The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room.
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
A bit off topic, but about commencement speeches...
Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.
Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.
Anyway, they're all dead. Can we move on? Although I remain astonished that Foundation got made when they cancelled Sandman and Good Omens after Neil Gaiman turned out to be pretty awful too. Maybe you have to still be alive to matter? What exactly are the rules here? I am so confused by this.
I believe the remains of Asimov's literary legacy are probably managed by his daughter along with an agent. Presumably most of the money goes to her too, but I have no idea. In any case she always seemed nice enough.
Its not a rambling but sad fact of life, one of the failures of mankind so far.
And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.
When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.
I just yesterday watched a scathing video about why the US has always had a major strain of anti-intellectualism, starting from the very first colonists:
I feel like I wasted 25 min watching that (at 2x).
If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:
- Some of the early colonists were religiously-driven
- The inconvenient examples otherwise (e.g. the Enlightenment-influenced founders) can be ignored because some people at the time disliked them
- Some presidents since have been populists
Then that's a weak argument.
... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.
Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world. (And if we cannot flourish with materialist consequences, that is some evidence that the materialist assumption is incorrect.) So religion is not just some silly, backwater thing, and Marx was absolutely wrong.
The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)
The modern west is still very religious, they just switched to a new religion without a mascot.
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
Yes, life has no inherent meaning in and of itself. It's up to you to find what's meaningful. If that's praying to the FSM, father of all pastas, hoping his sauce never goes bad, so be it, if it's a more mainstream religion, or something else entirely that's all on you. I don't understand how you connect that to not flourishing though.
>However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world.
Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.
You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.
And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.
I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.
Anecdata, but of the clips I've seen going around from Woz's speech, there were quite a few comments from people who claimed to have been there for the whole ceremony, most of which said that he was rambling and all over the place lol. Not bad necessarily, just that they felt like he wasn't really all that engaging, they were bored out of their minds, and some barely even knew who he was. Again, internet comments, so take that for what it is, just tossing my own pointless internet comment into the mix!
I've only been to the low tens of graduations, but in my experience this is pretty common for a speaker. A couple highlights and otherwise a little boring :)
Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
In my case, I was not even graduating, I just heard that Woz was speaking and decided to attend. I don't regret attending, as I managed to get a picture with Woz after the ceremony and thank him for his amazing work, but the speech itself was extremely forgettable.
Same, except not at a graduation speech. He was just all over the place, but I loved every second of it. :) As a nerd of the 80s, I'd take that over the sterile CEO BS any day.
I've been thinking about the expression "Reading the Room" for the last ten years. I've come to the conclusion finally that it is extremely pernicious.
Communication is not deterministic. Communication cannot take place without a selection of communication method, and there are inherently subjective and lossy parts to any communication attempt. Aligning my communication method to the specific audience could be "just telling them what they want to hear", or it can be telling them what I intend to communicate in a manner that are prepared to/capable of understanding, i.e. "reading the room".
Because, in practice, it turns telling people what they want to hear into a first-class virtue.
>> "We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, 'Endeavor to persevere!' ... We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union."
In this case, yes, a bunch of college students probably don't want to hear that AI is taking their job. Probably good to read the room, and it is used with your meaning.
But I also think there's an alternate meaning which is "this is not the correct time for this" (with an implicit "there will be a better time"). If your friend is upset they got laid off at their job, it's not the right time to start telling them about your promotion. Read the room, man! You can wait.
Depending on what the event is and why you were asked to speak telling the audience what they want to hear may be appropriate. If you're a consultant giving a presentation on how a business needs to change it's operations some hard truths may be necessary. At a graduation where students are going into an uncertain job market while loaded with debt... maybe save the hard truths. A little encouragement may be appropriate in that circumstance.
I also saw video of some school president being booed so badly that he never actually gave the speech, while some other admin had to come hold his hand and yell at the tuition paying students.
> ... protesting recent staff layoffs, severe program cuts, a mounting structural deficit, and the administration's controversial push for generative AI adoption through corporate tech partnerships
It's not that hard to "read the room" when you're a humanist, and not a sociopathic tech CEO... you just speak your mind, and you realize that your fellow humans are onboard with you
Where's a link to the actual speech? There's no link in the article. Surely you saw the speech to comment how strong of a public speaker he is, and it wasn't based off this one line right?
I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.
Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
> I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology.
When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting.
Back then changes happened more gradually.
It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison.
> Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different.
AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not.
Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.
It's not just AI. It's AI on top of society discontent that existed for a long time, but accelerated recently. The big underlying problem is, since at least 1970s every subsequent generation had to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as their parents. For a few decades it was balanced by the increasing women's participation in the workforce. But then, since 2008, we got banking crisis, both political parties focusing on outrage, pandemic, great resignation, generation of workers lost due to the lack of in-person contact, and now AI.
Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear.
But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
> They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.
If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
A view that is not shared always by LLM cheerleaders. Part of Sam Altman's defence of the environmental impact of AI is that it is less than that of a human life.
"He said it was unreasonable to focus on "how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query."
"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart," he said. "And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."
It took a 100 billion people and their knowledge,experience to generate the data to train an AI. So that cost also comes under the environmental costs to build his version of AI.
unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
It's odd that whenever someone discovers a way to generate value from public noise, costs already paid, that they feel like they are being stolen from even though PPP for the average person will rise due to AI, not fall.
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde
Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."
> The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value.
People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering?
I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular effort, but there should be no question about their worth as a person. It should not be a part of how we understand people and ourselves.
It is a healthy conclusion that your value doesn't depend on your practical utility, because that will come and go and is sometimes beyond your control. Your value isn't a question at all.
There's no value in life, but life should be allowed to exist. Who's to say otherwise?
The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.
Life is valuable to life. Or to say it another way, there is no concept of value beyond the reckoning of living things, even the value of dust and rock on the moon.
Every year half a million children die of diarrhea. There are so, so many people in the world, who are capable of joy and suffering, who "we" don't care much at all. However I have a feeling that "we" might be joining that group eventually.
Yea, and I will take it a step further; it is really easy to start to worry about the “worth of a human life” when it’s yours. When we are in the position to not care about the worth of a human for our gain(such as children working to make iPhones for us to use cheaper) we call it economics.
Still, it’s vastly fewer now relative to the total number of children born than any previous time in human history. It could be even fewer had birth rates begin to drop instantly as a response to child mortality dropping dramatically even in most developing countries, rather than with a few-generation delay.
But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists.
The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you don't get to participate in society and are left to starve to death. No amount of flowery language is going to feed and house the unemployed. And we are running full speed into a situation with the explicit and overt goal of cresting as many unemployed people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that there are no resources or help offered to those unemployed people.
Flowery language will cover up the starving bodies in the streets the same way a can of febreeze will cover up a landfill. This is an enormous problem and if we don't fix it, people will die. Whether or not a human has intrinsic moral value by simply existing, we require money to survive in this society. A human life may be a mystical beautiful and valuable concept, but our society has determined that if you don't have money, you literally do not deserve to live.
That's what these students are so angry about. They're being pushed into a world that refuses to employ them and which delivers a death sentence for the crime of unemployment.
You're conflating society with the white collar job at hand. Yes, if you don't provide value for shareholders, your life is worthless _to that company_. The company is in the business of making money. The businesses goals are a microcosm; a small subset of society. There are many other ways to live (and live well, I might add).
I don't think that's quite right, unless you personally value joy for its own sake. I value knowledge, and joy is useful to creating knowledge, and suffering is harmful to it. But I don't want to have some futile joy, and I don't need to avoid some irrelevant suffering.
Otherwise you get effects like;
* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
* Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
I'll admit that knowledge isn't practical, and you can't always identify when you're creating it, and a lot of people don't think in these terms and there's a lot of intuition involved, along with societal mores about caring for people which help the growth of knowledge as general rules without getting all bean-counting about it. But I think it matters that hedonism is an incoherent motivation and that creating knowledge is a far clearer one (and hedonism tends to turn into creating knowledge, anyway, if you like meaning). Hedonism, utilitarianism, same difference.
> Otherwise you get effects like;
> * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
> * Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
These are entirely valid positions to take though. Obtaining knowledge for knowledge's sake isn't objectively more meaningful, even if it may be subjectively more valuable to you.
You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)
Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.
Oh, the Sapiens guy. I read Sapiens, thought it was OK, then other people picked holes in it and persuaded me that it was worse than that. But I suppose that doesn't preclude this Nexus book being good.
But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)
I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.
I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.
Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.
I think you missed my point. The distinction I made in terminology was on purpose: I used "joy" to describe the inherent motivation for trying to accomplish something, and "bliss" for the state some may try to reach by using drugs.
And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.
And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.
Obviously you'd want to name "joy" as a separate thing, to propose it as the thing we're motivated to do, but the problem is that you didn't describe it. So now I'm at: the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it. Of course I'm open to some pluralism, like it can be a string bag of mixed motivations, but I do think the motivations in our culture all agree with creating knowledge, and become vacuous without that element. What is "gain", "pleasure", etc., without meaning? (I don't know what you mean by meaning. I mean the process of explaining and learning and creating ideas.) Without it those are mechanical processes of the "number go up" type. Yes, I am skeptical that anything of that kind is anybody's deep motivation, though it may be a superficial one.
Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.
> the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it.
That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.
Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.
> Why are you trying to avoid morality?
I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?
....I think it's a fairly widespread view to value joy for its own sake. In fact, I would say that's pretty much how normal people would say they view joy.
So normal people don't make sense, what else is new.
The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.
Your examples make it clear that you do not understand normal people in the slightest. And when I say "normal" here, I'm not talking about the Blazing Saddles-style "salt of the earth; you know, morons." I mean roughly the middle 50-60% (by width) of the bell curve. The vast majority of humanity.
Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.
THIS is going to be the limitation of capitalism. Capitalism isn't compassionate. It's a really good economic framework though, so it will be interesting how that's reconciled in the coming years
Money and monetary systems aren't compassionate -- people are.
Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).
One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).
This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.
What do you win at the end of the race? I've never heard it concisely put. 'Dominance' is the word that comes to my mind, but I don't want to put words in your mouth and don't really know why that would inherently be a valuable trophy, so that's probably not what you were thinking of, right?
Why should we care about that? Even if you wanted to argue our individual fates are tied to our country's, we don't all live in the same country, so how, actually, could we all care? Are you really convinced its so zero sum like this?
We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?
"Other countries" means China here, I think. China got a little on board with the global capitalism (and lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty along the way, if we're looking for the point), but never really embraced Liberalism and so ideally isn't the one aligning superintelligence. It would be lousy if Russia or North Korea or Somalia was in that position and it would be fine if the UK or Denmark or Brazil or Ghana was, but none of that matters because none of them will be in that position. Only the US and China are playing the game.
If this speculated intelligence is so "super" why would it matter what its host country's commitments are? I would hope it would at least be intelligent enough to sort things out there? How can something be so potentially threatening, so "super," but also be like a baby, where we need to worry how its raised? Its super intelligent about everything except ideology? That doesn't really sound like (super)intelligence to me..
But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?
I think it's more of a prestige discussion. Who leads, who follows, between countries. Not whose super intelligence is better. Who got their first, and how are they using it?
A supervillain is nevertheless super. Intelligence doesn't correlate with morality- most probably there doesn't exist a 'true ideology' that can be solved for in absolute terms. Do you imagine a superintelligence could calculate how beauty 'ought to' be traded off against truth?
When I say China is a bad choice because it's not as liberal as ~the west, I do imagine a reader in China thinking the opposite. I don't think they're dumb and I don't think they've been duped; they have a coherent ideology that fits their values. I just don't want it to stomp out mine.
Maybe I'm wrong and you can solve for morality or at least the meta-morality of Liberalism/pluralism where you permit various moralities to coexist. Hopefully so. Maybe the value system in China is closer to mine than I imagine and it's just operating under different constraints. But I don't want to gamble on that when winning is within reach and is a guarantee given alignment to any human values is achieved at all.
"Value" is a word with many meanings. Your value as a human or a living being may be very different from your value to your employer or your value to the taxman or anywhere else.
It is very easy to get lost in between them, especially when listening to a good speaker who can flitter between those meanings at will.
What is worse is that those values interact. We indeed we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled, but only up to a point, and there is a reasonable discussion how exactly should countries divide their limited resources between vulnerable groups, including families with young kids. In that context, the future economic and societal value of a 5 y.o. vs. a 85 y.o. inevitably creeps up.
