How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.
It's a relatively cheap trick, badly executed.
A good product should sell itself.
I feel that AI leaders have been shoving their product down our throats for the last two years (at least).
Tenuous connection between unrelated topics to fit them into larger ingroup/outgroup dynamics is the junkfood of persuasion tactics. Bad for you but addictive anyway. If you look for it you'll see it all the time.
Corporate bosses have been screaming for more "hustle-y" employees for decades so that is nothing new.
Corporate interpretation: listen you filthy cattle, gen-AI is bottoming out all our pesky human labour costs and allowing me and my friends to milk every last drop out of this late-stage capitalist nightmare, you better get used to it because from now on 99% of you will just have to make do scraping by in the gig economy, selling your bodies or just generally being dancing monkeys for billionaires - we'll still hire some of you as nurses and waiters because we don't exactly want clankers looking after our kids
Other countries typically have tons of foreign music and entertainment, most notably American music. America is the one that seems to be looking inwards here (due to being dominant on an international market - I am not saying it is sinister).
Maybe it ties in because, if you're not excited and enthusiastic about AI and our new Ways of Working, you're a racist. You don't want to be a racist, do you? AI is basically exactly like a black person getting chased by a lynch mob. Do you stand with the racist lynchers? Or with the civil rights movement (the billionaire AI promoters).
Already at work I can see that any attempt at questioning the benefits of AI in any way gets you shut down and written off as an idiot, who is on a fast track to be added to the next workforce reduction candidates. People who write any code by hand do so quietly and in secret like they are smuggling contraband or hiding Jews.
This is quickly growing into the sentiment where if you don’t like AI, you’re just a bad person who prefers to be lazy and waste company time and money moving slow as possible, you’re stealing velocity: think “Intellectuals” who just want to wax philosophically about problems rather than sit down and use AI to just get shit done and move on. If you have any opinion that is entirely your own, you are wrong automatically, you should have consulted AI first.
It’s not worth fighting these battles and it’s so much easier to just give up and accept AI as the lord and savior of corporate America. Just try to focus on all the good things it will do.
If someone is taking my job they better be a human being and they better live in this country.
With that in mind, what should we do with the bosses who stole thousands of jobs each and shipped them to India and Poland?
I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.
> graduates embraced freedom and boo'd schmidt.
Schmidt: No, not like that!
I think that the deeper topic is that there is a sense of double-speak going around, they mean freedom but what they really mean is to use the word and its meaning and to attach it to their own goals, in this case AI because google has a vested interest in that.
AI leaders are not interested in open debate and they have demonstrated this again and again.
Shouting this person down is the appropriate, humane response.
People with disdain for AI are probably largely limited to one “elite” or another. Of course this goes for practically any cause. It’s basically impossible to to get large-scale momentum behind anything that goes against prevailing economic interests.
Of course he was still out of touch with that particular group, and if they all try really hard, maybe they can get some narrative out there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Unless corpos discover how they can use these clashing views for market segmentation or something.
I'll thank the universe for not knowing anyone that does this.
> Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the Hackernews commenter sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality loves LLMs and their touted trajectory.
And it would hold mostly true for me. This goes to show we should all be aware of our respective bubbles.
But maybe I'm just a hippie, who knows.
I used to attribute it to the individualism ethos and whatnot, but I no longer think that is a reasonable take in a sense that it is not the whole story. There is a steady flow of push to separate individuals from one another. For example, it is not unusual for parent to offer a sentiment along the lines of 'you are out at 18'. And this is just one tiny example. The funny thing, there may be a merit to letting a bird fly out, but we are talking about concerted efforts to push birds out while outside is set up to be as anti-bird as possible. Not exactly a recipe for success..
It confusing to me how people complain about jobs - there is no guarantee that any job will be there forever, there is no guarantee that current social and economic model will be there forever, things always change, you have to adapt, there is no other way.
i do not doubt that there were people like you who saw the problems and perhaps even wanted to fix it, but I cant help but wonder where it all went wrong.
also there is no guarantee for anything that gen-z wouldn't try to pass it to the next generation either. It's a ticking time bomb, Tick tock.
