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hydroplane 20 hours ago [-]
I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A growing backlash that is not going away anytime soon.
tptacek 20 hours ago [-]
I think you'll find the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers believe themselves to be.
linkregister 19 hours ago [-]
The public statements of frontier labs' CEOs that generative models will replace human workers have been front page news for months.
JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago [-]
> the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers
SWE layoffs are politically irrelevant. The kids booing commencement speakers, however, are not aspiring SWEs. AI CEOs’ rhetoric, in particular, Altman’s, has been aimed and successfully landed more broadly.
And I don’t think the underlying cause of the anxiety is unemployment, which remains relatively low. Finding a block of hard-working workers who used to be able to make ends meet, but now can’t, is a political goldmine for good reason.
moregrist 19 hours ago [-]
It’s not about that.
It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.”
It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.”
It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will have jobs anymore.
It’s knowing that, in the US, UBI will never come.
It’s the feeling that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are getting rich and there isn’t even a “learn to code” path to wealth anymore.
It’s knowing that data centers will create problems in your neighborhood: the price of power and water will go up, the amount of undeveloped land down, and you don’t even get jobs out of it.
For fuck’s sake, it’s not about the thousands of Mag7 tech workers losing their jobs. That’s just a symptom, like all the other symptoms, of this weirdly dystopian future that the AI companies keep telling us is inevitable.
Danox 19 hours ago [-]
You left out the computer gamers crowd are mad about the high price of memory, a group that is a very vocal crowd in all the tech circles.
kiba 19 hours ago [-]
This is assuming AI will take our jobs as opposed to making more mess for us to clean up.
pa7ch 19 hours ago [-]
I'm worried many companies no longer care much if they make a mess or a way to hold them accountable.
pabs3 18 hours ago [-]
Thats the entire history of companies right there though? They have always socialised costs, privatised profits.
throwaway27448 20 hours ago [-]
Mag7?
JaakkoP 19 hours ago [-]
Magnificent 7, the new FAANG where Netflix got swapped to NVIDIA and Tesla got added.
throwaway27448 17 hours ago [-]
Jeez, we could have chosen a less, erm, crassus-reminiscent acronym
JohnFen 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's a term I won't use because of how awful and obsequious it is.
19 hours ago [-]
rsanek 14 hours ago [-]
Pandemic-related over-hiring was corrected by end of ~2023, if you look at employment growth rates pre-pandemic. [1] I'm more inclined to believe that it is AI (or, at least, the expectation by CEOs of what AI will be).
So for the Mag7 it's kinda AI, in that they want to maintain margins and invest loads more into capital for AI infrastructure. Those layoffs clearly have AI associated with them.
For lots of other tech, I'm not sure. I do believe that productivity can increase in a bunch of places with AI tooling, but you need to build that tooling first, then monitor and ensure that it continues working. Like, the vast majority of tech companies already outsourced a lot of what AI tooling would/could do, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the rationale (AI is so good we can cut 20% of our staff).
wvenable 19 hours ago [-]
The only way AI recoups the investment is if it replaces all our jobs.
It might be literally impossible but that's what the numbers are.
ivantop 20 hours ago [-]
The pandemic over hiring that ended 4 years ago?
xboxnolifes 16 hours ago [-]
I wonder if people will continue blaming things on pandemic over-hiring in 2030.
tom_ 19 hours ago [-]
Things take time to play out!
MattDamonSpace 19 hours ago [-]
Yes
bdangubic 19 hours ago [-]
industrial revolution also played a part too? :)
heavyset_go 18 hours ago [-]
No one wants to be the one to ring the "we're in a recession" bell first
ChiperSoft 8 hours ago [-]
I think once it's more than a year it's officially a depression
Sparkyte 19 hours ago [-]
They are opportunistic. They are using it as a scapegoat to lay off people they over-hired for for the growth they had during COVID. They are also using it as a scapegoat to offshore more and more labor.
mgh2 19 hours ago [-]
The best people can do is to "vote with the wallets" aka attention: like social media, avoid using AI altogether no matter how "pervasive" they become, they will soon realize they won't need it as much as they think- overcome the addiction and brainwashing...
sapphicsnail 19 hours ago [-]
Maybe in a normal world where a company's valuation is based in some sort of material reality.
rob74 19 hours ago [-]
The real reason is "make number go up". A few years ago, you showed the stock market (or your investors if you weren't listed yet) how amazing a company you were by hiring people like crazy, even if you didn't need them, and giving them all sorts of perks, including (but not limited to) home office. Now, the stock market wants to see blood, so you have to sacrifice people - not because you're actually losing money, but because you're not making as much profit as the stock market thinks you should, and therefore your shares are "underperforming".
Sparkyte 18 hours ago [-]
This tactic is wearing thin on investors. All companies doing layoffs as of recent have started to lose share value. AI or not.
I think investors are starting to see stress on the market for fewer working people contributing back as customers and investors themselves. This creates depreciation in share value as no one is willing to invest.
gofreddygo 18 hours ago [-]
It helps to think of investors in tiers. The lower tiers mimic higher ups. Each tier has two orders of magnitude deeper pockets than the lower tier.