Yes it is. If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist because the entity that sees it as valuable would be willing to spend resources on maintaining it.
> The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
Most social programs keep expanding until they become unsustainably expensive. You can't just make a law "everyone gets free money" and expect this to have no negative consequences.
>If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist
This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.
I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.
Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.
If human lives weren't inherently valuable, the concept of charity wouldn't exist. Where does that leave us? I think probably the line of argument doesn't work in either direction.
Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?
We’ve also done true intelligence a disservice by using AI to name the current implementation of LLMs. It’s stretching ‘intelligence’ quite a bit. They can be super useful, but we’ve downplayed how phenomenal the human brain is.
I really like ‘Actual Intelligence’, that’s a clever one from Woz. People need to be reminded to use their brains, they’re a brilliant product of evolution (or your favourite god’s work).
Something changed with Dario a year or so ago. I think he started out with good intentions, although really hard to tell. Maybe it was really all about power and control for him from day one. Certainly now he's a different person - appears totally corrupted by money and power.
Dario used to at least emphasize the potential positives of AI while being worried about the negatives, but unlike Hassabis/DeepMind he has done nothing to bring about the positive part and is now just accelerating the harmful part as fast as he can. Google is an AI company, bringing us things like AlphaFold, and Anthropic (also OpenAI) are just LLM companies.
It's just the worst version of capitalist game theory. If I don't do the bad thing and get rich, then someone else will do the bad thing and I won't get rich.
I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt.
“You’re right - I overstepped”
Is the new “You’re absolutely right”.
I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.
I have a script at work that writes out some config files and I'm having Claude run them after making changes. The script if it detects breaking changes will spit out a message saying what the breaking changes are, and not do anything, telling you to rerun it after validation with the override flag.
If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.
So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.
This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.
This is one of a few reason I strongly prefer GPT and its codex variants. It seldom frustrates me, sure its not omnipotent in any way, but it just feels very "tuned in" when it comes to understanding intent and scope.
Imagine worker that did loop of "you're absolutely right -> same fuckup again" multiple days every week, wasting time of whoever told them to do the task
I do want to fire Claude at this point and switch to Codex. Unfortunately the guy with the purse strings is ride or die full Claude psychosis and our business can’t afford to just buy anything and everything for funsies.
That depends on the company. I worked at an S&P 500 company that muddled along like this. They still make critical software for local and state governments.
But this new tool is not a blacksmith’s tool in the traditional sense. It’s more like an automated blacksmith that works fast, for cheap, does mediocre work, but has this mediocre skill level in an exceptional broad range of tasks.
Why not? Blacksmithing and coding have a hell of a lot in common. In both disciplines toolmaking is extremely important. Often you have to make custom tools to accomplish a design--e.g. a twisting wrench or a form tool. Sometimes you have to make tools that get used once and thrown away, like a jig temporarily welded to a piece to hold it in place while you build its sibling assembly. Sound familiar? I do this kind of thing all the time in code.
Another similarity is the relative simplicity of the underlying structure of the system. You essentially have two hammers (one small one you swing with your hand and another big one that is planted on the ground), some material, and some heat. You build the rest.
Another similarity is the resistance to automation. A skilled blacksmith is a versatile worker. You can create assembly lines to automate any one thing they might produce. The end product will not have the same quality--it will not truly be wrought iron, each piece will not be unique, there will be nothing of the aesthetic taste of the artist in it, but if you're just some bean counter who doesn't care about those things you'll be able to sell it. But if you need the optionality to produce any of those things.. automation is not your friend. And some things just cannot be automated, at least not without extreme costs or very poor results--shoeing horses comes to mind.
No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
I maintain a part of my team's CD process and I've observed a 30% increase in PR velocity since we started adopting agentic tools but it was a "one-off" increase (as-in, it hasn't continued to increase beyond that since about a half-year ago).
I'm guessing though that there are other improvements in code quality and feature velocity. I've noticed personally that AI is really good at catching smaller things that are easy to miss (e.g., if you ask it to rename fooTheBars it also updates all the relevant comments or enums that you might have missed).
> My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.
> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.
I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, not with Markov chains (next token prediction), not otherwise. Especially not now when the current ML hype is already winding down. And yes this is a matter of belief since I don't think any science precludes agi from existing nor is there any reason to be sure it could someday materialize. I honestly would rather believe societal collapse hits us before agi can even be theorized.
AI was here in the 1970's too for that matter, in the form of expert systems. "AI" is the label that perennially gets applied to whatever current technology does something that was previously considered similar to human intelligence, then later on gets removed and applied to something new.
You'll know were making progress towards AGI when LLMs start being called LLMs again, and something new starts being called AI.
Kind of, but I wouldn't exactly put it like that since AI has never meant anything more than automated intelligence/decision making of some sort. The bar isn't moving, just this almost meaningless label is just forever getting slapped on the latest shiny new thing.
You could legitimately call a thermostat "AI". Expert systems were previously called AI. Today it's Large Language Models. Tomorrow it'll be something else.
I think the issue is that technologists use the term AI to mean one thing, which is something we've had since the 60s with lisp, forth, and prolog. And the average person uses AI to mean something more like Data from Star Trek, which we don't have and may or may not have this century. We're all talking past each other.
There is no rigorous definition of intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence. What you're referring to is people simply not knowing what they're talking about.
More to the point, there has always been a cottage industry in predicting an amazing future, just around the corner. 'AGI' is just the latest incarnation.
Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it.
AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.
"Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.
We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.
Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.
Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.
All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.
Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
One angle I'm exploring, as a non-dev who nonetheless works in tech, is using Claude as a professor. Make learning timelines for me for Leetcode, break it down in phases, start with theory, ask me questions, then give me a coding challenge. Save that to an html artifact I can export and read on my phone.
It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems.
But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with.
That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.
Yup, I used to believe that people would all use the Internet to educate themselves, and we all know how that turned out (loads of people did, but the majority didn't).
The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
> At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think
That's reasonable, but it doesn't mean that LLMs are close to being brains.
For a start, when humans think/talk, we often think ABOUT something - whatever is swirling about in our mind, or what we are currently seeing/feeling/etc. An LLM generating tokens/words is doing so only based on it's weights and the word sequence it is currently generating ... the human parallel would be more like a rapper spitting out words based on prior words, essentially on auto-pilot, or when we get triggered into spitting out stock phrases like "have a nice day".
If you want to compare an LLM to a human brain, it's basically equivalent to our language cortex if you ripped out all the external connections and ripped out all the feedback paths that make it capable of learning.
Of course there is a lot more to our brain than just our language cortex, but that alone should make you realize there is no real comparison beyond the fact that our language generation is also going to be based on prediction, and partly auto-regressive.
Having shame would require the LLMs to actually be able to recognize mistakes they make.
People love to put a lot of meaning on what an LLM responds with when asked why it made a mistake, but it's critical to remember that the answer to that prompt is just another series of probabilistic tokens, and has no actual relation to how the error happened.
They "recognize" mistakes just fine because you explicitly tell them. They recognize them well enough to correct (...sometimes). The way in which mistakes don't register is "Oh shit, that bad result was a result of my inappropriate actions. I must pay attention to not doing that again or the user will think I'm an idiot. I should even think about it some more to avoid the whole class of mistakes". Think of emotions as an attention mechanism that LLMs lack.
And many times, after an error is pointed out and an LLM offers an "explanation" for what happened, the LLM then gives the exact same erroneous result.
It's language. Language itself is the thing that makes us smart in the unique way that we are among the other animals, and it weirdly turns out to be transferable to machines to at least some degree.
At least 50% of humans have no "inner voice" and are not thinking in the same way as you. Many animals like dolphins, dogs, rats, crows are also very intelligent yet appear to only have primitive language capabilities.
A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.
I personally think that the "inner voice" is a non-falsifiable claim, and therefore more of a religious belief than something which can be part of any materialist theory. In this regard, I'm a strict empiricist and wouldn't be able to claim that I have one myself. In fact, I find that thinking "out loud" or "on paper" produces much better results in most instances, probably because I'm grounding my thinking in natural language, which is a fantastic medium for thought. If my "inner voice" were comparable in efficacy to actually speaking or writing, we wouldn't notice this effect, but I'm definitely not alone in this regard.
Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on.
It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it.
For the religious angle, look no further than John 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Well, humans developed language. Language is just a tool that let's us leverage our innate intelligence.
I'm sure that we will eventually build artificial brains, capable of bootstrapping communications and language for themelves (if run en-masse in a simulation where the benefit of communication would emerge). An LLM can't do this since it is by definition/construction something only capable of learning a pre-existing language.
An artificial brain, just like a wet jiggly one, is always going to be more intelligent than a one-trick pony like an LLM - a language processor, but it is notable how intelligent that one-trick pony nonetheless appears to be.
I think it's interesting that you think we could bootstrap an artificial brain with no inputs from human culture. That's what I mean by falsifiable: I disagree, but am open to an existence proof of this kind. Such an artificial brain would be totally alien to us, of course. I wonder how differently it would perform versus something more grounded in "real" culture and writing?
Yes, this to me is also a good sign for the "it's language that's smart, not us" argument. It's an emergent trait that has evolved several times, like flight or carcinization. There's something about language that attracts evolution toward it. One would expect such a trait to have a big survival value (disclaimer: IANA biologist, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, or linguist).
> I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.
average person is absolutely awful judge on anything you put in front of average person tho.
And if anything, average AI user is vastly overstating how good/useful it is. Papers about it pretty much always show huge gap between "productivity person thinks they are achieving" and "actual growth of productivity"
Yes! We need them to have hope, but hopefully there can be substance behind it, otherwise it's like when the Hitler Youth got those badges before Hitler killed himself. In the sense that we are awarding people medals when their future is bleak
Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.
This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my friends cobbled together an agent that runs in an infinite loop, grabs whatever song they're actively listening to on Spotify, writes it in a file, then instructs the agent to emit tokens for 2-3 minutes on what that song and previous songs that day might mean for that person's mental state, like a little music-based diary. Repeat, run all day, 24/7. Kinda cool. But its just a way to use tokens, because the first thing all these AI labs built was a good coding model, and the second thing they built was a dashboard for admins to track how much their users are using the good coding model.
A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.
In case this anecdote is not made up, I would implore you or your friend be a bit more subtle at tokenmaxing (ugh). At $JOB, I'm under the same mandate, and it turns out that every prompt is logged and aggregated. When someone else at $JOB asked the team PM who's in charge of the logging, s/he replied that the log is only used to correlate with commits, and nothing else, trust us (wink). I doubt this is unique to my $JOB.
Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.
The situation is insane at the company my friend works at. There's no central oversight, because, as I understand it, someone in leadership had the idea that they didn't want to prescribe which AI tools their engineers should use. So they just let their engineers expensify any tools they want. Afaik he hasn't yet hit the upper-bound; last month he said he reimbursed a ~$500 anthropic bill. The same company also makes their engineers go to the Apple store to buy laptops, with their own money, then reimburse it. The credit card points must go crazy over there.
But definitely yeah, normally: be careful about these things. In his case when I said "admin dashboard" i moreso meant the general idea of admin oversight; he's said he's been complimented internally about how much he's using AI.
It may be useful outside the current tech rat race. One possibility is that a decade of openly user-hostile business decisions will reach their logical conclusion even faster, and those that haven’t fried our brains with CC may be in a position to pick up customers from these behemoths as they disintegrate.
I work in infrastructure (backups, networking etc) and no longer in software. I just don't see llms being that useful right now. If I have a problem and ask an LLM the answer is either fabricated or useless, rarely does it know what it's talking about. And yes I know how to describe the problem so that it has a chance to give an useful answer.
Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.
Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.
Well Coding agents are being tackled. Infrastructure agents that would read your host event logs, device configuration, ilo, etc, etc - that is probably the missing piece.
Having a chat with chatgpt may give you clues or ideas when you have gone throught your own checklist of what could have went wrong, but can go only as far.
Agent on the other side will decompile .dll to find out issues if needed to go deep enought.
Providing access to the data is easy. It is just an MCP or equivalent, and coding such CRUD is cheap now.
Applying the actions is unsolved. Unless you YOLO the LLMs, taking stateful actions automatically requires a lot of protective infrastructure, solid testing infra etc.