Point is: Just say it. If you think the parent is in a bubble, just express the opinion. You don't even have to mount an argument or present evidence, but there's really no value in calling somebody's opinion "weird" just because, essentially, "anybody could be wrong".
For example, is that true of your experience?
In general HN has been enamored by AI, with the sheen falling off only in the past quarter. This has matched with most people on HN being far more tech aware than the average user.
The issues with GenAI have also been couched to match observed reality.
——-
The point being, - You can have your experience, and you can talk about it to build a better understanding of reality.
If your mother is at all like my mother, she isn't burning through nearly as many tokens as developers who are utilizing AI effectively.
Datacenters aren't being built for the handful of people using a hundred or two tokens a month but the fields where each user is utilizing 10k+
In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a difference when fighting against people's desire to 'take it easy'.
Humans will always compete, there's never any rest. AI is never going away. The crowd is booing but they will never act.
Circus and Bread has become Casino and Colleseum. The competition never stops.
And also, that generation got quite a few students who did sacrificed their future in protests just a few years ago. The crackdown was very real and is still ongoing.
The only way to act is to not produce or consume (to the best of your ability) any slop, and be loud about it. We are being absolutely overrun with low-quality art, prose, and software, and making the production of such unprofitable (and even unfashionable) is the only reasonable action you can take.
Anyone that thinks an LLM won't be up to spewing endless Harlequin Romance level prose is in a state of denial. And the cost of tokens continues to drop. This either means the current generation of content gets cheaper or better content becomes affordable through chain of thought token burning. I don't see a problem with that. The problem IMO is pushing a narrative that AI exists primarily to displace humans and the pushback is finally loud enough that it's getting blasted back into the faces of the billionaires.
In my non-IT life:
1. Vast majority of people have limited awareness and even less care about AI. In fact, they cheerfully consume AI generated Facebook, tiktok and YouTube videos, let alone articles, websites, reviews and emails - my electrician, factory and plumbing male friends like nothing better than to watch random 25 second reels of scantily clad AI women after a hard day work. Other people are enjoying non-existent huskies howling and kittens mewowing, listen to AI muzak on spotify, are amazed by non-existent weird creatures, etc. They are peripherally aware thay chatgpt can make you a nicer email or tell you about something but honestly cannot be bothered much. And then there's the faction that enjoys consuming manufactured outrage. They fall for AI emails and scams and generally blissfully consume massive amounts of ai daily without being aware of it.
2. There are young passionate anti AI zealots who are not in IT. Their passionate cries all too frequently fall on death ears because they have no actual fundamental thorough correct understanding of what GenAI / LLM is, its failure modes, actual consumption, or socio-political risk. At best, they post under every AI video "won't somebody think of the water!". Which, fair enough.
3. It's really only the technically aware folks that I find have any real sense of understanding or concern about AI dangers (as well as being the ones using / championing it the most). It can even be both in same person - as a parent I'm extremely concerned what will employment and political future be for my kids - so I took a part time role as AI focal for my team to better understand and perhaps shape / guide it).
(Yes, I'm quite aware of the risk this is all a "only those who share exact same concerns I do are legit " perspective. I welcome counter arguments :).
The numbers are not reliable.
This is what bugs people.
Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen.
Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use.
The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap, competent, cloud-based open source.
Be the change you want to see.
Same here, but I honestly think that's largely due to the threat is poses to their (and my) profession.
That's a shame.
I assume the reason for the "deep distain" is rooted in fear of change, fear that LLM will make it harder to have a successful career.
That's a pretty negative mindset to have as a college grad just entering the workforce.
I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
It's strange that your comment puts "fear of change" right there next to one of the actual concrete reasons. Usually the people disparaging negative attitudes about AI say "fear of change" to avoid talking about the obvious reasons.
