is just math at the end of the day. Yes you can question the moral/societal implications of said technology (if used in a negative way) but that does not make the technology itself evil.

For example, I hate vibe coding with a passion because it enables wrong usage (IMHO) of AI. I hate how easy it has become to scam people using AI. How easy it is to create disinformation with AI. Hate how violence/corruption etc could be enabled by using AI tools. Does not mean I hate the tech itself. The tech is really cool. You can use the tech for doing good as much as you can use it for destroying society (or at the very minimum enabling and spreading brainrot). You choose the path you want to tread.

Just do enough good that it dwarfs the evil uses of this awesome technology.

johnnyanmac8• 6 months ago

Nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so - Shakespeare

That said, their thinking is that this can remove labor from their production, all while stealing works under the very copyright they setup. So I'd call that "evil" in every conventional sense.

Just do enough good that it dwarfs the evil uses of this awesome technology.

The evil is in the root of the training, though. And sadly money is not coming from "good". I don't see any models focusing on ensuring it trains only on CC0/FOSS works, so it's hard to argue of any good uses with evil roots.

If they could do that at the bare minimum, maybe they can make the argument over "horses vs cars". As it is now, this is a car powered by stolen horses. (also I work in games, and generative AI is simply trash in quality right now).

pixl9710• 6 months ago

Even this has little to do with AI and points right at the capitalist society that already exists. HN really doesn't like to talk about their golden child that let's money flow, but the concentration of wealth and IP by the super wealthy occurred before GenAI was a thing.

This also ignores the broken fucking copyright system that ensures once you create something you get many lifetimes of fucking off without having to work, so if genAI kills that I won't shed a tear.

wk_end2• 6 months ago

It is just math at the end of the day.

Not really - it's math, plus a bazillion jigabytes of data to train that math, plus system prompts to guide that math, plus data centers to do that math, plus nice user interfaces and APIs to interface with that math, plus...

Anyway, it's just kind of a meaninglessly reductive thing to say. What is the atom bomb? It's just physics at the end of the day. Physics can wreck havoc on the world; so can math.

budududuroiu• 6 months ago

Well, at this moment, the evil things done with technology vastly surpass the good things done with technology.

Democratisation of tech has allowed for more good to happen, centralisation the opposite. AI is probably one of the most centralisation-happy tech we've had in ages.

pixl9710• 6 months ago

Centralization of technology has been happening at a rapid pace, and is only a tiny bit the fault of technology itself.

Capitalism demands profits. Competition is bad for profits. Multiple factories are bad for profits. Multiple standards are bad for profits. Expensive workers are bad for profits.

mrnaught2• 6 months ago

“Just do enough good...”, it is hard to define what is "good". This tech has many dimensions and second-order effects, yet all the tech giants claim it a “net positive” without understanding fully what is unfolding.

robinhoode• 6 months ago

If we lived in a sane society, AI would actually be used for good.

AI is literally trained on by humans, used by humans. If humans are doing awful things with it, then it's because humans are awful right now.

I strongly feel this is related to the rise of fascism and wealth inequality.

We need a great conflict like WW2 to release this tension.

quantum_state• 6 months ago

Viewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.

justarandomname• 6 months ago

yeah, but zero chance of that happening unfortunately.

pear01• 6 months ago

well practiced cynicism is boring.

imo there are actually too few answers for what a better path would even look like.

hard to move forward when you don't know where you want to go. answers in the negative are insufficient, as are those that offer little more than nostalgia.

FridayoLeary3• 6 months ago

Sounds like you just want some of their money.

triceratops2• 6 months ago

Yes, especially since they're talking about wiping about most or all white-collar jobs in our lifetimes. What's wrong with that?

blactuary• 6 months ago

If they want to abandon noblesse oblige we can certainly go back to the old way of evening things out. Their choice

mackeye• 6 months ago

some would say their money is our money via the ltv :-)

mrwaffle2• 6 months ago

Is this technically a form of retroactive mind rape? If so, at least we have the right oligarchic friends experienced in this running the big show. (Apologies if I just any broke rules here).

mrwaffle2• 6 months ago

This seems to be a touchy subject for YC people with 500+ karma. Not a repudiation but an 'invisible hand' downvote to avoid a response or exposure of an opinion. My ancestors fought in the revolutionary war and like them, I'll die on this very subtle rolling hill of a question. I loved you all as brothers, this may be the end for mrwaffle.

relaxing• 6 months ago

What should?

mediaman• 6 months ago

How? They are all losing tens of billions of dollars on this, so far.

Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models.

There doesn't appear to be any moat.