It’s all just more code, but a “create me a shopping website” LLM is likely not going to be doing the infrastructure level thinking required to handle it for now.
Might be but I just can't imagine a customer being fine with a loose cannon agent in their environment. E.g. coding agents are ignoring instructions. Who is to say that Claudes solution to a, say, slow backup isn't deleting the backup?
Imagine an agent shadowing all your terminals, providing ideas and asking to run commands that will let it verify the hypotheses it comes up with, while at the same time doing research on vendor docs, etc...
Quite safe, and already a force multiplier - this would be a harness. Maybe have it be able to write to a shadow system with similar (ideally same) hardware to verify it's hypothesis on how the system works, etc...
Some people live paycheck to paycheck in tech. Where do they walk away to that isn't or won't be impacted by AI? Or are you assuming they have the financial support for such a risky switch?
Indeed, here’s a prompt snippet to help you afterwards”.
“Create me a resume for [newjob]. Ensure that it is properly embellished so that my two years of superficial, directionless AI-driven learning seem equivalent to the multi-decade experience and domain expertise the company is actually hiring for”.
Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.
I agree, with the caveat that I don’t think any company is using AI well at the moment, specifically because I think our tooling around AI is woefully inadequate and immature.
Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.
How is that possible when the cost of memory and hard drives have gone up 3x+ in the last six months? Maybe cheaper if you're OAI or one of the lucky companies Nvidia is propping up. Everyone else is getting screwed.
I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.
> I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.
A lot - and over the coming 2 years, even more. Utilization rates are under 50% across the board, and special and cheaper chips are coming out all the time for inference. And a truckload of research - TurboQuant, HC (deepseek), etc, etc..
That's like saying farmers that don't use pesticides will die out. There's whole industries around doing things not the way big companies say you have to. Human-centric firms will pop up and proposer.
That's just a baseless assumption. To use AI well you should do the things that allow you to use stuff well. You shouldn't just use it any way you can because you assume that 'not using it at all' is not the best option.
This is literally the same with every single technological development.
Ironically, companies overusing it will probably die at a similar speed. Maybe faster, even, depending whether cash burn or technical debt catches up to them first.
Maybe. But I used to have unlimited Claude Code usage but now I’m relegated to whatever the subscription happens to give me and when I run out of tokens I need to trad code until my limits reset. My manager saw the bill and nearly fell out of his chair. Small companies just can’t afford the added cost of AI at the real price (and we aren’t even in the real price territory yet).
Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.
There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.
I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.
The copilot token pricing is going to wake a lot of companies up. Even with our smaller company only using around 1/3 of our allotted requests, next month the bill will easily twice as much.
If by "using AI well" you mean kill off customer service; maybe customers will want to switch to other companies that are more expensive but have customer service.
This is basically the next step of all the AI trainings and hacktons that many of us are now required to take part into, with KPI metrics on how each one is using their tokens.
It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers.
I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
Technical Debt is not a developer skill issue. It’s a management planning, capacity and budget issue. It’s a bet that the cost of servicing the debt will be less than the cost of paying for it outright with cash. I’ve been in the industry for decades and 95% of the dysfunction in an engineering organization is always management.
AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse.
That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper.
Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.
It’s a question of degree: technical debt has a carrying cost trying to balance features against your ability to support the codebase. LLMs change both sides of that equation but I think most companies are going to struggle with maintaining a balance when it’s so easy to push past concerns and get something which seems to work.
Tech debt is a debt taken to reduce development time. It's a time debt actually. Patching something that would work until the team has the time to do it correctly.
...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
This past fall I overheard a conversation between some high schoolers where one of the students was taking classes remotely for a while as she was dealing with some mental issues. She complained that while she needed the time away, it was just so easy to cheat with ChatGPT and be done with school for the day, and she went on to say that she really felt like she wasn’t learning anything and really was looking forward to returning to the classroom. This has stuck with me as the group of kids were just your average punk/emo high school kids.
Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
The kids are smarter than many of us think. We owe to them a world where they can feel hope and see a future. But much of the AI hype is built around declaring how dangerous and futile everything is.
The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.
This is positive compared to the college students I overheard lamenting that chatgpt ruined everything because now every evaluation is an in-class essay rather than something they could do at home at their leisure. And by lamenting, I mean loudly swearing about the bar and cursing their instructors.
Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category."
Woz isn't some kind of monk. He enjoys his tech toys that he can only afford because he's rich. He's just bad at managing his money and lost a lot of it through multiple divorces.
It's easy for us to judge from the outside. It's also entirely possible that the quote OP posted is true enough to the point that he didn't "lose" it through multiple divorces, because he didn't care about it.
How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
I bet Eric's used AI to review his speech, and it told him it was brilliant. He had never bombed before, so him being booed was not in the training data. In a sense, kids booing shows is exactly the difference between AI and our unpredictable mind. This is innovation as far as commencement speeches are concerned.
He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.
Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it.
But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
Both happen at the same time, by the same people. The reason for usage differs by major, but usually it's an expedient to either get past tasks that represent busywork or just the cheating you've seen described. Students have explained to me how much they hate in the same explanation of what they do with it.
(just FYI: There's no "traditional learning" to return to; you will definitely hear a lot of faculty going to "paper and pen" situations - kinda uncritically, if you ask me! - but I ask folks to remember that writing itself is a technology, and the media/means historically associated with it are technological advances in their own rights).
As a recent graduate, both headlines read as plausible and non-contradictory. Students right now are faced with two things:
1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.
2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.
The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
One of the "grown up" moments everyone needs to make their way through is: Realizing that the vast majority of people are not internally consistent, and that by the way includes you.
Every single student who boo'd Eric Schmidt the other day was regularly using AI for their schoolwork. People are not cistercian monks.
Its easy to draw a conclusion from this like "revealed preferences outweigh spoken ones, we can ignore the boos" but much like the tech executives, you're not thinking deeply enough. The tech industry will face the music for relentlessly creating products that the world hates to be forced to use. But, for now, the industry is too addicted to it. It sounds crazy, but: There are vanishingly few companies left who have the ability to manufacture products & services that their customers are excited to use. Its a lot easier to monopolize a space, re-baseline the industry around the expectations of your product's existence, then deploy capital and lawyers to put up fences.
If some students use LLMs to do tasks faster and at higher quality, that changes the grading curve, so everybody else might have no choice but to do so as well if they want to graduate. It's the "and yet you participate in society" meme.
I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. Good chance that a few students that cheated or at the least used AI in a major capacity to graduate, still booed when that former Google CEO brought up AI at the graduation speech. Being pro AI when it benefits them and anti AI when it doesn't is just human nature. I'm being a little reductive here though.
> Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
Sure, both are true, although I think you'll find that they differentiate between "cheating" on their math homework by using AI, and kids who are cheating on exams by sneaking in a smartphone and giving a photo of the problem to ChatGPT.
As far as homework goes, AI is just the new Google, useful perhaps, but hardly outweighing all the anxiety of their future being taken away by AI, or all the societal enshittification by AI that they see all around them.
I cannot stress how much the deep internal Apple loyalists loathe Woz. I personally find him one of the best parts of (old) Apple, and it’s a shame the company internally continues to think of him as a loose cannon.
How many people from that era still exist at Apple to be holding a grudge like that? Genuinely curious, since it's been a very long time since he was last involved at Apple.
A lot. Apple has pretty impressive retention, more than everywhere else I’ve worked in the Bay Area. Many people work there to retire, so the age demographic skews older. I worked there close to 20 years and that’s not even in the longer end comparatively.
Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.
Very successful large company retains staff until retirement. I find that vaguely reassuring. Hope the trend catches on. Thanks for posting this observation.
Loose cannons have their uses in organisations (they can say things senior people find uncomfortable without fear of repercussions).
I worked at apple a couple decades ago. He isn't loathed so much as acknowledged as being uncontrollable. Internally at Apple it is very strict in terms of what you can say and do, like being in a communist country where you never go against Dear Leader. Woz speaks his mind and that is ultimately why he left early on. He also has a conscience and cares about people, something Apple does a great job of pretending to do.
I worked there just shy of 20 years, and I agree “uncontrollable” is a good way to frame it.
To be clear I think Woz is great, I was just referring to listening to years of behind his back comments made by leaders at the company who look down on him for being too open, which as you know is not “allowed”.
I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline.
But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.
English isn't ambiguous here either. It's the fault of journalists who have this weird obsession with removing as many words as possible from headlines.
>I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this.
most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.
"Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence "
Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker.
The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know.
Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific.
How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?
While it's technically ambiguous, most native speakers would immediately understand that Steve was not the person cheering. Firstly, Steve cheering makes no sense. Secondly, it's a very common construction for newspaper/article headlines.
For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..."
Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.
I'm a native speaker, and read it the "Wozniak gave a little cheer after" way at first, though the more likely meaning did occur to me immediately after. As for it making no sense, I differ. There are scenarios I can conjure in which that exact sequence could happen, either because he was cheering the students after telling them they're great, or because he forgot what he was doing -- dementia wouldn't even be "early onset" at his age. Further, if something is utterly mundane and expected, there are no headlines about it, as in the old saying about the difference between "Dog bites man" and "Man bites dog".
Language is often ambiguous! You have to guess the intended meaning based on context clues. Unambiguously phrased language sounds less natural, because it is. Incidentally, this is part of what makes natural language such an awful fit for controlling a computer.
Yeah I agree with you. To me it was immediately obvious what it meant. It never occurred to me that he would "cheer himself", that doesn't even make any sense. ESL is right.
I have been seeing so many bad commencement speeches that it's good to see someone actually deliver a nuanced and grounded approach that speaks to the issues of our time. Woz has definitely improved a lot in his public speaking over the years.
Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.
I really like how he approaces AI. Not the tone other leaders are talking, but much more human and much more collaborative. How young people actually can help with the AI shaping. For example Eric Schmidt was really terrible at his speach in front of University of Arizona.
To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place.
Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.
I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.
This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product
In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."
It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."
Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable.
But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad.
Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.
I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit.
On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI.
Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.
Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.
How good is AI integration in Apple products? Did they drop the ball as hard as Microsoft did? I naively assumed a few years ago that Microsoft could pull it off perfectly because they had more than enough in terms of resources & engineers (yes, I was this naive in college)
Like most MS vs. Apple differences, it comes down to a matter of taste. They've added quite a few AI enhancements across their apps and operating system, but they are mostly feature enhancements and not major AI branded efforts. Having a Summarize button in Mail.app where it's contextually relevant or having text improvement menu options in text fields vs. slapping a major "Copilot" tab into everything.
Their use of AI so far has been much less "let AI take the wheel and brand it as a product itself" and more "use AI to improve an aspect of <user need>".
Yeah, hard to guess how a person would react to transformative technology, together with whatever context it'd be brought up, their reaction could differ.
I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.
Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.
His reaction probably still would not have been solidified yet, given how long his response took to other tectonic shifts in technology. That isn’t to say he wouldn’t have an opinion to voice, I just suspect it wouldn’t have resulted in a product direction for at least a few more years.
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.
Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.
I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).
Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.
> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..
Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.
You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.
In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.
The problem is natural language is a horrendously bad human-computer interface. Even if they're running nondeterministic software, computers are very precise machines. You wouldn't talk to your lathe or milling machine and expect good things to happen. So why would you have that expectation of a computer? It's ridiculous sci-fi fantasy nonsense.
It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.
no this is a fair question. he was enough of a sociopath to disown his own kid, but his narcissistic tendencies and love of the arts would have been a weird counter point to that.
Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.
> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.
Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.
> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.
The difference is it’s incredibly easy to opt out of apples AI-like services. For instance, I have never had Siri on on my iPhone no matter how many years go by. And every time I’ve gotten a new one, it stayed off. One tap, that’s it.
They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.
Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing
Good point. Yes, I also have all of that turned off and can ignore it. Not that Apple is without its pushiness, though, I still get frequent nags to “upgrade” to Tahoe and iOS 26 without an option to turn those off, and every time I go to System Settings to update to a new macOS 15 version and click to show more details, they sneakily select macOS 26 checkbox.
There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings.
Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.
I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time.
He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange.
Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
I described a bit of this in reply to thinkingemote, but to:
> And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).