At the very top are the big investment banks and fund houses, berkshire. Second are smaller institutions and third retail/individual.
The top two layers demand a steady return, never losing money on average in any 36 month window. Otherwise it triggers a selloff top down to cover for it.
The bottom follows the top so the selloff or buy just gets mimicked, with the top tier never losing (the bottom layers make sure of it by following blindly)
With wild indicators already set a massive selloff should have already been in motion, but its not. The top tier is getting more greedy.
No one is betting on AI long term. Everyone's in for the ride. As always the bottom will feed the top.
Sparkyte 14 hours ago [-]
Also to add investors know stock can't keep winning. They will diversify before too long and doing more splits does not ensure more value as it depreciates.
Nvidia is worth so much if it fails it takes investments with it. The risk is too high.
gofreddygo 4 hours ago [-]
yes I don't like the term investor anymore, because there aren't anymore. in my mind I just switch the word to a compulsive gambler or at best a speculator. and everything else is just bots.
wcxcv 35 minutes ago [-]
Ahem, the word trader fits it lol
librasteve 18 hours ago [-]
this “square wave” effect is driven by interest rates … when the bank rate is very low investors will tolerate high level of gambling on growth (ponzi-like). as soon as money will grow anyway in the bank, then investors demand actual RoI
hyperadvanced 16 hours ago [-]
It’s hard to square this with the post 2024 AI-investment economy. Interest rates have stayed higher longer than expected, while many, many companies (Vercel, Cursor, Wave-whatever that got bought out last year, whatever Alexandr Wang’s thing) got billion dollar valuations with no path to profitability and no revenue.
It seems that ROI has become more important in the last 5 years, but then again you have these Space or Rare Earth shitcos trading at -200x PE while all of their industrial promise is directly undermined by rising costs from AI.
The likely forecast for this year is either rate hikes combined with further labor market deterioration and consumption somehow going negative, or inflation eating up all of the (still non existent) profits from AI mega caps themselves.
It’s hard to see how this ends well without a lowered cost of capital or more interest in taking on capex risk, which seems frankly unlikely. The worst case scenario seems to be a lot of bad debt with nobody except for perhaps Berkshire or China who would be interested or capable when it comes to salvaging it. Armchair economist here, grain of salts a plenty.
rob74 14 hours ago [-]
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themafia 18 hours ago [-]
You take a non working technology and threaten workers with it as part of a global scheme to depress wages, and hey, bonus, the technology probably appears smart because it just wantonly steals everyone else's work and then passes it off as it's own.
How different would AI sentiment be if this never happened?
It wouldn't exist.
Who would buy this?
Show me any "little guy" suddenly competing with the "big guys" due to "AI." Any single examples? Remember the dawn of the internet? Where this very thing was happening every day?
The writing is on the wall. People imagine they're going to turn their $2500 computer into a butler and never work again so their brains are just shut off to the obvious.
clumsysmurf 20 hours ago [-]
Another part of the problem is our lax regulatory "anything goes" environment which puts no guardrails on how AI can be used / abused. For example, eventually nearly everyone needs healthcare, and the idea you might be denied by AI or fighting AI to get a claim accepted is unpopular.
jacobn 19 hours ago [-]
So far it seems like AI is helping the little guy fight the bills more?
(That can of course change very quickly, yes)
euroderf 17 hours ago [-]
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19 hours ago [-]
soundworlds 19 hours ago [-]
1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers.
2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people.
The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.
heavyset_go 18 hours ago [-]
> The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.
The goal was to raise as much money as possible as fast as possible before the curtain is pulled back to reveal the Wizard's empire of lies.
tencentshill 8 hours ago [-]
A lot of designers and artists were not hired for their particular style or skills. AI allows "good enough" results for less. Same with coding. It no longer takes skill to meet minimum requirements, just some money. Code monkeys and junior graphic designers will have to upskill somehow, or find other work. Maybe it will balance out eventually, with the AI costing about the same as hiring a junior designer.
dinfinity 15 hours ago [-]
> The goal was to raise as much money as possible as fast as possible before the curtain is pulled back to reveal the Wizard's empire of lies.
There may be some lies, but a big part of the backlash against AI is that it is too effective. The backlash is growing precisely because people are finally getting out of the "it's just a tool and there will always be a place for humans!"-denial phase and into the "they took our jobs!"-anger phase. They're seeing the writing on the wall many (although surprisingly not all) in the tech sector saw long ago.
Additionally, I'm quite sure it's not backlash against slop, as some might think. People have disliked spam and ads forever, but all in all they'll happily stomach loads of it just to watch some badly written Hollywood or Netflix human slop.
somesortofthing 18 hours ago [-]
I think AI companies have actually broadly adopted the right strategy. There's no way to sugarcoat or hide that your company's pitch is "your salary is our TAM, btw our product is so powerful it might cause human extinction". Deploying as widely as possible while steamrolling opposition before it can get its bearings is the only viable option for the technology as they describe it.
samrus 18 hours ago [-]
I call bullshit. They got greedy. The right way would have been to work with both knowledge and culture workers instead of making it an antagonistic relationship. These are the people ai companies need to operate their agents. Its stupid to threaten them and foment resentment
Also dont be ridiculous. We didnt go extinct from the nuke, we wont go extinct from a next token predictor
nmeagent 15 hours ago [-]
> We didnt go extinct from the nuke
Yet. We've come very close (see e.g. Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls). A catastrophic mistake or miscalculation could trigger a massive exchange at any time; it could happen on any given Thursday.
warumdarum 18 hours ago [-]
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samrus 18 hours ago [-]
This is a genuinely great point. It articulates something i could feel happening but couldnt fully recognize. And i guess the AI compananies couldnt wither because they thought screwing over culture workers was free
Also love the term culture workers. Everyone keeps talking about knowledge workers but culture workers play a huge part in society that no one in the AI space mentioned
asdfasgasdgasdg 18 hours ago [-]
> 1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers.