However, this is not the issue. The issue is that the tech is being hijacked by corps and already on the verge of being annoying. I my corner of the world, I get high level company message of 'use AI' ( which include goals that say so ), but also -- already -- ridiculous sets of limits on how much I an use it ( our context recently got nearly zeroed ; we no longer can upload unsanctioned files ). And if you want something beyond email summarization machine, you need special approvals. This thing is already being neutered at multiple levels and it barely even started to blossom.
Add to this clear indicators that our dictators have no intention of being benevolent and it is not exactly a surprise why younger generations are not exactly thrilled. I like this tech and I hate the retardation I am subjected to daily resulting directly from its outputs.
I don't think people are pretending the world isn't changing. I think people are right to be deeply skeptical about the direction we're headed in. More powerful tech companies dug in deeper into our lives, more government surveillance, harder times for small companies and more influence from mega-corps.
Lying, cheating and game-rigging at industrial scale powered by machine intelligence. He's lucky all he got were boos.
Why not? Most people do. There are still about 10,000 working blacksmiths in America.
Unironically I think we need more lifestyle and technological diversity in the world. End the monopolies that make running your own X harder. More Amish adjacent microcommunities and less monoculture. Federalism for tech / lifestyle creep.
The only reason these things seem inevitable is because our shared delusions make it so. We would have more power if we weren’t all so afraid to exercise it.
You imply that the change is inevitable. AI isn't inevitable.
It requires governments to allow the construction of datacentres and for companies to be able to spend vast amounts of money they don't have for the hope of future return, which will inevitably result in a too-big-to-fail cascade which gets money dragged out of the middle/lower class via slogans like "we're all in this together".
None of this is required. The idea that humanity is stuck on this future pathway is frankly bunk.
notably, I haven’t seen any ACTUAL technical improvements from LLMs, just a massive amount of slop. The ‘improvements’ are in volume of slop, not quality.
The Western media is stoking these fears.
Asia is embracing AI. Japan is using it in anime. India is going wild with large and small business usage. All of my friends in India report how popular it is, and how they're using it to get work done. I don't even have to mention China.
I am sick of how our media is brainwashing people to hate one of the most important technological developments in our lifetime.
They tried doing this during the internet era too. When I was a kid, every newspaper was going on about how awful the internet was. Didn't stop me from jumping on IRC and learning to program.
Every single time disruption happens, there's a cacophony of ire and disdain. Musicians that hated "electronic" music. Digital photography. This one just happens to be broader and even more impacting, so you're hearing it everywhere.
These tools are immensely useful. They can empower individuals with superpowers, like wearing an exoskeleton.
The conversation is never about monopolization or consolidation of power, which is how this should be articulated. Instead, it's always "AI bad" or "think of the water". That is 10000% the wrong framing.
That was not the original narrative by any company. I was here ten years ago when WaveNet and DeepDream were first published.
The media started shitting on this stuff immediately. DALL-E and Midjourney were not describing themselves as artist destroyers. GPT-3 was not hailed as a white collar job killer. Yet the news media hounded the industry relentlessly.
Labs started co-opting this narrative from the news media to create FOMO for investors and possible customers.
I work in AI. I had a coworker quit a job four years ago because his sister had a long talk with him that "AI destroyed art", which is something she learned from YouTube. Four years ago.
No AI CEO was saying any of this stuff back then. It was all seeded by the news media and certain YouTubers.
I can remember when John Oliver was joking around with Midjourney and DeepDream on his show and laughing about how fun and cool it was. He can't do that now because he'd be crucified for it.
I can go back and do an archeological dig if you like.
What you answer on a survey is meaningless. Look at their actions.
And no they're not being pressured to use LLMs, standards or expectations have not gone up dramatically.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/09/stu...
People can hate on AI e.g. because they see it as a symbol of inequality and billionaires deciding important things over our heads and also actively use it.
I don’t like driving in traffic yet I do it pretty much every day. Why don’t I simply not drive?
It is possible to be a user of LLMs and to despise them.
teens are not using llm for fun.
> had used generative AI at some point
also this is bit of a ridiculous stat to claim "highest user"
The optimistic case is technological deflation. Where goods and services become so cheap, you don't need a lot of money to afford them. If you can have a robot sort packages like,
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/human-intern-beats-figure...