Seems more like the issue is nuance and consideration or not. One side is saying that it is possible to do things that have value using LLMs. The other side is pointing out that this technology has increasing costs, is requiring data centers that have strongly negative environmental, social, and economic impacts, is promoting rampant, industrialized theft of intellectual property, is inserting errors, hallucinations, and psychotic ideas into all usage, and is at a number of levels doing damage to kids, elders, and professionals who are exposed.
If they did use it then maybe in hindsight they regret it, realize they didn't learn much, realize the temptation to cheat yourself will always be there and that's not a good thing.
He seems to be a nice guy and this contrasts with big tech CEOs, but this is pretty demagogical. AI is going to causing disruption but is here to stay, so what should be done about it? "Think different", "you have actual intelligence" may be comforting and enough to be cheered but is not a very actionable advice.
I don't know what to say. I may not like it, you may not think it's actually intelligent, you may not think it's going to change the world - but how can you not see that this is revolutionary?
I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this.
And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search.
The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.
No. Nondeterministic output is not revolutionary. Technology forced down our throats by a few companies and executives who are licking their lips at the idea of laying off people, even if laying those people off means garbage products, is not revolutionary. Slop is not revolutionary.
Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
This one looks completely different from the short as well. There are now 3 known versions of this same line and all are different. Is it possible he gave the same speech to multiple audiences on that day?
One perhaps unpopular opinion: Could it be that the current AI is beneficial for young people in the sense that it is making them stop looking at their phone for a bit, and realize that certain tech is not that important for human well beeing? The change is in their/our hands after all, we just need to become aware, believe and vote with our wallet and the whole society will change in the blink of an eye. The hard part is the awareness and believing.
My experience as a parent is that gen alpha took note of the fact that their parents being on their phones means less attention, so it's possible they'll have a more sober view of the entire thing.
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone.
>Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.
AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works.
This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.
This contrast is a bit sad.
When Eric Schmidt told students the truth about the importance that AI will take in the future ("It will touch every profession, every lab..."), students booked him
But the takes like "AI is not real/powerful, human intelligence is better", which are basically pleasant myopic lies, are cheered. Cope bias is powerful.
The point of a graduation speech like this is to get students hyped up about themselves and their future. Surely you see the merit in, amongst a backdrop of a horrible job market, telling students that they have, inherent in them, the stuff of greatness, just as people did (checks watch) 3 years ago before vibe coding?
Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.
With what would I be coping? I'd much prefer (probably like most people) if AI were not that powerful. The harsh reality, and the stuff of cope, is that it's (too) powerful.
There's been a massive mask-off shift amongst elites* the last few years where displaying open contempt and hatred towards normal people - employees, students, public servants, etc. You can see this most clearly near the epicentre of the SV executive class where layoffs are celebrated and the life of the remaining employees is made as shitty as possible (ie, Meta's keyloggers), but it is everywhere. Speakers gleefully mocking and chiding graduates about how fucked they are due to AI, opinion columns from oligarch-owned mass media about how ungrateful everyone is towards the president, democratic senators (!!) mocking their constituents for wanting health insurance, just absolute disgust and hatred dripping everywhere.
* Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".
Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them.
I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).
It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore.
I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.
And yet, here we are.
Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.
You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
What have we done?
People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?
The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?
Funny, I don't feel "disenfranchised" by AI. If you do, well... in the words of the other Steve, you're holding it wrong.
> But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
> What have we done?
Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.
It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.
Modernity is soulless for the most part. Social media, the 24/7 news cycle, unaccountable mega-corps, the list goes on. I suspect people are tired of the constant psychic damage you endure for just trying to exist in 2026.
Hopefully people are understanding that technology, no matter how cool, does not exist in a vacuum. Technology is defined by who controls it, how it’s used, and what power it enables them to wield. Those concerns are far more important to society than how neat the tech is.
An obvious example is nuclear weapons. Amazing science, incredible engineering, awe-inspiring power. But I doubt you would make the same critiques of people who were anxious about the world they create. A world in which MAD exists is fundamentally different than one where it doesn’t.
Regarding your grandfather, it’s a pretty well-supported hypothesis that younger generations are less happy and more depressed because of technology from the very industry pushing AI onto them! Why should you expect them to be excited about a new world-changing tool from the same set of companies that brought them an infinite doom-scrolling feed of self-doubt, the increased polarization of politics, the viral spread of conspiracy theories, and a higher rate of youth and teen suicide than ever before?
Technology isn’t fundamentally good or bad, but it can have very negative impacts on society. It seems like people are catching on to that fact.
I have noticed a certain personality gloms onto AI and unlike other technologies, it is so easy old people and the technologically illiterate can do it! In fact, old people and morons seem to love it. And it gets annoying really fast. The same people who were web 3, crypto, block chain, nft bros are the biggest supporters of AI. Utility or not when scammy people act the same way as they did for all the other tech trends it is a massive turnoff. I am tired of seeing AI writing and AI images, and instead of people talking about how we are going to use AI to make people’s lives better the only thing people can talk about is how much money some tech bros are going to make and how everyone else is going to lose their jobs because we won’t need them anymore. And your idiot friend from HS has an awesome business idea, which amounts to AI art on a t shirt or AI youtube videos and just needs you to be in on it with them to actually do the work like they are selling Amway.
I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.
No, young people do not have to be optimistic. They have to think with their own brain, and form their own opinions.
People in the 1980s were optimistic in technology because they didn’t have the chance to see the social upheaval that youth in the 2020s have grown with. Only a complete idiot would remain steadfastly optimistic after seeing what the rise of the internet, social media and mass surveillance has done in the name of this promised technological utopia. Only the sociopath would tell a young person to happily embrace AI in the worst economy in decades while headlines about AI-related job losses are everyday news.
Blind faith in anything leads to terrible outcomes, and that includes technology.
you are so starry-eyed about what the tech can do that you're missing the societal impact
it's like marveling at the wonders of nuclear fission (truly a marvel) and wondering why people are angry about a nuclear arms race that has literally put us one button press away from global destruction
I was inspired by technology when I was young, but not anymore. When I was young it felt like the tech industry was about empowering human beings - Steve Jobs liked to say that a computer was like a bicycle for the mind. Today it feels like the tech industry is about wonton destruction ("move fast and break things") for the purposes of making a tiny number of people fantastically wealthy.
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.
If you’re still writing things like this you are stupid or willfully ignorant. All the boomers at work expose similar opinions and it’s because when the younger generation tries to explain why they feel this way, the boomers stick their fingers in their ears and start yelling.
People are not excited because those companies blatantly disgregard the law, exploit and fuck people over and try to concentrate as much power as possible in their hands. Young people are not stupid, they can see that the increasing wealth gap makes their lives suck more. And they also understand that AI is a hypercapitalistic tool, that, if left unchecked, will only accelerate this trend.
So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?
> People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty).
This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.
There was study that big percentage of university graduates, strugles to comprehend written text. In AI terms: take 20k token paper, feed it to well rested graduate, and they will strugle with basic memory recall, reasoning and comprehension! My laptop performs better than that!
Ah studies, those things nobody ever cares to reproduce.
At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.
Maybe I am in a minority position here, but despite me vibecoding for many months now (havent written a single line by hand and forced me todo so in the beginning), I still have my IDE open right next to Codex/CC and while the LLM is crucnching along and doing TDD loops I actually read whats created/changed and just sit with it judding if its only right on surface or semantically stupid underneath, essentially realtime-architecting and steering the code agents sometimes even midflight. so I do end up with these 200k+ LoC projects now since typing is lightning fast and 2/3 of my codebase is tests (I insist on regression tests after every steer) but in fact I perfectly know what each piece is doing and where it is, as well as the still not optimal parts and have a mental list for refactoring it later when I have time or a spare parallel agent can do it when feature work isn't crossing the same areas.
so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.
The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room.
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
A bit off topic, but about commencement speeches...
Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.
Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.
> Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation.
I don't know about mentioning that one.
He’s a seminal figure!
Now why'd you'd have to ejaculate that into the conversation?
Anyway, Minsky, perceptrons, great debunking of AI hype at the time, but a horrible person, ya know, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.
https://www.christopherkremmer.com/post/to-sir-with-love
https://web.archive.org/web/20240519113411/https://skepchick...
Anyway, they're all dead. Can we move on? Although I remain astonished that Foundation got made when they cancelled Sandman and Good Omens after Neil Gaiman turned out to be pretty awful too. Maybe you have to still be alive to matter? What exactly are the rules here? I am so confused by this.
I believe the remains of Asimov's literary legacy are probably managed by his daughter along with an agent. Presumably most of the money goes to her too, but I have no idea. In any case she always seemed nice enough.
Eww, I see what you did there
Its not a rambling but sad fact of life, one of the failures of mankind so far.
And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.
When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.
I just yesterday watched a scathing video about why the US has always had a major strain of anti-intellectualism, starting from the very first colonists:
https://youtu.be/j9MubNsh3rs?si=wpG1YLDz_Y9cOECQ
I feel like I wasted 25 min watching that (at 2x).
If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:
Then that's a weak argument.... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.
You missed the education related points.
Different strokes. I found it extremely entertaining.
Rambling in the sense of not being well prepared, like he had an idea and some points to hit, but not a script. The content was good, for me.
Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world. (And if we cannot flourish with materialist consequences, that is some evidence that the materialist assumption is incorrect.) So religion is not just some silly, backwater thing, and Marx was absolutely wrong.
The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)
The modern west is still very religious, they just switched to a new religion without a mascot.
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
It's a strange christian sect that is generally atheistic but borrows values from the western tradition.
> it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".
This is a strange definition of religion, to basically mean anything that isn't science. Are all aesthetics and ethics a matter of religion?
Yes, life has no inherent meaning in and of itself. It's up to you to find what's meaningful. If that's praying to the FSM, father of all pastas, hoping his sauce never goes bad, so be it, if it's a more mainstream religion, or something else entirely that's all on you. I don't understand how you connect that to not flourishing though.
>However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world.
Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.
You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.
And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
> I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life
"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"
(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)
People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.
Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.
This is the way!
I’m sharing this because you may not be aware yet…
Minsky, while a significant contributor to science and technology, is also a known participant in Epstein sex trafficking.
Him and a few other men at MIT are responsible for the long relationship between the university and the notorious child sex trafficker.
I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.
Anecdata, but of the clips I've seen going around from Woz's speech, there were quite a few comments from people who claimed to have been there for the whole ceremony, most of which said that he was rambling and all over the place lol. Not bad necessarily, just that they felt like he wasn't really all that engaging, they were bored out of their minds, and some barely even knew who he was. Again, internet comments, so take that for what it is, just tossing my own pointless internet comment into the mix!
I've only been to the low tens of graduations, but in my experience this is pretty common for a speaker. A couple highlights and otherwise a little boring :)
Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
In my case, I was not even graduating, I just heard that Woz was speaking and decided to attend. I don't regret attending, as I managed to get a picture with Woz after the ceremony and thank him for his amazing work, but the speech itself was extremely forgettable.
Same, except not at a graduation speech. He was just all over the place, but I loved every second of it. :) As a nerd of the 80s, I'd take that over the sterile CEO BS any day.
> He was just all over the place
I feel like that is a trait necessary to do what Woz did throughout his life.
I've been thinking about the expression "Reading the Room" for the last ten years. I've come to the conclusion finally that it is extremely pernicious.
Communication is not deterministic. Communication cannot take place without a selection of communication method, and there are inherently subjective and lossy parts to any communication attempt. Aligning my communication method to the specific audience could be "just telling them what they want to hear", or it can be telling them what I intend to communicate in a manner that are prepared to/capable of understanding, i.e. "reading the room".
Pray elaborate.
Because, in practice, it turns telling people what they want to hear into a first-class virtue.
>> "We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, 'Endeavor to persevere!' ... We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union."
In this case, yes, a bunch of college students probably don't want to hear that AI is taking their job. Probably good to read the room, and it is used with your meaning.
But I also think there's an alternate meaning which is "this is not the correct time for this" (with an implicit "there will be a better time"). If your friend is upset they got laid off at their job, it's not the right time to start telling them about your promotion. Read the room, man! You can wait.
Or, it is saying things in a way that will be actually heard by an audience, regardless of content.
Depending on what the event is and why you were asked to speak telling the audience what they want to hear may be appropriate. If you're a consultant giving a presentation on how a business needs to change it's operations some hard truths may be necessary. At a graduation where students are going into an uncertain job market while loaded with debt... maybe save the hard truths. A little encouragement may be appropriate in that circumstance.
i've been waiting for you to share your conclusion for the last ten years. finally, i can sleep again.