Counterpoint: AI's displacement of culture workers is to this point negligible. Nobody is consuming AI-generated media, except maybe in the trashiest tier of tiktok scrolling. Culture workers feel screwed, but they have not in fact been screwed.
userbinator 17 hours ago [-]
The "artists and other culture workers" are now the rest of the population, making what they want without needing to passively consume the legacy media.
threatofrain 17 hours ago [-]
Had things moved slowly? ML is an international race. Every nation has the prerogative of greed.
zombot 9 hours ago [-]
The looting began with how they trained their models and now they want to continue the looting with how the models are being used. You can't loot entire industries by cooperating with them.
userbinator 17 hours ago [-]
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soundworlds 15 hours ago [-]
You may be the first person I've heard argue that artists are the oppressor class
senectus1 19 hours ago [-]
yeah, completely agree. Made worse by the fact that the boomer and gen X generations are really well known for the whole "fuck you I've got mine, i deserve to stay rich and comfortable" attitude....
I get the feeling that shits coming to a head.
otterley 18 hours ago [-]
Please don’t lump GenX in with boomers. We are the first generation not to have lifetime employment and pensions, the first generation to pay through the nose for higher education, and many of our peers are just barely scraping by at 50 alongside our Millenial and GenZ friends.
heavyset_go 17 hours ago [-]
Stop the Boomerification of Gen X's voting record and the comparison will go away.
It seems to start happening when people hit 30 years of age. Maybe it’s because that’s when they start having children; I’m not sure.
x3qt 7 hours ago [-]
This is when they stop being simply consumers/receivers and become producers/owners.
IShotTheSherrif 14 hours ago [-]
Job losses are being fueled by cost cutting, not realized business transformation. There are early indicators of massive productivity gains in certain roles, coupled with a pervasive belief that the technology is advancing at a rate that means we must all evolve to survive in this new landscape, both people and organizations.
Executive teams are under pressure to cut costs now to fund AI investment and capture efficiencies they believe competitors are already realizing, fueled by an echo chamber that inflates small AI advancements (relative to impact) into evidence of sweeping transformation. My gut says offshore is benefiting from, and accelerating through, this transition because it remains the most familiar and defensible path to immediate cost cutting for most organizations.
Sparkyte 19 hours ago [-]
AI is fine, AI eating up jobs and taking away autonomy of people's lives. Not okay. It is a tool, it is expensive to run if it isn't more efficient or better.
It is a very fun tool when used correctly. I think there is a point where our current technology will wall before we achieve genuinely good AI. We're starting to see that now.
We are also over invested in it which also leaves us vulnerable for a crash in the market.
Nothing against AI in particular, but Schmidt's commencement speech sounded boring, and I would've tuned it out.
kj4211cash 19 hours ago [-]
If you read the article, it's mainly about data centers. Which is understandable regardless of your feelings about the technology. There's a ton of money, energy, labor, water, etc. going into building and operating data centers. It's a big change and a big topic for a lot of local governments. Because there's so much money involved and local government is so dysfunctional, there's also at least the appearance of the public will being given short shrift.
Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.
19 hours ago [-]
xscott 20 hours ago [-]
All that's going to happen is people will "voluntarily" take it away from themselves.
The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI.
The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI.
People who are afraid of losing their jobs will make tangential arguments about copyright violations. They'll vote to ban AI.
So citizens won't be allowed to use AI directly.
Instead, there will be regulatory capture. Microsoft and Apple will pay fees for compliance testing (bribes). Then they'll serve you a dumbed down version you can't escape. "I see you're trying to analyze numbers. Click here for a free signup to Office 365!".
The social media sites will make sure you still have access to create rage bait slop. That improves engagement.
Big software companies will pay for bug finding services. Small open source projects won't have the money.
If you're upset by AI, you should ask yourself if that's part of the plan. Because there's a lot of money to be made and power to be stripped from citizens if everything above comes true.
linkregister 19 hours ago [-]
There are many cheap, open models available on the vLLM engine: https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm. This includes gpt-oss, LLaMa, and Gemma. This is in addition to Qwen, Deepseek, Mistral, Kimi, GLM, and Poolside.
xscott 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, and I keep copies of the ones I like[0]. I can't run the huge ones, but the ones I can run aren't as good the "frontier" models. Regardless, I expect they will be considered contraband someday.
[0] - I've been using llama.ccp and Ollama. I should checkout vLLM.
peyton 19 hours ago [-]
Is there any precedent you’re referencing? Many things that are expensive, slow, scarce, or bad are going to become cheap, fast, abundant, and awesome. Historically people like that a lot.