Why have a human do that? I don't think there's a person alive whose life goal is to sort packages. A human will lose a job, but only a job they accepted because the human needed money. Well if the package sorting drops the price of things, they don't as much money. Now if every job is robotic, everything becomes cheaper to the point we don't need money for very many things at all.
That's the optimistic case.
For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.
This is what bugs people. We can tell the part they're bullshitting about is the promise of a subsistence UBI. No wonder people boo.
HG Wells really did have a time machine!
For some context, according to the daily beast, student groups at the university distributed fliers urging students to “turn their backs to the stage” or “boo” during the former executive’s speech. The fliers stated that they wanted to “make it clear that the University of Arizona and greater community that we represent, whether from Tucson or beyond, do not support abusers being platformed.” Schmidt was accused by Michelle Ritter in a 2021 lawsuit of “forcibly raping” her during a trip off the coast of Mexico and later initiating sex without her consent in 2023 during the annual Burning Man festival.
I guess you haven't heard much from executives before? They are absolutely coocoo-bananas people.
When the ramen noodles run out, how many will begrudgingly create a linkedin account and pretend to embrace AI while they fight for the remaining/dwindling job openings?
Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to use that expertise?
I don't get people who believe this. Why would an AI company provide a service that someone can sell at 10x the price, mostly unchanged? Why wouldn't the AI company sell it directly?
There's nothing to learn, just some CEOs trying to get you hooked on their product and a bunch of hucksters trying to be the number one "AI thought leader"
The alternative is like Killgrave in Jessica Jones. People who never hear no break.
Unless the industry is able to reduce the cost drastically and soon, it will have negative impact on all of us.
This sounds cynical if there is a kinglike president, surrounded by a small clique of tech billionaires who all are becoming increasingly open about the kind of future they want to realise.
"Here's AI. Figure out how we can make money from it. We're adding it to your performance reviews"
Basically, here's a solution. Find problems for it.
It's just wildly unprofessional from management, in no particular order my frustrations are:
1. A majority of planning documents from management have become LLM output, which no longer actually matches the desired/required work (but it sure looks nice if you don't have to read all of it).
2. Management undertones are pretty clearly: "Figure out how to use AI to replace yourself."
3. The visibility of leaderboards that promote spend with no relationship to output - ex: employees who spend the most tokens are rewarded, even when there's no equivalent boost in productivity.
---
My take is that AI is actually a managerial crucible - aka, a great filter for companies with poor management practices and processes.
Company management needs to shift in response to AI more than engineering, and I don't think most are prepared.
(A somewhat contrasting behaviour is say l deepseek who releases their models to the public, and I would not boo them)
I sense a pattern emerging.
"The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you're using now, also degraded the public square," he said. "They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society."
Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer - and was immediately met with boos."
In other words, he tried to promote Silicon Valley's shift away from one "business model" (e.g., search, social media) to another
YouTube is among the "platforms" that are "rewarding outrage" and "degrading the public square" in order to support an ad services business. The days of this "business model" may be numbered
As one unsustainable model fails, there is always another one to replace it. Maybe people are noticing the pattern
All these "business models" share something in common: use of a computer and a Silicon Valley middleman spying on peoples' computer use
Generally what I found listening to both sides is the latter group is very optimistic about AI and what it can do while the former group tries to be optimistic but just ends up coming off as doomery about it. And the problem that the AI space has right now is the doomery group is just more visible to the average person and thus the average person gets their opinion informed by that group.
I really wish there was a way to better surface the sentiment that I see on X about AI, the folks there aren't talking about how AI will replace you at work and make you obsolete, they use AI every day and they know that's just not realistic, not now and probably not ever. Rather they talk about all the cool things that it can help you do now, and how it can be a force multiplier in the best sense.
The problem with the elites talking about AI is everything they say is just so detached and abstract. And their giant egos prevent them from seeing the damage they are doing to the field.