I also saw video of some school president being booed so badly that he never actually gave the speech, while some other admin had to come hold his hand and yell at the tuition paying students.
Ah, here it is. It was CalArts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vTVWyY47s
What did he do to deserve this, there’s no context?
the students were:
> ... protesting recent staff layoffs, severe program cuts, a mounting structural deficit, and the administration's controversial push for generative AI adoption through corporate tech partnerships
It's probably not so much the AI thing as the latent disgust at the social media landscape and the toxicity driven by Meta and others.
It's not that hard to "read the room" when you're a humanist, and not a sociopathic tech CEO... you just speak your mind, and you realize that your fellow humans are onboard with you
Where's a link to the actual speech? There's no link in the article. Surely you saw the speech to comment how strong of a public speaker he is, and it wasn't based off this one line right?
I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.
Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
> I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology.
When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting.
Back then changes happened more gradually.
It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison.
> Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different.
AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not.
Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.
It's not just AI. It's AI on top of society discontent that existed for a long time, but accelerated recently. The big underlying problem is, since at least 1970s every subsequent generation had to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as their parents. For a few decades it was balanced by the increasing women's participation in the workforce. But then, since 2008, we got banking crisis, both political parties focusing on outrage, pandemic, great resignation, generation of workers lost due to the lack of in-person contact, and now AI.
Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear.
But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
> They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.
If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
A view that is not shared always by LLM cheerleaders. Part of Sam Altman's defence of the environmental impact of AI is that it is less than that of a human life.
"He said it was unreasonable to focus on "how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query."
"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart," he said. "And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/23/altman-you-t...
It took a 100 billion people and their knowledge,experience to generate the data to train an AI. So that cost also comes under the environmental costs to build his version of AI.
unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
>>> the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
Wow! Well said! so shouldn't we focus on ... fixing humanity first?
It's odd that whenever someone discovers a way to generate value from public noise, costs already paid, that they feel like they are being stolen from even though PPP for the average person will rise due to AI, not fall.
His human costume is really starting to fall apart at the seams, isn’t it?
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde
Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."
> A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
So the opposite of a Lisp programmer then!
A Lisp programmer it's very aware of the value of nil or ().
> The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value.
People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering?
I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular effort, but there should be no question about their worth as a person. It should not be a part of how we understand people and ourselves.
It is a healthy conclusion that your value doesn't depend on your practical utility, because that will come and go and is sometimes beyond your control. Your value isn't a question at all.
> There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive.
> there should be no question about their worth as a person
Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.
There's no value in life, but life should be allowed to exist. Who's to say otherwise?
The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.
Life is valuable to life. Or to say it another way, there is no concept of value beyond the reckoning of living things, even the value of dust and rock on the moon.
Every year half a million children die of diarrhea. There are so, so many people in the world, who are capable of joy and suffering, who "we" don't care much at all. However I have a feeling that "we" might be joining that group eventually.
Yea, and I will take it a step further; it is really easy to start to worry about the “worth of a human life” when it’s yours. When we are in the position to not care about the worth of a human for our gain(such as children working to make iPhones for us to use cheaper) we call it economics.
Still, it’s vastly fewer now relative to the total number of children born than any previous time in human history. It could be even fewer had birth rates begin to drop instantly as a response to child mortality dropping dramatically even in most developing countries, rather than with a few-generation delay.
> Our value isn't predicated on our utility.
In the moral sense, sure.
But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists.
The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you don't get to participate in society and are left to starve to death. No amount of flowery language is going to feed and house the unemployed. And we are running full speed into a situation with the explicit and overt goal of cresting as many unemployed people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that there are no resources or help offered to those unemployed people.
Flowery language will cover up the starving bodies in the streets the same way a can of febreeze will cover up a landfill. This is an enormous problem and if we don't fix it, people will die. Whether or not a human has intrinsic moral value by simply existing, we require money to survive in this society. A human life may be a mystical beautiful and valuable concept, but our society has determined that if you don't have money, you literally do not deserve to live.
That's what these students are so angry about. They're being pushed into a world that refuses to employ them and which delivers a death sentence for the crime of unemployment.
You're conflating society with the white collar job at hand. Yes, if you don't provide value for shareholders, your life is worthless _to that company_. The company is in the business of making money. The businesses goals are a microcosm; a small subset of society. There are many other ways to live (and live well, I might add).
I don't think that's quite right, unless you personally value joy for its own sake. I value knowledge, and joy is useful to creating knowledge, and suffering is harmful to it. But I don't want to have some futile joy, and I don't need to avoid some irrelevant suffering.
Otherwise you get effects like;
* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
* Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
I'll admit that knowledge isn't practical, and you can't always identify when you're creating it, and a lot of people don't think in these terms and there's a lot of intuition involved, along with societal mores about caring for people which help the growth of knowledge as general rules without getting all bean-counting about it. But I think it matters that hedonism is an incoherent motivation and that creating knowledge is a far clearer one (and hedonism tends to turn into creating knowledge, anyway, if you like meaning). Hedonism, utilitarianism, same difference.
You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)
Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.
Oh, the Sapiens guy. I read Sapiens, thought it was OK, then other people picked holes in it and persuaded me that it was worse than that. But I suppose that doesn't preclude this Nexus book being good.
But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)
I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.
I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.
Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.
I think you missed my point. The distinction I made in terminology was on purpose: I used "joy" to describe the inherent motivation for trying to accomplish something, and "bliss" for the state some may try to reach by using drugs.
And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.
And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.
Obviously you'd want to name "joy" as a separate thing, to propose it as the thing we're motivated to do, but the problem is that you didn't describe it. So now I'm at: the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it. Of course I'm open to some pluralism, like it can be a string bag of mixed motivations, but I do think the motivations in our culture all agree with creating knowledge, and become vacuous without that element. What is "gain", "pleasure", etc., without meaning? (I don't know what you mean by meaning. I mean the process of explaining and learning and creating ideas.) Without it those are mechanical processes of the "number go up" type. Yes, I am skeptical that anything of that kind is anybody's deep motivation, though it may be a superficial one.
Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.
> the thing we're motivated to do is the thing we're motivated to do, and it's not whatever I say it is, but apart from that you haven't told me anything about it.
That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.
Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.
> Why are you trying to avoid morality?
I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?
https://overthunk.netlify.app/posts/worthwhile/
(Which is itself a poor rendition of Nichomachean Ethics...this conversation you two are having is ancient)
....I think it's a fairly widespread view to value joy for its own sake. In fact, I would say that's pretty much how normal people would say they view joy.
So normal people don't make sense, what else is new.
The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.
Your examples make it clear that you do not understand normal people in the slightest. And when I say "normal" here, I'm not talking about the Blazing Saddles-style "salt of the earth; you know, morons." I mean roughly the middle 50-60% (by width) of the bell curve. The vast majority of humanity.
Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.
None of that buys groceries.
THIS is going to be the limitation of capitalism. Capitalism isn't compassionate. It's a really good economic framework though, so it will be interesting how that's reconciled in the coming years
Money and monetary systems aren't compassionate -- people are.
Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).
One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).
This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.
The problem with public policy is that it allows other countries to get ahead of you. 'AI' isn't just a tool, it's also a race.
What do you win at the end of the race? I've never heard it concisely put. 'Dominance' is the word that comes to my mind, but I don't want to put words in your mouth and don't really know why that would inherently be a valuable trophy, so that's probably not what you were thinking of, right?
As always, influence for the future
The bigger race is education, which some countries are really falling behind on.
That is always going to be a personal race. You can get in the currents of education, but your success will always depend on your own paddling.
Why should we care about that? Even if you wanted to argue our individual fates are tied to our country's, we don't all live in the same country, so how, actually, could we all care? Are you really convinced its so zero sum like this?
We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?
We're you around for the space race?
It's a world prestige thing, and also a competitive edge, for better or worse.
"Other countries" means China here, I think. China got a little on board with the global capitalism (and lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty along the way, if we're looking for the point), but never really embraced Liberalism and so ideally isn't the one aligning superintelligence. It would be lousy if Russia or North Korea or Somalia was in that position and it would be fine if the UK or Denmark or Brazil or Ghana was, but none of that matters because none of them will be in that position. Only the US and China are playing the game.
And it's a pretty big game
If this speculated intelligence is so "super" why would it matter what its host country's commitments are? I would hope it would at least be intelligent enough to sort things out there? How can something be so potentially threatening, so "super," but also be like a baby, where we need to worry how its raised? Its super intelligent about everything except ideology? That doesn't really sound like (super)intelligence to me..
But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?
I think it's more of a prestige discussion. Who leads, who follows, between countries. Not whose super intelligence is better. Who got their first, and how are they using it?
A supervillain is nevertheless super. Intelligence doesn't correlate with morality- most probably there doesn't exist a 'true ideology' that can be solved for in absolute terms. Do you imagine a superintelligence could calculate how beauty 'ought to' be traded off against truth?
When I say China is a bad choice because it's not as liberal as ~the west, I do imagine a reader in China thinking the opposite. I don't think they're dumb and I don't think they've been duped; they have a coherent ideology that fits their values. I just don't want it to stomp out mine.
Maybe I'm wrong and you can solve for morality or at least the meta-morality of Liberalism/pluralism where you permit various moralities to coexist. Hopefully so. Maybe the value system in China is closer to mine than I imagine and it's just operating under different constraints. But I don't want to gamble on that when winning is within reach and is a guarantee given alignment to any human values is achieved at all.
"Value" is a word with many meanings. Your value as a human or a living being may be very different from your value to your employer or your value to the taxman or anywhere else.
It is very easy to get lost in between them, especially when listening to a good speaker who can flitter between those meanings at will.
What is worse is that those values interact. We indeed we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled, but only up to a point, and there is a reasonable discussion how exactly should countries divide their limited resources between vulnerable groups, including families with young kids. In that context, the future economic and societal value of a 5 y.o. vs. a 85 y.o. inevitably creeps up.
> Our value isn't predicated on our utility.
Yes it is. If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist because the entity that sees it as valuable would be willing to spend resources on maintaining it.
> The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
Most social programs keep expanding until they become unsustainably expensive. You can't just make a law "everyone gets free money" and expect this to have no negative consequences.
>If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist
This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.
I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.
Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.
If human lives weren't inherently valuable, the concept of charity wouldn't exist. Where does that leave us? I think probably the line of argument doesn't work in either direction.
Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?
We’ve also done true intelligence a disservice by using AI to name the current implementation of LLMs. It’s stretching ‘intelligence’ quite a bit. They can be super useful, but we’ve downplayed how phenomenal the human brain is.
I really like ‘Actual Intelligence’, that’s a clever one from Woz. People need to be reminded to use their brains, they’re a brilliant product of evolution (or your favourite god’s work).
Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil.
Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.
Something changed with Dario a year or so ago. I think he started out with good intentions, although really hard to tell. Maybe it was really all about power and control for him from day one. Certainly now he's a different person - appears totally corrupted by money and power.
Dario used to at least emphasize the potential positives of AI while being worried about the negatives, but unlike Hassabis/DeepMind he has done nothing to bring about the positive part and is now just accelerating the harmful part as fast as he can. Google is an AI company, bringing us things like AlphaFold, and Anthropic (also OpenAI) are just LLM companies.
It's just the worst version of capitalist game theory. If I don't do the bad thing and get rich, then someone else will do the bad thing and I won't get rich.
I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt.
“You’re right - I overstepped”
Is the new “You’re absolutely right”.
I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.
I have a script at work that writes out some config files and I'm having Claude run them after making changes. The script if it detects breaking changes will spit out a message saying what the breaking changes are, and not do anything, telling you to rerun it after validation with the override flag.
If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.
So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.
This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.
This is one of a few reason I strongly prefer GPT and its codex variants. It seldom frustrates me, sure its not omnipotent in any way, but it just feels very "tuned in" when it comes to understanding intent and scope.
Imagine worker that did loop of "you're absolutely right -> same fuckup again" multiple days every week, wasting time of whoever told them to do the task
They'd be out of company after a week
> They'd be out of company after a week
I really wish this were true.
Such workers exist. AI is cheaper and faster than such workers, though, so management might still like them. Ugh.