I just have trouble seeing how we get to there from here. Vote to ban AI? Has anything like that happened before?
xvxvx 21 hours ago [-]
Americans aren’t in favor of being driven into unemployment and poverty? How dare they!
Companies have their relationship with people, specifically employees, backwards. What percentage of companies out there are truly needed? What percentage solely exist because people have some surplus money to play with?
No one needs Microsoft or Google products. No one needs overpriced Apple crap. AI means jack shit to almost 100% of Americans. Streaming services are one bad day away from ruin. We’ve seen what piracy can do. Now we have faster, better internet. Food delivery services RIP. I buy so little from Amazon these days that I’m questioning the $15 per month value of Prime.
I hope we see society correct course and go back to how it was in the 90’s, before everything went to shit. No social media. No smart phones. Going out more. Less digital noise. Physical media from physical stores. The list goes on…
WillPostForFood 19 hours ago [-]
Why would you only rollback to the 90s. Pretty sure TV was evil and destroying culture. And Rock and roll that was devastating, so we gotta roll back at least to the 1930's. That would be a fitting era to recreate.
gensym 19 hours ago [-]
Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then, at least in the US. It wasn't perfect, but it really did feel like things were getting better. The Clinton administration had to start doing studies about whether paying off the national debt would be globally destabilizing! We really were talking about the "end of history". We thought the Internet would bring people together and end bigotry.
JumpCrisscross 16 hours ago [-]
> Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then
We won a contest against a global superpower, due to administrations stretching across generations executing on a consistently-escalating strategy, and then balanced the budget on the peace dividend. Of course it was great. The point is there wasn’t the option of just doing the 90s in the 60s, 70s or even 80s—it had to be diligently worked towards and sacrificed for. (To be clear, our leaders of those eras, flawed as they were, could ask for those sacrifices.)
regularization 19 hours ago [-]
If we roll back 10,000 years, people often worked less hours per week. No class society where we have to serve the rich. Drinking alcohol, painting caves. Sounds pretty good.
gdulli 20 hours ago [-]
All of these companies and their products and services are getting worse and more expensive. If their hostility to customers has not been punished so far then what reason is there to believe it ever will be?
The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.
dotcoma 20 hours ago [-]
It would be nice, but is it likely to happen?
onetokeoverthe 20 hours ago [-]
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Daz912 19 hours ago [-]
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lofaszvanitt 19 hours ago [-]
As Musk said, they were the bootloaders of AI. Finally we get gargantuan monster battles akin to Godzilla vs. King Kong.
feverzsj 17 hours ago [-]
The AI winter is coming ... again.
euroderf 17 hours ago [-]
A.I. won't be placed on a back shelf like it was in the 90s.
SubiculumCode 19 hours ago [-]
We truly need to put a stop to leaving our citizens defenseless against nation-state propaganda campaigns coming out of China and Russia.
nozzlegear 19 hours ago [-]
Are you implying this story is Chinese or Russian propaganda?
SubiculumCode 16 hours ago [-]
No. I'm implying that Chinese micro targeted propaganda is stoking fear of AI in the U.S. with the aim of slowing/diminishing our advantage in data center compute in the AI race.
postsantum 19 hours ago [-]
Everything is Chinese/Russian propaganda unless it comes from a respectable source like BBC
fortran77 18 hours ago [-]
There's a lot to like about AI, but there's so much slop and everthing is getting so shitty, if I had to choose a side, it would be "against it."
I had to suffer through taling to Sutter Heath's AI three times today before I could get through to a person to tell them about a billing mistake. I finally decided to send a formal demand letter via FedEx (written with the help of AI) rather than deal with all this AI slop they've put between me and customer service.
baigy 20 hours ago [-]
It's going to get worse, way worse, before it gets better. You know that right?
20 hours ago [-]
hsuduebc2 20 hours ago [-]
I mean, people are semi developed selfish tribal monkeys. It must hurt us significantly before we are willing to solve the issue.
Not a best way to so virtually anything.
hcurtiss 19 hours ago [-]
While the west clutches their pearls, China roars ahead on manufacturing, energy, and AI. Unqualified military supremacy will soon follow. I weep for my children.
customguy 15 hours ago [-]
So you want your children to be rightless cogs in the belly of a machine so that machine can be in an eternal struggle with another machine running on slaves? What for?
hcurtiss 14 hours ago [-]
Is that your experience with AI? It’s made my work vastly more efficient and valuable. And have you been to modern Chinese cities? Prosperity is awesome. Stop listening to the Luddites and eco-nihilists. There’s a way to have all that AND civil rights. But if we continue to outlaw development and energy intensive industries, then yes, the West will be Chinese slaves.
customguy 9 hours ago [-]
> Stop listening to the Luddites and eco-nihilists.
Stop telling me to stop beating my wife, I'm not even married. You don't know what Luddites are, and I don't know what eco-nihilists are.
