8 ms·

Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on drea

by jabedude 10mo ago

Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?

surajrmal 10mo ago
Rob retired from Google years ago fwiw.
gilrain 10mo ago
[flagged]
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
  I think that criticizing when it benefits the person criticizing, and absense of criticism when criticism would hurt the person criticizing, makes the argument less persuasive. This isn't ad hom, it's a heuristic for weighting arguments. It doesn't prove whether an argument has merit or not, but if I have hundreds of arguments to think about, it helps organizing them.
- ViktorRay 10mo ago
  Someone else in the thread posted this article earlier. https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/artificial-intelligence-and-the-environment-putting-the-numbers-into-perspective/ https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar... It seems video streaming, like Youtube which is owned by Google, uses much more energy than generative AI.
  - oblio 10mo ago
    It's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters. I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).
  - j0lol 10mo ago
    Thankfully YouTube provides a lot more value to society than gen-AI.
    - Marha01 10mo ago
      This is a subjective value judgement and many disagree.
    - moltopoco 10mo ago
      To adults? Certainly. But keep in mind that many children are now growing up with this crap glued to their eyes from age 2: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=funny+3d+animals https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=funny+3d+animal... (That's just one genre of brainrot I came across recently. I also had my front page flooded with monkey-themed AI slop because someone in my household watched animal documentaries. Thanks algorithm!)
    - victorbjorklund 10mo ago
      Doubtful. If you look at viewed content it’s probably 90% views from brainrot content.
    - bongodongobob 10mo ago
      Not for me.
  - ori_b 10mo ago
    This is based on assuming 5 questions a day. YouTube would be very power efficient as well if people only watched 5 seconds of video a day. How many tokens do you use a day?
    - moralestapia 10mo ago
      It would be less power efficient as some of the associated costs/resources happen per request and also benefit from scale.
  - squeaky-clean 10mo ago
    Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison. The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.
    - lokar 10mo ago
      And it’s fair assume much of the time watching streaming would instead have been spent on TV
    - easterncalculus 10mo ago
      > Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison. Neither is comparing text output to streaming video
      - pardon_me 10mo ago
        Compare generative AI video to streamed video, and generative text to streamed text etc. The differences are closer to an order of magnitude. The comparison to be made is the processing power required to deliver the content, not to display it.
  - Verdex 10mo ago
    A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However: 1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs 2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus. 3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test. Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.
  - cowl 10mo ago
    Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.
- jabedude 10mo ago
  I think it's incredibly obvious how it connects to his "argument" - nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI. So dressing up his hatred of the technology in vague environmental concerns is laughably transparent. He and everyone who agrees with his post simply don't like generative AI and don't actually care about "recyclable data centers" or the rape of the natural world. Those concerns are just cudgels to be wielded against a vague threatening enemy when convenient, and completely ignored when discussing the technologies they work on and like
  - Arodex 10mo ago
    You simply don't like any criticism of AI, as shown by your false assertions that Pike works at Google (he left), or the fact Google and others were trying to make their data centers emit less CO2 - and that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI. And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time. If it is the former, it can't be the latter. If it is the latter, it can't be the former.
    - ywn 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - mrwrong 10mo ago
        do you get scared when you hear other ghost stories too?
      - Arodex 10mo ago
        Why should I be concerned with something that doesn't exist, will certainly never exist, and even if I were generous and entertained that something that breaks every physical law of the universe starting with entropy could exist, would result in "it" torturing a copy of myself to try to influence me in the past? Nothing there makes sense at any level. But people getting fired and electricity bills skyrocketing (as well as RAM etc.) are there right now.
    - tarsinge 10mo ago
- cm2012 10mo ago
  Do you really think that the only reason people would be turned off by this post by Rob Pike is that they are being paid by big AI?
  - gilrain 10mo ago
    No, which is why I didn’t say that. I do think astroturfing could explain the rapid parroting of extremely similar ad hominems, which is what I actually did imply.