This criticism seems very valid against advertising and social media, where strong network effects make dominant players ultra-wealthy and act like a tax, but the AI business looks terrible, and it appears that most benefits are going to accrue fairly broadly across the economy, not to a few tech titans.

NVIDIA is the one exception to that, since there is a big moat on their business, but not clear how long that will last either.

TheColorYellow• 6 months ago

I'm not so sure thats correct. The Labs seem to offer the best overall products in addition to the best models. And requirements for models are only going to get more complex and stringent going forward. So yes, open source will be able to keep up from a pure performance standpoint, but you can imagine a future state where only licensed models are able to be used in commercial settings and licensing will require compliance against limiting subversive use or similar (e.g. sexualization of minors, doesn't let you make a bomb etc.).

When the market shifts to a more compliance-relevant world, I think the Labs will have a monopoly on all of the research, ops, and production know-how required to deliver. That's not even considering if Agents truly take off (which will then place a premium on the servicing of those agents and agent environments rather than just the deployment).

There's a lot of assumptions in the above, and the timelines certainly vary, so its far from a sure thing - but the upside definitely seems there to me.

yowlingcat• 6 months ago

I agree with your point and it is to that point I disagree with GP. These open weight models which have ultimately been constructed from so many thousands of years of humanity are also now freely available to all of humanity. To me that is the real marvel and a true gift.

gizmodo59• 6 months ago

Nvda is not the only exception. Private big names are losing money but there are so many public companies seeing the time of their life. Power, materials, dram, storage to name a few. The demand is truly high.

What we can argue about is if AI is truly transforming lives of everyone, the answer is a no. There is a massive exaggeration of benefits. The value is not ZERO. It’s not 100. It’s somewhere in between.

gruez3• 6 months ago

Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models.

What happens when the AI bubble is over and developers of open models doesn't want to incinerate money anymore? Foundation models aren't like curl or openssl. You can't have maintain it with a few engineer's free time.

ulfw• 6 months ago

It's turning out to be a commodity product. Commodity products are a race to the bottom on price. That's how this AI bubble will burst. The investments can't possibly show the ROIs envisioned.

As an LLM I use whatever is free/cheapest. Why pay for ChatGPT if Copilot comes with my office subscription? It does the same thing. If not I use Deepseek or Qwen and get very similar results.

Yes if you're a developer on Claude Code et al I get a point. But that's few people. The mass market is just using chat LLMs and those are nothing but a commodity. It's like jumping from Siri to Alexa to whatever the Google thing is called. There are differences but they're too small to be meaningful for the average user

charcircuit3• 6 months ago

losing tens of billions

They are investing 10s of billions.

fHr• 6 months ago

The other side of the market:

jredwards• 6 months ago

I'd like to see evidence that open models are closing that gap. That would be promising.

derektank• 6 months ago

Isn’t the reason we have a public domain so that people aren’t in a perpetual debt to their intellectual forebears?

gruez3• 6 months ago

Copyrights last a very long time. Moreover nothing says it has to be open. The recipe to coke is still secret.

simianwords5• 6 months ago

Why do you see it as zero sum? I don’t care if big tech is accumulating intellectual wealth. I’m getting good products.

adolph• 6 months ago

reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years

Do we not all stand on the shoulders of giants? Will "big next" not take up where "big tech" leaves off one day?

Gene5ive• 6 months ago

Up Next: A McSweeney's article where McSweeney's takes the debates about it on Hacker News as seriously as Hacker News takes McSweeney's: way too much

selimthegrim• 6 months ago

This has the potential to be another /g/ ITT we HN now

lovich• 6 months ago

The Luddites weren’t anti technological progress, they were anti losing their job and entire way of life with an impolite “get fucked you fucking peasant” message to boot.

I wonder what name the tech bros will come up to call us for the same feeling nowadays.

yoyohello13• 6 months ago

They don’t need a new name. They just keep using Luddite.

snowwrestler2• 6 months ago

As someone who desperately needs this technology to work out, I can honestly say it is the most essential tool ever created in all of human history.

For those having trouble finding the humor, it lies in the vast gulf between grand assertions that LLMs will fundamentally transform every aspect of human life, and plaintive requests to stop saying mean things about it.

As a contrast: truly successful products obviate complaints. Success speaks for itself. In TV, software, e-commerce, statins, ED pills, modern smartphones, social media, etc… winning products went into the black quickly and made their companies shitloads of money (profits). No need to adjust vibes, they could just flip everyone the bird from atop their mountains of cash. (Which can also be pretty funny.)