> we continue to outlaw development
Again, I have no idea what this is even referring to. I'm sure you mean something with that, but expressed in such a hyperbolic, all-or-nothing way I just don't know what to do with it, sorry.
hcurtiss 8 hours ago [-]
You are doing the left-wing, pretending not to understand meme. Those are the principal objections in the linked article. Data centers are not an environmental catastrophe. And AI isn’t coming to take all of our jobs. There will be change, for certain, but if we don’t embrace it, the West is doomed. That is not hyperbole. History bears this out repeatedly.
customguy 2 hours ago [-]
If anyone who talks back or even just asks for clarification is "the left wing" for you, that kinda says it all.
The issues with "AI" is basically that profits once again get centralize while costs are outsourced. "The West" basically means buy our slop, die in our wars, die in the cold when you're elderly, but rest assured you're part of "The West" and "The West" is totally showing "the Chinese" what's what. While they tell their people the same thing. It's the same everywhere, all the time. And the argument is never a track record of success, but forms of "We cannot afford evidence in form of a mushroom cloud". Well, I think you're wrong and falling for liars, I say bring it.
archagon 6 hours ago [-]
“And have you been to modern Chinese cities? Prosperity is awesome.”
Sounds like you should embrace a Chinese future just like you’ve embraced AI.
10 hours ago [-]
gensym 19 hours ago [-]
It's funny how easily you can differentiate people in the tech industry who spend all their time with others in the tech industry from those who don't.
The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on).
Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in the tech industry think. Normies can see their social media feeds filling up with slop. They see people in their social circles who can no longer hold a normal conversation without feeding everything into ChatGPT. And - most importantly, I suspect - they are seeing the plan they've built their lives around - get your kids to do well in school, get them into college so they can have a good career and make enough to pay of the loans that plan will require - being casually dismissed by AI boosters ("they'll be plenty of jobs, we just don't know what they are yet!").
Here's a clue for people who don't understand the backlash: if you don't understand that stability has value on its own, then you lack a basic understanding of what more people actually care about.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 19 hours ago [-]
Is there room for people who are already in the acceptance phase? We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.
I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.
gensym 19 hours ago [-]
> We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against.
I'm right there with you. I think AI will be bad as a whole for the world, but I use it for work every day and am pushing my team to use it more. I think it's a really effective tool for my company even if it's going to be bad for the world overall.
> I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.
I see nuclear as an example of where public opinion did stop development. In the US at least, we've basically given up on nuclear power, much to our detriment.
Another example of this is human cloning, which seemed inevitable back when Dolly the sheep was first cloned.
asdfasgasdgasdg 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think AI is going to be as easy to give up on as nuclear. Nuclear has some long term/diffuse benefits, but in the short run it's just one among many types of electricity generation. AI is a whole category, not one substitutable member of an already common category. Us giving up on AI development would be more like giving up on electricity generation than like giving up on nuclear.
Human cloning is a solution with no corresponding problem. We can make more humans very easily, if we have someone willing to bear those humans and take care of them.
If AI becomes demonstrably useful, opting out will be incredibly challenging, since we cannot force other countries to disarm.
18 hours ago [-]
evmaki 17 hours ago [-]
The industry has pushed socially disruptive technologies in several waves (mobile phones, algorithmic social media, short-form content) with seemingly no buy-in from the greater public, nor any meaningful consequences for the ills imposed. Many are now looking at our current crop of tech leaders and billionaires and maybe correctly detecting a bit of indifference to the grievances of the masses of normal people who have been forced to live in successively more deteriorated societies shaped by technologies that they've had no voice in shaping.
AI is just the next wave, and the impact is more tangible than ever – it literally takes your job, and it's being pushed on you by enormously wealthy people who don't understand you, your life, and what's important to you. The sad thing is, AI can be beneficial to people if wielded in the right way, but we are in a polarized environment where productive conversations no longer feel possible: you're either an AI bro or a luddite. I think anyone (myself included) who has spent time developing B2C products that incorporate AI quickly discovers just how touchy of a subject this is, and it's due imo to the sins of the accelerationist crowd that never wastes time understanding the needs and perspectives of normal people.
goodwinresearch 19 hours ago [-]
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kakaz 17 hours ago [-]
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lowbloodsugar 20 hours ago [-]
I'll just keep repeating this:
There are three options:
1. AI owned by everyone
2. No AI
3. AI owned by billionaires
If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The masses do the job of the billionaires.
Most utopian science fiction has AI doing the work and humans leading a life of leisure (e.g. Culture novels). Dystopian futures have AI keeping the rabble under control (Neil Asher's Owner Trilogy, Elysium). Time to choose folks.
heddycrow 20 hours ago [-]
I wish that those who support #2 looked a lot less like #3.
For that matter, I wish those who were pro-AI were more strictly supportive of #1.
mycall 19 hours ago [-]
#2 is impossible now that oss models are readily available and nobody would know you are using them.
prettyblocks 19 hours ago [-]
#2 is not really an option though. It's more like #1 or #3.
xscott 19 hours ago [-]
I agree with your logic, but you should replace 2 with "AI used by governments only". The haters would have more luck getting rid of nuclear weapons than putting the AI cat back in the bag. Governments will use it for surveillance. Think "sentiment analysis" to make sure you're not a terrorist.
jaredcwhite 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah I'll pick two, thanks.
shimman 7 hours ago [-]
It's hilarious how the elites don't understand the politics of rejection.
wvenable 19 hours ago [-]
What does #1 actually mean in practical terms? Collective ownership of a giant data center and all the CPUs, GPUs, and DRAM needed to do AI?
euroderf 17 hours ago [-]
This is where the researchers and the essayists should be working. What does it look like when there's a significant tax at every value-add (hey let's call it a value-added tax!) that goes into a big beautiful kitty that funds UBI and general nutrition & housing ?
wvenable 7 hours ago [-]
What?
JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago [-]
4. AI owned by someone else. Unless you’re in America, China, the UK, France or Israel, it’s this or No. 2.
throwawa14223 19 hours ago [-]
#1 seems like the worst possible dystopia. We should shoot for #2 and have #3 as a fallback. The Culture is the worst dystopia I am capable of imagining.
18 hours ago [-]
GolfPopper 9 hours ago [-]
If there are no billionaires, you don't have to worry about option 3.
lofaszvanitt 19 hours ago [-]
4. regulation... well, that's a no go in the US. So what is the 5th option?
xscott 17 hours ago [-]
I predict it will get regulated in the US, and that it will lead to regulatory capture. Solving absolutely NONE of the problems people complain about while providing NONE of the benefits AI could bring to society.
lofaszvanitt 20 hours ago [-]
People don't see the safety net, that's the problem. Big tech hopes that bigdiks gonna bring in UBI and the like to ease the pepl, but it's nowhere near on the horizon. And it will be hard to persuade the ruling psychos to let the millions of their slaves running amok.
So pepl gonna riot and hunt down AI researchers and ceos and gonna burn them at the stake and then eat them :D. Musk will tell the sect members to hunt down Sam and the first one who bites his calves will be awarded a cybertruck.
Oh and data centers gonna be looted after hungry pepl eat the security guards and the mercenaries. Also remember everyone have rifles and gatlings buried in the garden :DDD.
Niice future.
dyauspitr 19 hours ago [-]
Bunch of idiots. We’re all going to lose our jobs but you can only hold back the inevitable for so long. This idiot populous has a total inability to see past the extremely short term. What exactly is going to happen you’re going to block the data centers. You’re going to make it hard to make technical progress and then someone else will eat your lunch and now you’re just poor.
add-sub-mul-div 18 hours ago [-]
Seeing the future is hard for everyone, but what I have a hard time understanding is people who act ignorant of the recent past. Because that's what tells us how AI is going to be used against us.
nozzlegear 19 hours ago [-]
Personally I'm not convinced by pro-accelerationism arguments. Why shouldn't technical progress be hard? Why shouldn't the inevitable be held back as long as possible? What does it mean to have someone else eat our lunch in terms of AI?
dyauspitr 19 hours ago [-]
It’s because you live in a world with competitors now this isn’t the 60s and the 70s anymore. There are legitimately quite a few countries that can effectively compete. Someone else eating your lunch in this case means you’re poor, have no global power and life for all of us will be worse than what we currently enjoy.
nozzlegear 9 hours ago [-]
But in terms of AI, what does that actually mean? If the Chinese are ahead of us and have "eaten our lunch," what are the actual effects? Cheaper AI for everyone with the existential threat that they may shut off access whenever they like? We're not building weapons here, there's no end goal unless you believe in the myth of AGI that these companies are pushing. US companies won't suddenly take their LLMs offline if China's become sufficiently advanced.
customguy 14 hours ago [-]
What's the competition about? If you can generate more value from less, why should that make anyone else poorer?
userbinator 19 hours ago [-]
...while at the same time the pro-AI supporters are also growing steadily, as countless people discover how generative AI has lowered the bar to creating content beyond what they could before.
Ifkaluva 18 hours ago [-]
“Content”
userbinator 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, memes and the like. Lots more than before. Entertainment is far better than it was before AI, when it was controlled by the big media companies.
customguy 14 hours ago [-]
Memes were never controlled by "big media".
But I'm sure some people LOVE that video generation is no longer "controlled" by there having to be a real thing to take videos of. You can just make shit up, and retreat even harder into bubbles. No need to interact with "the enemy" to even mock them, no need for source material to even twist or lie about; just generate whatever. There is a rift between "AI" and people, and one between those people vs. those who take having a society, culture and public spaces seriously.
SWE layoffs are politically irrelevant. The kids booing commencement speakers, however, are not aspiring SWEs. AI CEOs’ rhetoric, in particular, Altman’s, has been aimed and successfully landed more broadly.
And I don’t think the underlying cause of the anxiety is unemployment, which remains relatively low. Finding a block of hard-working workers who used to be able to make ends meet, but now can’t, is a political goldmine for good reason.
It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.”
It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.”
It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will have jobs anymore.
It’s knowing that, in the US, UBI will never come.
It’s the feeling that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are getting rich and there isn’t even a “learn to code” path to wealth anymore.
It’s knowing that data centers will create problems in your neighborhood: the price of power and water will go up, the amount of undeveloped land down, and you don’t even get jobs out of it.
For fuck’s sake, it’s not about the thousands of Mag7 tech workers losing their jobs. That’s just a symptom, like all the other symptoms, of this weirdly dystopian future that the AI companies keep telling us is inevitable.