    - cm2012 10mo ago
      Astroturfing means a company is paying people to comment. No one in this entire thread was paid to comment.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - hnisforjakases 10mo ago
      Buddy it's not astroturfing if people hate your favorite thing.
- gyanchawdhary 10mo ago
  being inside the machine doesn’t exempt you from tradeoff analysis, kind sir
  - jabedude 10mo ago
    As it so happens Rob Pike performed absolutely 0 tradeoff analysis
- macinjosh 10mo ago
  This is the most astro-turfy comment ITT
- lamontcg 10mo ago
  It is the same energy as the "you criticize society, yet you participate in society" meme. Catching someone out on their "hypocrisy" when they hit a limit of what they'll tolerate is really a low-effort "gotcha". And it probably isn't astroturf, way too many people just think this way.
hanwenn 10mo ago
Rob left Google a couple of years ago.
- ofrzeta 10mo ago
  So what's he doing now? Is he retired?
  - moralestapia 10mo ago
    Not "retired" but a similar term.
  - pkal 10mo ago
    I think so, or at least something like that. In https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode60-rob-pike https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode60-rob-pike he mentioned that he has now been working more on Ivy (https://github.com/robpike/ivy https://github.com/robpike/ivy) in his spare time.
- W-Stool 10mo ago
  What about Ken Thompson?
oblio 10mo ago
Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure? The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal. You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries can be cached, too).
- jstummbillig 10mo ago
  Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
  - oblio 10mo ago
    > jstummbillig: > Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM) Why would you lie: https://imgur.com/a/1AEIQzI https://imgur.com/a/1AEIQzI ??? For those that don't want to see the Gemini answer screenshot, best case scenario 10x, worst case scenario 100x, definitely not "3x that rounds to 0x", or to put it in Gemini's words: > Summary > Right now, asking Gemini a question is roughly the environmental equivalent of running a standard 60-watt lightbulb for a few minutes, whereas a Google Search is like a momentary flicker. The industry is racing to make AI as efficient as Search, but for now, it remains a luxury resource.
    - jstummbillig 10mo ago
      Are you okay? You ventured 100x and that's wrong. What would you know about the last time I checked was, and in what context exactly? Anyway, good job on doing what I suggest you do, I guess. The reason why it all rounds to 0 is that the google search will not give you an answer. It gives you a list of web pages, that you then need to visit (often times more than just one of them) generating more requests, and, more importantly, it will ask more of your time, the human, whose cumulative energy expenditure to be able to ask to be begin with is quite significant – and that you then will have not to spend on other things that a LLM is not able to do for you.
29athrowaway 10mo ago
They claim they have net zero carbon footprint, or carbon neutrality. In reality what they do is pay "carbon credits" (money) to some random dude that takes the money and does nothing with it. The entire carbon credit economy is bullshit. Very similar to how putting recyclables in a different color bin doesn't do shit for the environment in practice.
- lokar 10mo ago
  They know the credits are not a good system. The 1st choice has always been a contract with a green supplier, often helping to build out production. And they have a lot of that, with more each year. But construction is slow, in the mean time they use credits, which are better than nothing.
- Tepix 10mo ago
  They don't have it. They aimed for it. However: "Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website" as noticed by the Canadian National Observer https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/google-net-zero-sustainability https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/g...
nkohari 10mo ago
Yeah, I'm conflicted about the use of AI for creative endeavors as much as anyone, but Google is an advertising company. It was acceptable for them to build a massive empire around mining private information for the purposes of advertisement, but generative AI is now somehow beyond the pale? People can change their mind, but Rob crashing out about AI now feels awfully revisionist. (NB: I am currently working in AI, and have previously worked in adtech. I'm not claiming to be above the fray in any way.)
- skywhopper 10mo ago
  It’s certainly possible to see genAI as a step beyond adtech as a waste of resources built on an unethical foundation of misuse of data. Just because you’re okay with lumping them together doesn’t mean Rob has to.
  - nkohari 10mo ago
    Yeah, of course, he's entitled to his opinion. To me, it just feels slightly disingenuous considering what Google's core business has always been (and still is).
- luke5441 10mo ago
  Google's official mission was "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", not to maximize advertising sales. Obviously now it is mostly the latter and minimally the former. What capitalism giveth, it taketh away. (Or: Capitalism without good market design that causes multiple competitors in every market doesn't work.)
- WD-42 10mo ago