I do want to fire Claude at this point and switch to Codex. Unfortunately the guy with the purse strings is ride or die full Claude psychosis and our business can’t afford to just buy anything and everything for funsies.
That depends on the company. I worked at an S&P 500 company that muddled along like this. They still make critical software for local and state governments.
Contractors?!
But this new tool is not a blacksmith’s tool in the traditional sense. It’s more like an automated blacksmith that works fast, for cheap, does mediocre work, but has this mediocre skill level in an exceptional broad range of tasks.
Blacksmiths is not the best analogy here.
Why not? Blacksmithing and coding have a hell of a lot in common. In both disciplines toolmaking is extremely important. Often you have to make custom tools to accomplish a design--e.g. a twisting wrench or a form tool. Sometimes you have to make tools that get used once and thrown away, like a jig temporarily welded to a piece to hold it in place while you build its sibling assembly. Sound familiar? I do this kind of thing all the time in code.
Another similarity is the relative simplicity of the underlying structure of the system. You essentially have two hammers (one small one you swing with your hand and another big one that is planted on the ground), some material, and some heat. You build the rest.
Another similarity is the resistance to automation. A skilled blacksmith is a versatile worker. You can create assembly lines to automate any one thing they might produce. The end product will not have the same quality--it will not truly be wrought iron, each piece will not be unique, there will be nothing of the aesthetic taste of the artist in it, but if you're just some bean counter who doesn't care about those things you'll be able to sell it. But if you need the optionality to produce any of those things.. automation is not your friend. And some things just cannot be automated, at least not without extreme costs or very poor results--shoeing horses comes to mind.
No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
I maintain a part of my team's CD process and I've observed a 30% increase in PR velocity since we started adopting agentic tools but it was a "one-off" increase (as-in, it hasn't continued to increase beyond that since about a half-year ago).
I'm guessing though that there are other improvements in code quality and feature velocity. I've noticed personally that AI is really good at catching smaller things that are easy to miss (e.g., if you ask it to rename fooTheBars it also updates all the relevant comments or enums that you might have missed).
Less and less true with every new generation of AI systems.
AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.
That simply isn't true. LLMs are completely incapable of operating without supervision, same as they were 3 years ago.
The scope and scale of the tasks LLMs can be trusted to do without supervision has increased massively in the meanwhile.
Of course, it will never be enough. The goalposts will move until we run out of them.
> My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.
> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.
I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, not with Markov chains (next token prediction), not otherwise. Especially not now when the current ML hype is already winding down. And yes this is a matter of belief since I don't think any science precludes agi from existing nor is there any reason to be sure it could someday materialize. I honestly would rather believe societal collapse hits us before agi can even be theorized.
I don't believe there will be self driving cars that will be perfect and never get into any accident or cause someone to die.
That does not matter when discussing its practicality; or whether they will cause drivers to lose jobs.
>I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, ...
Sounds like you're talking about AGI, not AI. AI is here today.
AI was here in the 1970's too for that matter, in the form of expert systems. "AI" is the label that perennially gets applied to whatever current technology does something that was previously considered similar to human intelligence, then later on gets removed and applied to something new.
You'll know were making progress towards AGI when LLMs start being called LLMs again, and something new starts being called AI.
"AI" is a marketing buzzword. Real AI doesn't exist.
A thing that people have chosen to call AI is here today.
That just continues a tradition of moving the goalposts for "AI" to just beyond what's currently possible.
Kind of, but I wouldn't exactly put it like that since AI has never meant anything more than automated intelligence/decision making of some sort. The bar isn't moving, just this almost meaningless label is just forever getting slapped on the latest shiny new thing.
You could legitimately call a thermostat "AI". Expert systems were previously called AI. Today it's Large Language Models. Tomorrow it'll be something else.
I think the issue is that technologists use the term AI to mean one thing, which is something we've had since the 60s with lisp, forth, and prolog. And the average person uses AI to mean something more like Data from Star Trek, which we don't have and may or may not have this century. We're all talking past each other.
There is no rigorous definition of intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence. What you're referring to is people simply not knowing what they're talking about.
More to the point, there has always been a cottage industry in predicting an amazing future, just around the corner. 'AGI' is just the latest incarnation.
If you want to lean into the lie, you do you. I will not.
>the students needed to hear this.
I thought that was the objective of these celebrity speeches.
Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it.
AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.
"Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.
We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.
Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.
Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.
All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.
Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
One angle I'm exploring, as a non-dev who nonetheless works in tech, is using Claude as a professor. Make learning timelines for me for Leetcode, break it down in phases, start with theory, ask me questions, then give me a coding challenge. Save that to an html artifact I can export and read on my phone.
It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems.
But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with.
That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.
Yup, I used to believe that people would all use the Internet to educate themselves, and we all know how that turned out (loads of people did, but the majority didn't).
The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
> At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think
That's reasonable, but it doesn't mean that LLMs are close to being brains.
For a start, when humans think/talk, we often think ABOUT something - whatever is swirling about in our mind, or what we are currently seeing/feeling/etc. An LLM generating tokens/words is doing so only based on it's weights and the word sequence it is currently generating ... the human parallel would be more like a rapper spitting out words based on prior words, essentially on auto-pilot, or when we get triggered into spitting out stock phrases like "have a nice day".
If you want to compare an LLM to a human brain, it's basically equivalent to our language cortex if you ripped out all the external connections and ripped out all the feedback paths that make it capable of learning.
Of course there is a lot more to our brain than just our language cortex, but that alone should make you realize there is no real comparison beyond the fact that our language generation is also going to be based on prediction, and partly auto-regressive.
We have spatial / quantitative and social / emotional aspects in our intelligence that are not at all like next token prediction.
If LLMs had shame, they'd surely not repeat mistakes (in the same context window) as much as they do.
Having shame would require the LLMs to actually be able to recognize mistakes they make.
People love to put a lot of meaning on what an LLM responds with when asked why it made a mistake, but it's critical to remember that the answer to that prompt is just another series of probabilistic tokens, and has no actual relation to how the error happened.
They "recognize" mistakes just fine because you explicitly tell them. They recognize them well enough to correct (...sometimes). The way in which mistakes don't register is "Oh shit, that bad result was a result of my inappropriate actions. I must pay attention to not doing that again or the user will think I'm an idiot. I should even think about it some more to avoid the whole class of mistakes". Think of emotions as an attention mechanism that LLMs lack.
And many times, after an error is pointed out and an LLM offers an "explanation" for what happened, the LLM then gives the exact same erroneous result.
The LLM does not understand itself in any way.
It's language. Language itself is the thing that makes us smart in the unique way that we are among the other animals, and it weirdly turns out to be transferable to machines to at least some degree.
At least 50% of humans have no "inner voice" and are not thinking in the same way as you. Many animals like dolphins, dogs, rats, crows are also very intelligent yet appear to only have primitive language capabilities.
A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.
I personally think that the "inner voice" is a non-falsifiable claim, and therefore more of a religious belief than something which can be part of any materialist theory. In this regard, I'm a strict empiricist and wouldn't be able to claim that I have one myself. In fact, I find that thinking "out loud" or "on paper" produces much better results in most instances, probably because I'm grounding my thinking in natural language, which is a fantastic medium for thought. If my "inner voice" were comparable in efficacy to actually speaking or writing, we wouldn't notice this effect, but I'm definitely not alone in this regard.
Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on.
It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it.
For the religious angle, look no further than John 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
(This is admittedly less falsifiable!)
Well, humans developed language. Language is just a tool that let's us leverage our innate intelligence.
I'm sure that we will eventually build artificial brains, capable of bootstrapping communications and language for themelves (if run en-masse in a simulation where the benefit of communication would emerge). An LLM can't do this since it is by definition/construction something only capable of learning a pre-existing language.
An artificial brain, just like a wet jiggly one, is always going to be more intelligent than a one-trick pony like an LLM - a language processor, but it is notable how intelligent that one-trick pony nonetheless appears to be.
I think it's interesting that you think we could bootstrap an artificial brain with no inputs from human culture. That's what I mean by falsifiable: I disagree, but am open to an existence proof of this kind. Such an artificial brain would be totally alien to us, of course. I wonder how differently it would perform versus something more grounded in "real" culture and writing?
I think you’re right but I wanted to note that we are discovering that other animals also have language.
Yes, this to me is also a good sign for the "it's language that's smart, not us" argument. It's an emergent trait that has evolved several times, like flight or carcinization. There's something about language that attracts evolution toward it. One would expect such a trait to have a big survival value (disclaimer: IANA biologist, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, or linguist).
> I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.
average person is absolutely awful judge on anything you put in front of average person tho.
And if anything, average AI user is vastly overstating how good/useful it is. Papers about it pretty much always show huge gap between "productivity person thinks they are achieving" and "actual growth of productivity"
Yes! We need them to have hope, but hopefully there can be substance behind it, otherwise it's like when the Hitler Youth got those badges before Hitler killed himself. In the sense that we are awarding people medals when their future is bleak
Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.
This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my friends cobbled together an agent that runs in an infinite loop, grabs whatever song they're actively listening to on Spotify, writes it in a file, then instructs the agent to emit tokens for 2-3 minutes on what that song and previous songs that day might mean for that person's mental state, like a little music-based diary. Repeat, run all day, 24/7. Kinda cool. But its just a way to use tokens, because the first thing all these AI labs built was a good coding model, and the second thing they built was a dashboard for admins to track how much their users are using the good coding model.
A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.
In case this anecdote is not made up, I would implore you or your friend be a bit more subtle at tokenmaxing (ugh). At $JOB, I'm under the same mandate, and it turns out that every prompt is logged and aggregated. When someone else at $JOB asked the team PM who's in charge of the logging, s/he replied that the log is only used to correlate with commits, and nothing else, trust us (wink). I doubt this is unique to my $JOB.
Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.
The situation is insane at the company my friend works at. There's no central oversight, because, as I understand it, someone in leadership had the idea that they didn't want to prescribe which AI tools their engineers should use. So they just let their engineers expensify any tools they want. Afaik he hasn't yet hit the upper-bound; last month he said he reimbursed a ~$500 anthropic bill. The same company also makes their engineers go to the Apple store to buy laptops, with their own money, then reimburse it. The credit card points must go crazy over there.
But definitely yeah, normally: be careful about these things. In his case when I said "admin dashboard" i moreso meant the general idea of admin oversight; he's said he's been complimented internally about how much he's using AI.
> Many will not survive.
Thankfully the people responsible have already prepared a golden parachute to land safely to destroy something else.
It may be useful outside the current tech rat race. One possibility is that a decade of openly user-hostile business decisions will reach their logical conclusion even faster, and those that haven’t fried our brains with CC may be in a position to pick up customers from these behemoths as they disintegrate.
I work in infrastructure (backups, networking etc) and no longer in software. I just don't see llms being that useful right now. If I have a problem and ask an LLM the answer is either fabricated or useless, rarely does it know what it's talking about. And yes I know how to describe the problem so that it has a chance to give an useful answer.
Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.
Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.
Well Coding agents are being tackled. Infrastructure agents that would read your host event logs, device configuration, ilo, etc, etc - that is probably the missing piece.
Having a chat with chatgpt may give you clues or ideas when you have gone throught your own checklist of what could have went wrong, but can go only as far.
Agent on the other side will decompile .dll to find out issues if needed to go deep enought.
Providing access to the data is easy. It is just an MCP or equivalent, and coding such CRUD is cheap now.
Applying the actions is unsolved. Unless you YOLO the LLMs, taking stateful actions automatically requires a lot of protective infrastructure, solid testing infra etc.
It’s all just more code, but a “create me a shopping website” LLM is likely not going to be doing the infrastructure level thinking required to handle it for now.
Might be but I just can't imagine a customer being fine with a loose cannon agent in their environment. E.g. coding agents are ignoring instructions. Who is to say that Claudes solution to a, say, slow backup isn't deleting the backup?
Imagine an agent shadowing all your terminals, providing ideas and asking to run commands that will let it verify the hypotheses it comes up with, while at the same time doing research on vendor docs, etc...
Quite safe, and already a force multiplier - this would be a harness. Maybe have it be able to write to a shadow system with similar (ideally same) hardware to verify it's hypothesis on how the system works, etc...
It is also possible to walk away from tech. To stop chasing the demands of anything for a buck and focus on something real.