[1] https://robulka.com/employees/
So for the Mag7 it's kinda AI, in that they want to maintain margins and invest loads more into capital for AI infrastructure. Those layoffs clearly have AI associated with them.
For lots of other tech, I'm not sure. I do believe that productivity can increase in a bunch of places with AI tooling, but you need to build that tooling first, then monitor and ensure that it continues working. Like, the vast majority of tech companies already outsourced a lot of what AI tooling would/could do, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the rationale (AI is so good we can cut 20% of our staff).
It might be literally impossible but that's what the numbers are.
I think investors are starting to see stress on the market for fewer working people contributing back as customers and investors themselves. This creates depreciation in share value as no one is willing to invest.
At the very top are the big investment banks and fund houses, berkshire. Second are smaller institutions and third retail/individual.
The top two layers demand a steady return, never losing money on average in any 36 month window. Otherwise it triggers a selloff top down to cover for it.
The bottom follows the top so the selloff or buy just gets mimicked, with the top tier never losing (the bottom layers make sure of it by following blindly)
With wild indicators already set a massive selloff should have already been in motion, but its not. The top tier is getting more greedy.
No one is betting on AI long term. Everyone's in for the ride. As always the bottom will feed the top.
Nvidia is worth so much if it fails it takes investments with it. The risk is too high.
It seems that ROI has become more important in the last 5 years, but then again you have these Space or Rare Earth shitcos trading at -200x PE while all of their industrial promise is directly undermined by rising costs from AI.
The likely forecast for this year is either rate hikes combined with further labor market deterioration and consumption somehow going negative, or inflation eating up all of the (still non existent) profits from AI mega caps themselves.
It’s hard to see how this ends well without a lowered cost of capital or more interest in taking on capex risk, which seems frankly unlikely. The worst case scenario seems to be a lot of bad debt with nobody except for perhaps Berkshire or China who would be interested or capable when it comes to salvaging it. Armchair economist here, grain of salts a plenty.
How different would AI sentiment be if this never happened?
It wouldn't exist.
Who would buy this?
Show me any "little guy" suddenly competing with the "big guys" due to "AI." Any single examples? Remember the dawn of the internet? Where this very thing was happening every day?
The writing is on the wall. People imagine they're going to turn their $2500 computer into a butler and never work again so their brains are just shut off to the obvious.
(That can of course change very quickly, yes)
2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people.
3. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about AI and the number is falling: (https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...)
The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.
The goal was to raise as much money as possible as fast as possible before the curtain is pulled back to reveal the Wizard's empire of lies.
There may be some lies, but a big part of the backlash against AI is that it is too effective. The backlash is growing precisely because people are finally getting out of the "it's just a tool and there will always be a place for humans!"-denial phase and into the "they took our jobs!"-anger phase. They're seeing the writing on the wall many (although surprisingly not all) in the tech sector saw long ago.
Additionally, I'm quite sure it's not backlash against slop, as some might think. People have disliked spam and ads forever, but all in all they'll happily stomach loads of it just to watch some badly written Hollywood or Netflix human slop.
Also dont be ridiculous. We didnt go extinct from the nuke, we wont go extinct from a next token predictor
Yet. We've come very close (see e.g. Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls). A catastrophic mistake or miscalculation could trigger a massive exchange at any time; it could happen on any given Thursday.
Also love the term culture workers. Everyone keeps talking about knowledge workers but culture workers play a huge part in society that no one in the AI space mentioned
Counterpoint: AI's displacement of culture workers is to this point negligible. Nobody is consuming AI-generated media, except maybe in the trashiest tier of tiktok scrolling. Culture workers feel screwed, but they have not in fact been screwed.
I get the feeling that shits coming to a head.
It seems to start happening when people hit 30 years of age. Maybe it’s because that’s when they start having children; I’m not sure.
Executive teams are under pressure to cut costs now to fund AI investment and capture efficiencies they believe competitors are already realizing, fueled by an echo chamber that inflates small AI advancements (relative to impact) into evidence of sweeping transformation. My gut says offshore is benefiting from, and accelerating through, this transition because it remains the most familiar and defensible path to immediate cost cutting for most organizations.
It is a very fun tool when used correctly. I think there is a point where our current technology will wall before we achieve genuinely good AI. We're starting to see that now.
We are also over invested in it which also leaves us vulnerable for a crash in the market.
Checking MSN is a good alternative to archive.ph, or otherwise searching for the author and title?
Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419
Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674
Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107
An AI Hate Wave Is Here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318
Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.
The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI.
The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI.
People who are afraid of losing their jobs will make tangential arguments about copyright violations. They'll vote to ban AI.
So citizens won't be allowed to use AI directly.
Instead, there will be regulatory capture. Microsoft and Apple will pay fees for compliance testing (bribes). Then they'll serve you a dumbed down version you can't escape. "I see you're trying to analyze numbers. Click here for a free signup to Office 365!".
The social media sites will make sure you still have access to create rage bait slop. That improves engagement.
Big software companies will pay for bug finding services. Small open source projects won't have the money.
If you're upset by AI, you should ask yourself if that's part of the plan. Because there's a lot of money to be made and power to be stripped from citizens if everything above comes true.