  Ad tech is a scourge as well. You think Rob Pike was super happy about it? He’s not even at google anymore. The amount of “he’s not allowed to have an opinion because” in this thread is exhausting. Nothing stands up to the purity test.
  - itsdrewmiller 10mo ago
skywhopper 10mo ago
Uh, have you missed the tech news in the past three years?
InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack. Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.
- xorgun 10mo ago
  Cutting trees for fuel and paper to send a letter burned resources. Nobody gained in that transaction
  - Blackthorn 10mo ago
    I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans.
    - gcau 10mo ago
      I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication, that could just as easily be written by a LLM (and transcribed by a human onto paper).
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - ImPostingOnHN 10mo ago
        I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication between people. Automated systems sending people unsolicited, unwanted emails is more commonly known as spam. Especially when the spam comes with a notice that it is from an automated system and replies will be automated as well.
        deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
lwhi 10mo ago
There aren't any rules that prevent us from changing course. The points you raise, literally, do not affect a thing.
odiroot 10mo ago
Pecunia non olet.
devnonymous 10mo ago
Can't speak for Rob Pile but my guess would be, yeah, it might seem hypocritical but it's a combination of seeing the slow decay of the open culture they once imagined culminating into this absolute shirking of responsibility while simultaneously exploiting labour, by those claiming to represent the culture, alongwith the retrospective tinge of guilt for having enabled it, that drrove this rant. Furthermore, w.r.t the points you raised - it's a matter of scale and utility. Compared to everything that has come before, GenAI is spectacularly inefficient in terms of utility per unit of compute (however you might want to define these). There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be. The egarness and will to throw money and resources at this surpasses the crypto mania which was just as worthless. Even if you consider Rob a hypocrite , he isn't alone in his frustration and anger at the degradation of the promise of Open Culture.
- lukan 10mo ago
  "There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be" People being more productive with writing code, making music or writing documents fpr whatever is not a improvement for them and therefore for society? Or do you claim that is all imaginary? Or negated by the energy cost?
  - devnonymous 10mo ago
    I claim that the new code, music or documents have not added anything significant/noteworthy/impactful to society except for the self-perpetuating lie that it would, all the while regurgitating, at high speeds, what was stolen. And all at significant opportunity cost (in terms of computing and investment) If it was as life altering as they claim where's that novel work of art (in your examples..of code, music or literature) that truly could not have been produced without GenAI and fundamentally changed the art form ? Surely, with all that ^increased productivity^ we'd have seen the impact equivalent of linux, apache, nginx, git, redis, sqlite, ... Etc being released every couple of weeks instead of yet another VSCode clone./s
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
My guess is the scale has changed? They used to do AI stuff, but it wasn't until OpenAI (anyone feel free to correct me) went ahead and scaled up the hardware and discovered that more hardware = more useful LLM, that they all started ramping up on hardware. It was like the Bitcoin mining craze, but probably worse.
tgv 10mo ago
Oh look, the purity police have arrived, and this time they're the AI-bros. How righteous does one have to be before being allowed to voice criticism?
- cons0le 10mo ago
  I've tried many times here to voice my reservations against AI. I've been accused of being on the "anti AI hype train" multiple times today. As if there isn't a massive pro AI hype train. I watched an nfl game for the first time in 5 years, and saw no less than 8 AI commercials. AI Is being forced on people. In commercials people were using it to generate holiday cards for God sake. I can't imagine something more cold and impersonal. I don't want that garbage. Our time on earth is to short to wade through LLM slop text
  - stavros 10mo ago
    I don't know your stance on AI, but "AI is being forced on people because I saw a company offering AI greeting cards" is not a stance I'd call reasonable.
    - cons0le 10mo ago
      If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want. It all stinks of resume-driven development
      - stavros 10mo ago
        How are you being forced to use these features? I don't think I've seen a single one I couldn't just... not use.
bgwalter 10mo ago
There is a difference between providing a useful service (web search for example) and running slop generators for modified TikTok clips, code theft and Internet propaganda. If he is currently at Google: congratulations on this principled stance, he deserves a lot of respect.
api 10mo ago
The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now. I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages. His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience. It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact. It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless. There’s more but that’s the gist of it. That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.