AI Billionaire and AI Executive cohorts are openly advocating in media and the press for total job replacement by AI within a narrow time frame. Dario Amodei has spent years braying that AI will replace most or all jobs within half a decade; Sundar Pichai has openly told working folks the equivalent of "Good luck, fuckers" (his 2-DEC-2025 remarks about the working class "working through" social disruption forcibly imposed on them by his billionaire class); Microsoft's AI ghoul went on a media spree this year bragging that knowledge-work will be gone in eighteen months.
It doesn't matter whether or not any of this is true, because these same students - the law students, the pre-med students, the political science students, the psychology and history and econ and tech students and the like, they all have to write essays about this, read newspaper articles about it, read journals about it. They see the actions taken by this same cohort of AI boosters in blocking regulatory reforms, in blocking social programs, in blocking work protections and social safety net expansions and tax reforms. These students aren't stupid, they see the naked hypocrisy on display by the people telling them the sky is falling and are rightfully enraged at it.
You are telling fresh graduates, saddled with student debt, at a time of pride in their own accomplishments and uncertainty in their job prospects, to their face, that they have no future and that's going to be peachy-keen because everyone other than them will be better off as a result.
And they wonder why they're so intensely hated.
“The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you’re using now, also degraded the public square,” he said. “They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society.”
"You have the power to shape AI" - So many empty words spoken!
It was the Ayn Rand-esque hero, an Übermensch, who of course formed Google out of nothing proclaiming that individualism and egoism are the way to go, that they have a small alcove at best in between the productive assets of the factory owner who wields the materials to his will and creates his perfect city of perfect design that needs none of your contribution. That these graduates aren't be be valued by their creativity or self-worth but by the marginal contribution they may have towards his empire, to be discarded once they don't have anything to give. He's the ultimate factory owner, the owner of the factory that makes everything and brings light to all, and the masses just don't appreciate his brilliance and the brilliance of the other tech bros.
None if it is particular to AI, it's just that AI is the latest tool with which the workers of the world are deprived of the means of production. They know that capitalism is healthiest when the wealth is distributed, and here the Randian hero tells them not that the wealth will be distributed, but only the labour and the AI will do most of the labour, and that the human contribution is a penny for themselves and 99 cents to those that already have a hundred billion, and excited with an incomparable glee Eric expresses that the datacenter that powers the AI will be the panopticon through which the factory owner will judge the productivity of his workers.
It is such a horrifyingly dismal picture he painted right on their faces and if they would just allow that data center and stop booing him they'd understand, surely they must understand that he's the hero, that he and his Rearden Steel will make them the shining city that the unwashed masses for their utter collective incompetence cannot.
AI as a technology is amazeballs in precisely the same way AI thought leaders, executives and mid-level management are not. And yet, here we are poisoning its innovation with late stage capitalism and privatized panopticons. Yuck.
And I know, I know, here are the helpful links before anyone pretends they haven't heard any of this...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/judge-sends-former-googl... https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5497193/exclusive-how-googles... https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/3/16/8227625/eric-schmidt...
TLDR: promoted well beyond his level of incompetence, but that's the American way now I guess.
Moreover, the executives have done an absolutely horrible job of communicating the benefits. It's all "your job is going to be replaced in the next few years". I've had plenty of amazing conversations with Claude about the imminent AI-enabled revolutions in materials science, biotech, etc - and yet for some reason this is the exact opposite of the PR line they're taking.
This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way."
Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.
It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.
To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsibility to prevent the AI revolution from being as bad. All evidence points to it being worse exactly because of corporations like Google. I get that this guy is only the former CEO but the speech seems kinda tone-deaf to the reality here, and I bet that's why he got booed.
Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech:
> “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.”
Come to think of it… very appropriate today!
It's not entirely within the power of the creators of technology to control how it is used. In our case, they actively market the technology as replacement for human intelligence, at which it fails miserably. I would love to see a more grounded frontier AI company, but beyond certain safety measures they can't stop people from misusing it.
The guy has always looked for way to keep humans as chattel.