[0] - I've been using llama.ccp and Ollama. I should checkout vLLM.
I just have trouble seeing how we get to there from here. Vote to ban AI? Has anything like that happened before?
Companies have their relationship with people, specifically employees, backwards. What percentage of companies out there are truly needed? What percentage solely exist because people have some surplus money to play with?
No one needs Microsoft or Google products. No one needs overpriced Apple crap. AI means jack shit to almost 100% of Americans. Streaming services are one bad day away from ruin. We’ve seen what piracy can do. Now we have faster, better internet. Food delivery services RIP. I buy so little from Amazon these days that I’m questioning the $15 per month value of Prime.
I hope we see society correct course and go back to how it was in the 90’s, before everything went to shit. No social media. No smart phones. Going out more. Less digital noise. Physical media from physical stores. The list goes on…
We won a contest against a global superpower, due to administrations stretching across generations executing on a consistently-escalating strategy, and then balanced the budget on the peace dividend. Of course it was great. The point is there wasn’t the option of just doing the 90s in the 60s, 70s or even 80s—it had to be diligently worked towards and sacrificed for. (To be clear, our leaders of those eras, flawed as they were, could ask for those sacrifices.)
The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.
I had to suffer through taling to Sutter Heath's AI three times today before I could get through to a person to tell them about a billing mistake. I finally decided to send a formal demand letter via FedEx (written with the help of AI) rather than deal with all this AI slop they've put between me and customer service.
Stop telling me to stop beating my wife, I'm not even married. You don't know what Luddites are, and I don't know what eco-nihilists are.
> we continue to outlaw development
Again, I have no idea what this is even referring to. I'm sure you mean something with that, but expressed in such a hyperbolic, all-or-nothing way I just don't know what to do with it, sorry.
The issues with "AI" is basically that profits once again get centralize while costs are outsourced. "The West" basically means buy our slop, die in our wars, die in the cold when you're elderly, but rest assured you're part of "The West" and "The West" is totally showing "the Chinese" what's what. While they tell their people the same thing. It's the same everywhere, all the time. And the argument is never a track record of success, but forms of "We cannot afford evidence in form of a mushroom cloud". Well, I think you're wrong and falling for liars, I say bring it.
Sounds like you should embrace a Chinese future just like you’ve embraced AI.
The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on).
Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in the tech industry think. Normies can see their social media feeds filling up with slop. They see people in their social circles who can no longer hold a normal conversation without feeding everything into ChatGPT. And - most importantly, I suspect - they are seeing the plan they've built their lives around - get your kids to do well in school, get them into college so they can have a good career and make enough to pay of the loans that plan will require - being casually dismissed by AI boosters ("they'll be plenty of jobs, we just don't know what they are yet!").
Here's a clue for people who don't understand the backlash: if you don't understand that stability has value on its own, then you lack a basic understanding of what more people actually care about.
I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.
I'm right there with you. I think AI will be bad as a whole for the world, but I use it for work every day and am pushing my team to use it more. I think it's a really effective tool for my company even if it's going to be bad for the world overall.
> I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.
I see nuclear as an example of where public opinion did stop development. In the US at least, we've basically given up on nuclear power, much to our detriment.
Another example of this is human cloning, which seemed inevitable back when Dolly the sheep was first cloned.
Human cloning is a solution with no corresponding problem. We can make more humans very easily, if we have someone willing to bear those humans and take care of them.
If AI becomes demonstrably useful, opting out will be incredibly challenging, since we cannot force other countries to disarm.
AI is just the next wave, and the impact is more tangible than ever – it literally takes your job, and it's being pushed on you by enormously wealthy people who don't understand you, your life, and what's important to you. The sad thing is, AI can be beneficial to people if wielded in the right way, but we are in a polarized environment where productive conversations no longer feel possible: you're either an AI bro or a luddite. I think anyone (myself included) who has spent time developing B2C products that incorporate AI quickly discovers just how touchy of a subject this is, and it's due imo to the sins of the accelerationist crowd that never wastes time understanding the needs and perspectives of normal people.
There are three options:
1. AI owned by everyone
2. No AI
3. AI owned by billionaires
If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The masses do the job of the billionaires.
Most utopian science fiction has AI doing the work and humans leading a life of leisure (e.g. Culture novels). Dystopian futures have AI keeping the rabble under control (Neil Asher's Owner Trilogy, Elysium). Time to choose folks.
For that matter, I wish those who were pro-AI were more strictly supportive of #1.
So pepl gonna riot and hunt down AI researchers and ceos and gonna burn them at the stake and then eat them :D. Musk will tell the sect members to hunt down Sam and the first one who bites his calves will be awarded a cybertruck.
Oh and data centers gonna be looted after hungry pepl eat the security guards and the mercenaries. Also remember everyone have rifles and gatlings buried in the garden :DDD.
Niice future.
But I'm sure some people LOVE that video generation is no longer "controlled" by there having to be a real thing to take videos of. You can just make shit up, and retreat even harder into bubbles. No need to interact with "the enemy" to even mock them, no need for source material to even twist or lie about; just generate whatever. There is a rift between "AI" and people, and one between those people vs. those who take having a society, culture and public spaces seriously.
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