- mikojan 10mo ago
  You do not seem to be familiar with Rob Pike. He is known for major contributions to Unix, Plan 9, UTF-8, and modern systems programming, and he has this to say about his dream setup[0]: > I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that. [0]: https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
mikojan 10mo ago
OpenAI's internal target of ~250 GW of compute capacity by 2033 would require about as much electricity as the whole of India's current national electricity consumption[0]. [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openais-colossal-ai-data-center-targets-would-consume-as-much-electricity-as-entire-nation-of-india-250gw-target-would-require-30-million-gpus-annually-to-ensure-continuous-operation-emit-twice-as-much-carbon-dioxide-as-exxonmobil https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
- wpm 10mo ago
  My favorite factoid is that the most energetic power production facility on the planet is the Three Gorges Dam, with a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW. That dam took 10 years to build and cost $30B. And OpenAI needs more than ten of them in 7 years.
MrDarcy 10mo ago
They are building data centers of TPUs now, not general purpose processors.
inlined 10mo ago
Google had achieved carbon neutrality and committed to wiping out their carbon legacy until AI.
pokstad 10mo ago
This reminds me of how many Facebook employees were mad at Zuckerberg for going MAGA, but didn’t make any loud noise at the rapid rise of teenagers committing suicide or the misinformation and censorship done by their platform. People have blinders on.
- watwut 10mo ago
  Zuckenberg going MAGA and misinformation on facebook are the same thing. And liberals were criticising facebook for years for misinformation on platform. You needed to read only conservative resources to not be aware that such criticism exists.
pkulak 10mo ago
The difference in carbon emissions for a search query vs an LLM generation are on the order of exhaling vs driving a hummer. So I can reduce this disingenuous argument to: > You spent your whole life breathing, and now you're complaining about SUVs? What a hypocrite.
_ea1k 10mo ago
Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's radar here. The data center is about 300 MW, if I'm not mistaken. Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW. Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem! This is an all too common pattern.
- nikanj 10mo ago
  How many more jobs are there at the aluminum plant than a datacenter? Big datacenters employ mid-hundreds of people
  - 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
    Not only would I suspect that an aluminum plant employs far more people, it is an attainable job. Presumably minimal qualifications for some menial tasks, whereas you might need a certain level of education/training to get a more prestigious and out of reach job at a datacenter. Easier for a politician to latch onto manufacturing jobs.
    - squigz 10mo ago
      I'm pretty sure both the plant and the DC have both "menial" jobs and highly-skilled jobs. You don't just chuck ore into a furnace and wait for a few seconds in reality.
kurikuri 10mo ago
Someone making a complain does not imply that they were ok with it prior to the complaint. Why are you muddying the waters?
planb 10mo ago
Even if I don't share the opinion, I can understand the moral stance against genAI. But it strikes me as a bit unfaithful when people argue against it from all kinds of angles that somehow never seemed to bother them before. It's like all those anti-copyright activists from the 90s (fighting the music and film industry) that suddenly hate AI for copyright infringements. Maybe what's bothering the critics is actually deeper than the simple reasons they give. For many, it might be hate against big tech and capitalism itself, but hate for genAI is not just coming from the left. Maybe people feel that their identity is threatened, that something inherently human is in the process of being lost, but they cannot articulate this fear and fall back to proxy arguments like lost jobs, copyright, the environment or the shortcomings of the current implementations of genAI?
Ritewut 10mo ago
The dose makes the poison. Data centers are just now being built haphazardly without cause because they anticipate demand that does not yet exist.
duxup 10mo ago
I do wonder about how we as individuals influence this stuff. We want free services and stuff, complain about advertising / sign up for the google's of the world like crazy. Bitch about data-centers while consuming every meme possible ...
jimbob45 10mo ago
Data centers seem poised to make renewable energy sources more profitable than they have ever been. Nuclear plants are springing up everywhere and old plants are being un-decommissioned. Isn’t there a strong case to be made that AI has helped align the planet toward a more sustainable future?
LastTrain 10mo ago
I really hate this kind of lazy argument: Oh. do you use toilet paper? Then kindly keep your mouth shut while we burn the planet down.
EdiX 10mo ago
AFAIK Rob Pike has been retired for years.
a456463 10mo ago
Everything has been doing has been bad faith and harmful since a looong time
kristianp 10mo ago
Rob Pike retired from google a few years back. As per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398351