There are mountains of cash in LLMs today too, but so far they’re mostly on the investment side of the ledger. And industry-wide nervousness about that is pretty easy to discern. Like the loud guy with a nervous smile and a drop of sweat on his brow.

https://youtu.be/wni4_n-Cmj4

So much of the current discourse around AI is the tech-builders begging the rest of the world to find a commercially valuable application. Like the AgentForce commercials that have to stoop to showing Matthew McConaughey suffering the stupidest problems imaginable. Or the OpenAI CFO saying maybe they’ll make money by taking a cut of valuable things their customers come up with. “Maybe someone else will change the world with this, if you’ll all just chill out” is a funny thing to say repeatedly while also asking for $billions and regulatory forbearance.

datsci_est_2015• 6 months ago

As a contrast: truly successful products obviate complaints. Success speaks for itself.

Makes me consider: Dotcom domains, Bitcoin, Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, generative AI…

Varying degrees of utility. But the common thread is people absolutely begging you to buy in, preying on FOMO.

twoodfin• 6 months ago

Or maybe McSweeney’s hasn’t been consistently funny for years and years?

snowwrestler2• 6 months ago

McSweeney’s was never consistently funny. This is a good piece though.

gradus_ad• 6 months ago

Jensen needs to keep escalating the hype to keep the hoarding dynamics in play. Because that's what's selling GPU's. You can't look at voracious GPU demand as a real signal of AI app profitability or general demand. It's a function of global tech oligarchs with gargantuan cash hoards not wanting to be left behind. But hoarding dynamics are nonlinear through self reinforcment and the moment any hint of limitations of current gen AI crop up spend will collapse.

ares6233• 6 months ago

None of them can stop. None of them can blink. They must keep going.

If Jensen even as much as _plans_ for something other than AI, it will cause everyone else to doubt.

akomtu• 6 months ago

AI is alien intelligence, really. If biotech created an unusual mold that responds to electric impulses the way LLMs do, we would rightfully declare that this mold has some sort of intelligence and for this reason it is, technically speaking, an alien lifeform. AI is just that intelligent mold, but based on transistors instead of organic cells. Needless to say, it's a bad idea to create a competing lifeform that's smarter than us, regardless of whatever flimsy benefits it might have.

20260126032624• 6 months ago

Hey, I just wanted to say, big fan of your work on vixra.org

Joel_Mckay3• 6 months ago

LLM is not real AI, would take 75% of our galaxy energy to reach human level error rates, and is economically a fiction.... but it doesn't have to be "AGI" to cause real harm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...

The damage is already clear =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYNHYIX11Pc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA

stego-tech• 6 months ago

Excellent satire, absolutely something I could see in The Onion or Hard Drive as an Op-Ed.

mattgreenrocks• 6 months ago

It’s wild to me that we both see people like Jensen as great while also tolerating public whining of the sort in the linked article. Don’t get me wrong, there are people who are far worse! But why do we put up with a billionaire whining that people are critical of what they make? At that scale it is guaranteed to have haters. It’s just statistics, man.

twochillin• 6 months ago

fully expected this to be about nadella

willturman• 6 months ago

It is.

olivierestsage• 6 months ago

Powerful catharsis in this

i_love_retros• 6 months ago

Today I asked copilot agent a question about a selector in a cypress test and it requested to run a python command in my terminal.

Brajeshwar• 6 months ago

We, humans, will read this and laugh, chuckle, but the AI Overloads will not understand that. This will be added to the training data and become a truth. But what if that is?

hedayet• 6 months ago

The same people selling you AI today (AGI tomorrow) were the ones selling remote work yesterday. Then "mandated" everyone back to the office.

Oh, and most of them had a crypto bag too.

<sigh>

Joel_Mckay3• 6 months ago

Most cons can't create actual value, and inevitably must continue to con to survive. It would be called recidivism if they went to prison. =3

vivzkestrel• 6 months ago

- can we please get an article like this dedicated to windows 11?

notepad0x902• 6 months ago

. Yes, it’s expanding the surveillance state, and yes, it’s destroying the education system, and yes, it’s being trained on copyrighted work without permission, and yes, it’s being used to create lethal autonomous weapons systems that can identify, target, and kill without human input, but… I forget my point, but ultimately, I think you should embrace it.

What's your answer to this? How did it turn out for nuclear energy? If it wasn't for this sort of thinking we'd have nuclear power all over the world and climate issues would not have been as bad.

You should embrace it, because other countries will and yours will be left behind if you don't. That doesn't mean put up with "slop", but that also doesn't mean be hostile to anything labeled "AI" either. The tech is real, it is extremely valuable (I applaud your mental gymnastics if you think otherwise), but not as valuable as these CEOs want it to be or in the way they want to be.