Some people live paycheck to paycheck in tech. Where do they walk away to that isn't or won't be impacted by AI? Or are you assuming they have the financial support for such a risky switch?
Yes - it is easier than ever thanks to AI !
Indeed, here’s a prompt snippet to help you afterwards”.
“Create me a resume for [newjob]. Ensure that it is properly embellished so that my two years of superficial, directionless AI-driven learning seem equivalent to the multi-decade experience and domain expertise the company is actually hiring for”.
You don't even need to do anything: layoffs will hit you anyway.
Thanks to AI too - wow, it really is versatile !
If you run your own company — even a tiny one — you don't have to do any of that shit (unless you want to).
Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.
I agree, with the caveat that I don’t think any company is using AI well at the moment, specifically because I think our tooling around AI is woefully inadequate and immature.
Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.
Right now LLMs are heavily subsidized. When that ends, the actual cost of the service may exceed its usefulness for many use cases.
Computation halves in price every ~2 years so maybe in the short term but not in the long term
How is that possible when the cost of memory and hard drives have gone up 3x+ in the last six months? Maybe cheaper if you're OAI or one of the lucky companies Nvidia is propping up. Everyone else is getting screwed.
I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.
> I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.
A lot - and over the coming 2 years, even more. Utilization rates are under 50% across the board, and special and cheaper chips are coming out all the time for inference. And a truckload of research - TurboQuant, HC (deepseek), etc, etc..
You've somehow confused using AI well with using it extensively.
Sometimes using something well involves not using it at all.
not using it at all is no longer an option, companies that are not using it at all will die slow/fast death but death nonetheless.
That's like saying farmers that don't use pesticides will die out. There's whole industries around doing things not the way big companies say you have to. Human-centric firms will pop up and proposer.
That's just a baseless assumption. To use AI well you should do the things that allow you to use stuff well. You shouldn't just use it any way you can because you assume that 'not using it at all' is not the best option.
This is literally the same with every single technological development.
> This is literally the same with every single technological development.
yup, there are a lot of successful companies today not using the internet :)
Ironically, companies overusing it will probably die at a similar speed. Maybe faster, even, depending whether cash burn or technical debt catches up to them first.
100%
Maybe. But I used to have unlimited Claude Code usage but now I’m relegated to whatever the subscription happens to give me and when I run out of tokens I need to trad code until my limits reset. My manager saw the bill and nearly fell out of his chair. Small companies just can’t afford the added cost of AI at the real price (and we aren’t even in the real price territory yet).
Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.
There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.
I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.
The copilot token pricing is going to wake a lot of companies up. Even with our smaller company only using around 1/3 of our allotted requests, next month the bill will easily twice as much.
Say the line, Bart!
If by "using AI well" you mean kill off customer service; maybe customers will want to switch to other companies that are more expensive but have customer service.
> internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts
That is absolutely insane. Thing is I can honestly believe that it happens, which makes it even more insane.
This is basically the next step of all the AI trainings and hacktons that many of us are now required to take part into, with KPI metrics on how each one is using their tokens.
https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn
Oh it happens all right.
It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers.
I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
Technical Debt is not a developer skill issue. It’s a management planning, capacity and budget issue. It’s a bet that the cost of servicing the debt will be less than the cost of paying for it outright with cash. I’ve been in the industry for decades and 95% of the dysfunction in an engineering organization is always management.
AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse.
That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper.
Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.
It’s a question of degree: technical debt has a carrying cost trying to balance features against your ability to support the codebase. LLMs change both sides of that equation but I think most companies are going to struggle with maintaining a balance when it’s so easy to push past concerns and get something which seems to work.
Tech debt is a debt taken to reduce development time. It's a time debt actually. Patching something that would work until the team has the time to do it correctly.
...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
This past fall I overheard a conversation between some high schoolers where one of the students was taking classes remotely for a while as she was dealing with some mental issues. She complained that while she needed the time away, it was just so easy to cheat with ChatGPT and be done with school for the day, and she went on to say that she really felt like she wasn’t learning anything and really was looking forward to returning to the classroom. This has stuck with me as the group of kids were just your average punk/emo high school kids.
Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
The kids are smarter than many of us think. We owe to them a world where they can feel hope and see a future. But much of the AI hype is built around declaring how dangerous and futile everything is.
The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.
This is positive compared to the college students I overheard lamenting that chatgpt ruined everything because now every evaluation is an in-class essay rather than something they could do at home at their leisure. And by lamenting, I mean loudly swearing about the bar and cursing their instructors.
Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak
Stark contrast to other tech leaders...
Woz isn't some kind of monk. He enjoys his tech toys that he can only afford because he's rich. He's just bad at managing his money and lost a lot of it through multiple divorces.
It's easy for us to judge from the outside. It's also entirely possible that the quote OP posted is true enough to the point that he didn't "lose" it through multiple divorces, because he didn't care about it.
How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
I bet Eric's used AI to review his speech, and it told him it was brilliant. He had never bombed before, so him being booed was not in the training data. In a sense, kids booing shows is exactly the difference between AI and our unpredictable mind. This is innovation as far as commencement speeches are concerned.
Haha this is a totally Woz thing to do <3
He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.
Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
Both happen at the same time, by the same people. The reason for usage differs by major, but usually it's an expedient to either get past tasks that represent busywork or just the cheating you've seen described. Students have explained to me how much they hate in the same explanation of what they do with it.
(just FYI: There's no "traditional learning" to return to; you will definitely hear a lot of faculty going to "paper and pen" situations - kinda uncritically, if you ask me! - but I ask folks to remember that writing itself is a technology, and the media/means historically associated with it are technological advances in their own rights).
As a recent graduate, both headlines read as plausible and non-contradictory. Students right now are faced with two things:
1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.
2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.
The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
One of the "grown up" moments everyone needs to make their way through is: Realizing that the vast majority of people are not internally consistent, and that by the way includes you.
Every single student who boo'd Eric Schmidt the other day was regularly using AI for their schoolwork. People are not cistercian monks.
Its easy to draw a conclusion from this like "revealed preferences outweigh spoken ones, we can ignore the boos" but much like the tech executives, you're not thinking deeply enough. The tech industry will face the music for relentlessly creating products that the world hates to be forced to use. But, for now, the industry is too addicted to it. It sounds crazy, but: There are vanishingly few companies left who have the ability to manufacture products & services that their customers are excited to use. Its a lot easier to monopolize a space, re-baseline the industry around the expectations of your product's existence, then deploy capital and lawyers to put up fences.
If some students use LLMs to do tasks faster and at higher quality, that changes the grading curve, so everybody else might have no choice but to do so as well if they want to graduate. It's the "and yet you participate in society" meme.
I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. Good chance that a few students that cheated or at the least used AI in a major capacity to graduate, still booed when that former Google CEO brought up AI at the graduation speech. Being pro AI when it benefits them and anti AI when it doesn't is just human nature. I'm being a little reductive here though.
> Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
Sure, both are true, although I think you'll find that they differentiate between "cheating" on their math homework by using AI, and kids who are cheating on exams by sneaking in a smartphone and giving a photo of the problem to ChatGPT.
As far as homework goes, AI is just the new Google, useful perhaps, but hardly outweighing all the anxiety of their future being taken away by AI, or all the societal enshittification by AI that they see all around them.
I cannot stress how much the deep internal Apple loyalists loathe Woz. I personally find him one of the best parts of (old) Apple, and it’s a shame the company internally continues to think of him as a loose cannon.
How many people from that era still exist at Apple to be holding a grudge like that? Genuinely curious, since it's been a very long time since he was last involved at Apple.
A lot. Apple has pretty impressive retention, more than everywhere else I’ve worked in the Bay Area. Many people work there to retire, so the age demographic skews older. I worked there close to 20 years and that’s not even in the longer end comparatively.
Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.
Very successful large company retains staff until retirement. I find that vaguely reassuring. Hope the trend catches on. Thanks for posting this observation.
Loose cannons have their uses in organisations (they can say things senior people find uncomfortable without fear of repercussions).
I worked at apple a couple decades ago. He isn't loathed so much as acknowledged as being uncontrollable. Internally at Apple it is very strict in terms of what you can say and do, like being in a communist country where you never go against Dear Leader. Woz speaks his mind and that is ultimately why he left early on. He also has a conscience and cares about people, something Apple does a great job of pretending to do.
I worked there just shy of 20 years, and I agree “uncontrollable” is a good way to frame it.
To be clear I think Woz is great, I was just referring to listening to years of behind his back comments made by leaders at the company who look down on him for being too open, which as you know is not “allowed”.
Having worked at Apple, any event where he was present was completely packed.
Tim Cook Apple with Palo Alto money and constant surveillance does not jibe with jovial intellectual prankster.. do tell
The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title
In case it gets edited, the title of the HN submission is "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence".
I laughed when I read this, imagining a weird act of self-congratulation in front of a silent audience.
I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline.
But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.
English isn't ambiguous here either. It's the fault of journalists who have this weird obsession with removing as many words as possible from headlines.
The actual headline is not ambiguous at all
> Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'
Modern journalism deserves a lot of criticism, but this headline is not one of those cases
>I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this.
most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.
Not to me... Maybe a ESL thing
"Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence "
Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker.
The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know.
Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific.
How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?
While it's technically ambiguous, most native speakers would immediately understand that Steve was not the person cheering. Firstly, Steve cheering makes no sense. Secondly, it's a very common construction for newspaper/article headlines.
For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..."
Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.
I mean technically in the sense that you -can- interpret it two different ways, even if most people wouldn't.
The 'is' is not required because it's using newspaper headline grammar.
I'm a native speaker, and read it the "Wozniak gave a little cheer after" way at first, though the more likely meaning did occur to me immediately after. As for it making no sense, I differ. There are scenarios I can conjure in which that exact sequence could happen, either because he was cheering the students after telling them they're great, or because he forgot what he was doing -- dementia wouldn't even be "early onset" at his age. Further, if something is utterly mundane and expected, there are no headlines about it, as in the old saying about the difference between "Dog bites man" and "Man bites dog".
Could also mean that he was cheered by the response to his comments and his disposition improved. There are layers of ambiguity in this headline.
Language is often ambiguous! You have to guess the intended meaning based on context clues. Unambiguously phrased language sounds less natural, because it is. Incidentally, this is part of what makes natural language such an awful fit for controlling a computer.
Yeah I agree with you. To me it was immediately obvious what it meant. It never occurred to me that he would "cheer himself", that doesn't even make any sense. ESL is right.
I have been seeing so many bad commencement speeches that it's good to see someone actually deliver a nuanced and grounded approach that speaks to the issues of our time. Woz has definitely improved a lot in his public speaking over the years.
Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.
I really like how he approaces AI. Not the tone other leaders are talking, but much more human and much more collaborative. How young people actually can help with the AI shaping. For example Eric Schmidt was really terrible at his speach in front of University of Arizona.
Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"
Ah, so the students were saying “moo,” not “boo.”
To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place.
Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.
I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.
This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product
Adding non deterministic layers on top of a painfully deterministic layer to make more betterer deterministic things is an oxymoron.
...and many people choose to ignore that fact.
They can start by voting for politicians who will rein in big tech
There is no politician who stands against big tech and by extension big money
We are about to test that theory.
not even Bernie Sanders?
probably not
In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."
"Citizens United" might be the most ironic name in the history of western democracy.
Do you know what the Citizens United organization wanted to do? Why didn’t they have a right to do it?
They don't need money they just need votes.
If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate.
You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.
> If money can buy votes
It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."
Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?
Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...
I think it’s possible.
If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.
Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
Okay!
Now, more than ever, I think young people are cows for the economic meat grinder. It takes me to one of my favourite quotes:
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.
The world is a significantly better place than it was when my parents were my age.
By what metrics?
Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable.
But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad.
Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.
I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit.
On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI.
Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.
Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.
How good is AI integration in Apple products? Did they drop the ball as hard as Microsoft did? I naively assumed a few years ago that Microsoft could pull it off perfectly because they had more than enough in terms of resources & engineers (yes, I was this naive in college)
Like most MS vs. Apple differences, it comes down to a matter of taste. They've added quite a few AI enhancements across their apps and operating system, but they are mostly feature enhancements and not major AI branded efforts. Having a Summarize button in Mail.app where it's contextually relevant or having text improvement menu options in text fields vs. slapping a major "Copilot" tab into everything.