surajrmal 10mo ago

Rob retired from Google years ago fwiw.

gilrain 10mo ago

[flagged]

ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
I think that criticizing when it benefits the person criticizing, and absense of criticism when criticism would hurt the person criticizing, makes the argument less persuasive. This isn't ad hom, it's a heuristic for weighting arguments. It doesn't prove whether an argument has merit or not, but if I have hundreds of arguments to think about, it helps organizing them.
ViktorRay 10mo ago
Someone else in the thread posted this article earlier. https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/artificial-intelligence-and-the-environment-putting-the-numbers-into-perspective/ https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar... It seems video streaming, like Youtube which is owned by Google, uses much more energy than generative AI.
- oblio 10mo ago
  It's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters. I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).
- j0lol 10mo ago
  Thankfully YouTube provides a lot more value to society than gen-AI.
  - Marha01 10mo ago
    This is a subjective value judgement and many disagree.
  - moltopoco 10mo ago
    To adults? Certainly. But keep in mind that many children are now growing up with this crap glued to their eyes from age 2: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=funny+3d+animals https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=funny+3d+animal... (That's just one genre of brainrot I came across recently. I also had my front page flooded with monkey-themed AI slop because someone in my household watched animal documentaries. Thanks algorithm!)
  - victorbjorklund 10mo ago
    Doubtful. If you look at viewed content it’s probably 90% views from brainrot content.
  - bongodongobob 10mo ago
    Not for me.
- ori_b 10mo ago
  This is based on assuming 5 questions a day. YouTube would be very power efficient as well if people only watched 5 seconds of video a day. How many tokens do you use a day?
  - moralestapia 10mo ago
    It would be less power efficient as some of the associated costs/resources happen per request and also benefit from scale.
- squeaky-clean 10mo ago
  Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison. The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.
  - lokar 10mo ago
    And it’s fair assume much of the time watching streaming would instead have been spent on TV
  - easterncalculus 10mo ago
    > Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison. Neither is comparing text output to streaming video
    - pardon_me 10mo ago
      Compare generative AI video to streamed video, and generative text to streamed text etc. The differences are closer to an order of magnitude. The comparison to be made is the processing power required to deliver the content, not to display it.
- Verdex 10mo ago
  A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However: 1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs 2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus. 3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test. Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.
- cowl 10mo ago
  Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.
jabedude 10mo ago
I think it's incredibly obvious how it connects to his "argument" - nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI. So dressing up his hatred of the technology in vague environmental concerns is laughably transparent. He and everyone who agrees with his post simply don't like generative AI and don't actually care about "recyclable data centers" or the rape of the natural world. Those concerns are just cudgels to be wielded against a vague threatening enemy when convenient, and completely ignored when discussing the technologies they work on and like
- Arodex 10mo ago
  You simply don't like any criticism of AI, as shown by your false assertions that Pike works at Google (he left), or the fact Google and others were trying to make their data centers emit less CO2 - and that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI. And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time. If it is the former, it can't be the latter. If it is the latter, it can't be the former.
  - ywn 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - mrwrong 10mo ago
      do you get scared when you hear other ghost stories too?
    - Arodex 10mo ago
      Why should I be concerned with something that doesn't exist, will certainly never exist, and even if I were generous and entertained that something that breaks every physical law of the universe starting with entropy could exist, would result in "it" torturing a copy of myself to try to influence me in the past? Nothing there makes sense at any level. But people getting fired and electricity bills skyrocketing (as well as RAM etc.) are there right now.
  - tarsinge 10mo ago
cm2012 10mo ago
Do you really think that the only reason people would be turned off by this post by Rob Pike is that they are being paid by big AI?
- gilrain 10mo ago
  No, which is why I didn’t say that. I do think astroturfing could explain the rapid parroting of extremely similar ad hominems, which is what I actually did imply.
  - cm2012 10mo ago
    Astroturfing means a company is paying people to comment. No one in this entire thread was paid to comment.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hnisforjakases 10mo ago
    Buddy it's not astroturfing if people hate your favorite thing.
gyanchawdhary 10mo ago
being inside the machine doesn’t exempt you from tradeoff analysis, kind sir
- jabedude 10mo ago
  As it so happens Rob Pike performed absolutely 0 tradeoff analysis
macinjosh 10mo ago
This is the most astro-turfy comment ITT
lamontcg 10mo ago
It is the same energy as the "you criticize society, yet you participate in society" meme. Catching someone out on their "hypocrisy" when they hit a limit of what they'll tolerate is really a low-effort "gotcha". And it probably isn't astroturf, way too many people just think this way.

hanwenn 10mo ago

Rob left Google a couple of years ago.

ofrzeta 10mo ago
So what's he doing now? Is he retired?
- moralestapia 10mo ago
  Not "retired" but a similar term.
- pkal 10mo ago
  I think so, or at least something like that. In https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode60-rob-pike https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode60-rob-pike he mentioned that he has now been working more on Ivy (https://github.com/robpike/ivy https://github.com/robpike/ivy) in his spare time.
W-Stool 10mo ago
What about Ken Thompson?