On one hand you have clueless executives and randos trying to slap "AI" on everything and creating a mess. On the other extreme you have people who reject things just because it has auto-complete (LLMs :) ) as one of it's features. You're both wrong.

What Jensen Huang and other CEOs like Satya Nadella are saying about this mindless bandwagonning of "oh no, AI slop!!!" b.s. is true, but I think even they are too caught up in tech circles? Regular people don't to the most part feel this way, they only care about what the tool can do, not how it's doing it to the most part. But..people in tech largely influence how regular people are educated, informed,etc...

Look at the internet, how many "slop" sites were there early on? how much did it get dismissed because "all the internet is good for is <slop>"?

Forget everything else, just having an actual program.. that I can use for free/cheap.. on my computer.. that can do natural language processing well!!! that's insane!! Even in some of the sci-fi I've been rewatching in recent years, the "AI/Computer" in spaceships or whatever is nowhere near as good as chatgpt is today in terms of understanding what humans are saying.

I'm just calling for a bit of a perspective on things? Some are too close to things and looking under the hood too much, others are too far and looking at it from a distance. The AI stock valuation is of course ridiculous, as is the overhyped investments in this area, and the datacenter buildout madness. And like I said, there are tons of terrible attempts at using this tech (including windows copilot), but the extremes of hostility against AI I'm seeing is also concerning, and not because I care about this awesome tech (which I do), but you know.. the job market is rough and everything is already crappy.. I don't want to go through an AI market crash or whatever on top of other things, so I would really appreciate it on a personal level if the cause of any AI crash is meritocratic instead of hype and bandwagonning, that's all.

ares6233• 6 months ago

I wasn’t around at the time to argue against nuclear energy.

I wasn’t old enough to argue against the internet. Plus to be fair to the ones who were, there was no prior tech that was anything like it to even make realistic guesses into what it would turn out to.

I wasn’t old enough to argue against social media and the surveillance it brought.

Now AI comes along. And I am old enough. And I am experienced enough in a similar space. And I have seen what similar technology have done and brought. And I have taken all that and my conscience and instinct tells me that AI is not a net good.

Previous generations have failed us. But we make do with the world we find ourselves born into.

I find it absurd that experienced engineers today look at AI and believe it will make their children’s lives better, when very recent history, history they themselves lived through, tells a very different story.

All so they can open 20 PRs per day for their employers.

notepad0x902• 6 months ago

Whether you were around or not is irrelevant, I wasn't around for some of that either. I brought it up so we can learn from the past instead of repeat those mistakes.

, there was no prior tech that was anything like it to even make realistic guesses into what it would turn out to.

Same with LLMs.

AI is not a net good.

You're falling into the same trap as previous generations when you do that. You won't actually end up fixing or improving the negative impacts of AI and your country/society will lose out big time in all sorts of ways.

Tech doesn't make things bad, people do to the most part. Where AI is abused, it needs legislation, not resistance and you should know it is a LOT more nuanced than that. How is an LLM language translator for tourists being loped in the same bucket as LLMs being used to target people for assasination? Your lack of nuance is laziness, no political or ideological stand can justify that laziness.

Nuclear energy had a lot of negatives, and people made the same types of arguments and outright banned it, next time you complain about climate change consider that your way of thinking might be part of the problem. Right now datacenter build outs are contributing to water scarcity for example, so instead of doing the hard and nuanced work of actually regulating and fixing that you oppose AI entirely. You do the easy thing, in the end we live in the real world and supply/demand economics rules, so your resistance is only performative at best, or catastrophic to the economy at worst. The latter part isn't for billionaries, and it isn't just for job markets, when the economy goes, all the climate change talk goes with it, all the EVs, green energy initiatives,etc... go, wars and crises increase, disease outbreaks increase. Doing the easy thing leads to this is my point, not that you need AI to prevent those.

I find it absurd that experienced engineers today look at AI and believe it will make their children’s lives better, when very recent history, history they themselves lived through, tells a very different story.

100x it would! although whose children depends on who regulates it first. My bet is China and the EU will regulate the crap out of it and extract the most value for themselves and future generations. AI is just solution, a tool, it isn't magic as you very well know. Companies have being using ML for surveillance for a long time. The US gov was using life of pattern analysis ML ten years ago to pick out assassination targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You have a fundamental lack of laws and a broken system of governance, don't take that out on tech.

casey2• 6 months ago

Investing and scalping are two different things. When you invest the pie grows larger, scalping you take more than you can eat from the existing pie.

Very few companies are investing into AI, most are engaged in scalping, hoping they are big enough to weather the storm.

LittleBox• 6 months ago

Someone remind me why this tech called AI deserves attention of this magnitude again.

Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

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