Their use of AI so far has been much less "let AI take the wheel and brand it as a product itself" and more "use AI to improve an aspect of <user need>".
I think that's the best thing they could have done as a company. Sounds like the end-user first philosophy is still there.
Yeah, hard to guess how a person would react to transformative technology, together with whatever context it'd be brought up, their reaction could differ.
I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.
Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.
His reaction probably still would not have been solidified yet, given how long his response took to other tectonic shifts in technology. That isn’t to say he wouldn’t have an opinion to voice, I just suspect it wouldn’t have resulted in a product direction for at least a few more years.
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.
Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.
I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).
Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.
> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..
Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.
You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.
In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.
The problem is natural language is a horrendously bad human-computer interface. Even if they're running nondeterministic software, computers are very precise machines. You wouldn't talk to your lathe or milling machine and expect good things to happen. So why would you have that expectation of a computer? It's ridiculous sci-fi fantasy nonsense.
It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.
no this is a fair question. he was enough of a sociopath to disown his own kid, but his narcissistic tendencies and love of the arts would have been a weird counter point to that.
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.
Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.
https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114
Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.
> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.
Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.
> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.
The difference is it’s incredibly easy to opt out of apples AI-like services. For instance, I have never had Siri on on my iPhone no matter how many years go by. And every time I’ve gotten a new one, it stayed off. One tap, that’s it.
They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.
Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing
Good point. Yes, I also have all of that turned off and can ignore it. Not that Apple is without its pushiness, though, I still get frequent nags to “upgrade” to Tahoe and iOS 26 without an option to turn those off, and every time I go to System Settings to update to a new macOS 15 version and click to show more details, they sneakily select macOS 26 checkbox.
There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings.
Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.
good ole woz. being just a wonderful fuzzy warm hearted human being.
I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time.
He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
It's a real shame there are no many people like Woz in the bay area
This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange.
Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
Don't hate the player.
I described a bit of this in reply to thinkingemote, but to:
> And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).
Seems more like the issue is nuance and consideration or not. One side is saying that it is possible to do things that have value using LLMs. The other side is pointing out that this technology has increasing costs, is requiring data centers that have strongly negative environmental, social, and economic impacts, is promoting rampant, industrialized theft of intellectual property, is inserting errors, hallucinations, and psychotic ideas into all usage, and is at a number of levels doing damage to kids, elders, and professionals who are exposed.
If they did use it then maybe in hindsight they regret it, realize they didn't learn much, realize the temptation to cheat yourself will always be there and that's not a good thing.
He seems to be a nice guy and this contrasts with big tech CEOs, but this is pretty demagogical. AI is going to causing disruption but is here to stay, so what should be done about it? "Think different", "you have actual intelligence" may be comforting and enough to be cheered but is not a very actionable advice.
Since no one here has linked the full speech, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlbO7oFmEhg
Real "plutonians cheering being told that Pluto is a real planet" energy.
Plutonians are busy making circular stock deals with ceresians.
I always thought it means "authentic Italian"
Wozniak is a man of the people.
He also said he's not impressed by LLM, which I totally agree.
I don't know what to say. I may not like it, you may not think it's actually intelligent, you may not think it's going to change the world - but how can you not see that this is revolutionary?
I see it as more iterative than revolutionary.
I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this.
And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search.
The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.
How so?
What can LLM's do that can't be done by a human?
No. Nondeterministic output is not revolutionary. Technology forced down our throats by a few companies and executives who are licking their lips at the idea of laying off people, even if laying those people off means garbage products, is not revolutionary. Slop is not revolutionary.
Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
Populist , let’s invent Make intelligence great again :)
Actual link to the quote video: https://youtu.be/S24CGNgqZJA
There's a live version of this video but it looks completely different: https://www.youtube.com/live/LHEW8Da5550?si=ZBEesfArnK4HSD1R...
Is the short AI generated? This is confusing.
The entire commencement program is here. Woz speaks at around the 42-minute mark.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sSfADusN40
This one looks completely different from the short as well. There are now 3 known versions of this same line and all are different. Is it possible he gave the same speech to multiple audiences on that day?
There're like 3 commencements
1st of May, 7pm - https://youtu.be/LHEW8Da5550?t=2757
2nd of May, 10am - https://youtu.be/4sSfADusN40?t=2586
2nd of May, 3pm - https://youtu.be/-bn3ydOuMm4?t=2855
Finally someone smart enough to read the room!
Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligence, Artificial Intelligentsia - I’d argue that one of them is not real.
One perhaps unpopular opinion: Could it be that the current AI is beneficial for young people in the sense that it is making them stop looking at their phone for a bit, and realize that certain tech is not that important for human well beeing? The change is in their/our hands after all, we just need to become aware, believe and vote with our wallet and the whole society will change in the blink of an eye. The hard part is the awareness and believing.
My experience as a parent is that gen alpha took note of the fact that their parents being on their phones means less attention, so it's possible they'll have a more sober view of the entire thing.
>have AI actual intelligence
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone.
>Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.
AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works.
This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.
This title makes me feel he cheered, not that he was cheered at.
Out of all of the OG “pirates of Silicon Valley” - Woz was always the coolest to me.
Can't locate the link to the actual speech
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234320
Wiz is the shit. The end.
These students? They are the worst students in decades if there is any generation that could be replaced by machines it's the latest.
Man... it's gonna absolutely suck when that guy dies.
This contrast is a bit sad. When Eric Schmidt told students the truth about the importance that AI will take in the future ("It will touch every profession, every lab..."), students booked him But the takes like "AI is not real/powerful, human intelligence is better", which are basically pleasant myopic lies, are cheered. Cope bias is powerful.
The point of a graduation speech like this is to get students hyped up about themselves and their future. Surely you see the merit in, amongst a backdrop of a horrible job market, telling students that they have, inherent in them, the stuff of greatness, just as people did (checks watch) 3 years ago before vibe coding?
> Cope bias is powerful.
Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.
With what would I be coping? I'd much prefer (probably like most people) if AI were not that powerful. The harsh reality, and the stuff of cope, is that it's (too) powerful.
There's been a massive mask-off shift amongst elites* the last few years where displaying open contempt and hatred towards normal people - employees, students, public servants, etc. You can see this most clearly near the epicentre of the SV executive class where layoffs are celebrated and the life of the remaining employees is made as shitty as possible (ie, Meta's keyloggers), but it is everywhere. Speakers gleefully mocking and chiding graduates about how fucked they are due to AI, opinion columns from oligarch-owned mass media about how ungrateful everyone is towards the president, democratic senators (!!) mocking their constituents for wanting health insurance, just absolute disgust and hatred dripping everywhere.
* Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".
I actually disagree with Steve here.
This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect.
Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them.
I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).
It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore.
I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.
And yet, here we are.
Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.
You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
What have we done?
People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?
The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?
Funny, I don't feel "disenfranchised" by AI. If you do, well... in the words of the other Steve, you're holding it wrong.
> But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
> What have we done?
Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.
It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.
Modernity is soulless for the most part. Social media, the 24/7 news cycle, unaccountable mega-corps, the list goes on. I suspect people are tired of the constant psychic damage you endure for just trying to exist in 2026.
Hopefully people are understanding that technology, no matter how cool, does not exist in a vacuum. Technology is defined by who controls it, how it’s used, and what power it enables them to wield. Those concerns are far more important to society than how neat the tech is.
An obvious example is nuclear weapons. Amazing science, incredible engineering, awe-inspiring power. But I doubt you would make the same critiques of people who were anxious about the world they create. A world in which MAD exists is fundamentally different than one where it doesn’t.
Regarding your grandfather, it’s a pretty well-supported hypothesis that younger generations are less happy and more depressed because of technology from the very industry pushing AI onto them! Why should you expect them to be excited about a new world-changing tool from the same set of companies that brought them an infinite doom-scrolling feed of self-doubt, the increased polarization of politics, the viral spread of conspiracy theories, and a higher rate of youth and teen suicide than ever before?
Technology isn’t fundamentally good or bad, but it can have very negative impacts on society. It seems like people are catching on to that fact.
I have noticed a certain personality gloms onto AI and unlike other technologies, it is so easy old people and the technologically illiterate can do it! In fact, old people and morons seem to love it. And it gets annoying really fast. The same people who were web 3, crypto, block chain, nft bros are the biggest supporters of AI. Utility or not when scammy people act the same way as they did for all the other tech trends it is a massive turnoff. I am tired of seeing AI writing and AI images, and instead of people talking about how we are going to use AI to make people’s lives better the only thing people can talk about is how much money some tech bros are going to make and how everyone else is going to lose their jobs because we won’t need them anymore. And your idiot friend from HS has an awesome business idea, which amounts to AI art on a t shirt or AI youtube videos and just needs you to be in on it with them to actually do the work like they are selling Amway.
I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.
So, yeah, I can see why the kids are over it.
No, young people do not have to be optimistic. They have to think with their own brain, and form their own opinions.
People in the 1980s were optimistic in technology because they didn’t have the chance to see the social upheaval that youth in the 2020s have grown with. Only a complete idiot would remain steadfastly optimistic after seeing what the rise of the internet, social media and mass surveillance has done in the name of this promised technological utopia. Only the sociopath would tell a young person to happily embrace AI in the worst economy in decades while headlines about AI-related job losses are everyday news.
Blind faith in anything leads to terrible outcomes, and that includes technology.
you are so starry-eyed about what the tech can do that you're missing the societal impact
it's like marveling at the wonders of nuclear fission (truly a marvel) and wondering why people are angry about a nuclear arms race that has literally put us one button press away from global destruction
I was inspired by technology when I was young, but not anymore. When I was young it felt like the tech industry was about empowering human beings - Steve Jobs liked to say that a computer was like a bicycle for the mind. Today it feels like the tech industry is about wonton destruction ("move fast and break things") for the purposes of making a tiny number of people fantastically wealthy.
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.
If you’re still writing things like this you are stupid or willfully ignorant. All the boomers at work expose similar opinions and it’s because when the younger generation tries to explain why they feel this way, the boomers stick their fingers in their ears and start yelling.
People are not excited because those companies blatantly disgregard the law, exploit and fuck people over and try to concentrate as much power as possible in their hands. Young people are not stupid, they can see that the increasing wealth gap makes their lives suck more. And they also understand that AI is a hypercapitalistic tool, that, if left unchecked, will only accelerate this trend.
So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?
Are you seriously going to compare AI with shoes?
did I compare AI to shoes anywhere in my text? They also used to teach comprehension when I went to school.
You chose shoes as your comparison point.
Using two symbols of technology: AI (advanced modern technology) Shoes (cheap, basic materials)
You were saying the following, in essence, no? "My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."
No I wasn't.
This is the whole paragraph:
> People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty).
This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.
There was study that big percentage of university graduates, strugles to comprehend written text. In AI terms: take 20k token paper, feed it to well rested graduate, and they will strugle with basic memory recall, reasoning and comprehension! My laptop performs better than that!
My car runs faster than any human. Therefore exercise is a waste of time.
I love this example.
Car (like humans) requires a lot of care and maintenance. You have to feed it (gas), park it, and jump through many legal hoops just to use it.
Walking is very often faster, and if not you can just fly or take a taxi.
I haven't read the study, but I wonder if one reason comprehension went down was because of over-reliance on AI among students.
Ai is around for a few years. This type of studies goes back decades.
Ah studies, those things nobody ever cares to reproduce.
At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.
Give it a bit more effort next time.
20k tokens is about 40 pages of text. Weekly i do about 1000x that. (I am very low lever user)
I really do not think there is a point to argue here.
Also why you have to be unicorn to comprehend 40 pages paper? I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
> I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
Yes, I can tell.
Maybe I am in a minority position here, but despite me vibecoding for many months now (havent written a single line by hand and forced me todo so in the beginning), I still have my IDE open right next to Codex/CC and while the LLM is crucnching along and doing TDD loops I actually read whats created/changed and just sit with it judding if its only right on surface or semantically stupid underneath, essentially realtime-architecting and steering the code agents sometimes even midflight. so I do end up with these 200k+ LoC projects now since typing is lightning fast and 2/3 of my codebase is tests (I insist on regression tests after every steer) but in fact I perfectly know what each piece is doing and where it is, as well as the still not optimal parts and have a mental list for refactoring it later when I have time or a spare parallel agent can do it when feature work isn't crossing the same areas.
so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.