oblio 10mo ago

Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure? The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal. You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries can be cached, too).

jstummbillig 10mo ago
Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
- oblio 10mo ago
  > jstummbillig: > Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM) Why would you lie: https://imgur.com/a/1AEIQzI https://imgur.com/a/1AEIQzI ??? For those that don't want to see the Gemini answer screenshot, best case scenario 10x, worst case scenario 100x, definitely not "3x that rounds to 0x", or to put it in Gemini's words: > Summary > Right now, asking Gemini a question is roughly the environmental equivalent of running a standard 60-watt lightbulb for a few minutes, whereas a Google Search is like a momentary flicker. The industry is racing to make AI as efficient as Search, but for now, it remains a luxury resource.
  - jstummbillig 10mo ago
    Are you okay? You ventured 100x and that's wrong. What would you know about the last time I checked was, and in what context exactly? Anyway, good job on doing what I suggest you do, I guess. The reason why it all rounds to 0 is that the google search will not give you an answer. It gives you a list of web pages, that you then need to visit (often times more than just one of them) generating more requests, and, more importantly, it will ask more of your time, the human, whose cumulative energy expenditure to be able to ask to be begin with is quite significant – and that you then will have not to spend on other things that a LLM is not able to do for you.

29athrowaway 10mo ago

They claim they have net zero carbon footprint, or carbon neutrality. In reality what they do is pay "carbon credits" (money) to some random dude that takes the money and does nothing with it. The entire carbon credit economy is bullshit. Very similar to how putting recyclables in a different color bin doesn't do shit for the environment in practice.

lokar 10mo ago
They know the credits are not a good system. The 1st choice has always been a contract with a green supplier, often helping to build out production. And they have a lot of that, with more each year. But construction is slow, in the mean time they use credits, which are better than nothing.
Tepix 10mo ago
They don't have it. They aimed for it. However: "Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website" as noticed by the Canadian National Observer https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/google-net-zero-sustainability https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/g...

nkohari 10mo ago

Yeah, I'm conflicted about the use of AI for creative endeavors as much as anyone, but Google is an advertising company. It was acceptable for them to build a massive empire around mining private information for the purposes of advertisement, but generative AI is now somehow beyond the pale? People can change their mind, but Rob crashing out about AI now feels awfully revisionist. (NB: I am currently working in AI, and have previously worked in adtech. I'm not claiming to be above the fray in any way.)

skywhopper 10mo ago
It’s certainly possible to see genAI as a step beyond adtech as a waste of resources built on an unethical foundation of misuse of data. Just because you’re okay with lumping them together doesn’t mean Rob has to.
- nkohari 10mo ago
  Yeah, of course, he's entitled to his opinion. To me, it just feels slightly disingenuous considering what Google's core business has always been (and still is).
luke5441 10mo ago
Google's official mission was "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", not to maximize advertising sales. Obviously now it is mostly the latter and minimally the former. What capitalism giveth, it taketh away. (Or: Capitalism without good market design that causes multiple competitors in every market doesn't work.)
WD-42 10mo ago
Ad tech is a scourge as well. You think Rob Pike was super happy about it? He’s not even at google anymore. The amount of “he’s not allowed to have an opinion because” in this thread is exhausting. Nothing stands up to the purity test.
- itsdrewmiller 10mo ago

skywhopper 10mo ago

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

InsideOutSanta 10mo ago

Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack. Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

xorgun 10mo ago
Cutting trees for fuel and paper to send a letter burned resources. Nobody gained in that transaction
- Blackthorn 10mo ago
  I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans.
  - gcau 10mo ago
    I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication, that could just as easily be written by a LLM (and transcribed by a human onto paper).
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ImPostingOnHN 10mo ago
      I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication between people. Automated systems sending people unsolicited, unwanted emails is more commonly known as spam. Especially when the spam comes with a notice that it is from an automated system and replies will be automated as well.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]

lwhi 10mo ago

There aren't any rules that prevent us from changing course. The points you raise, literally, do not affect a thing.

odiroot 10mo ago

Pecunia non olet.

devnonymous 10mo ago

Can't speak for Rob Pile but my guess would be, yeah, it might seem hypocritical but it's a combination of seeing the slow decay of the open culture they once imagined culminating into this absolute shirking of responsibility while simultaneously exploiting labour, by those claiming to represent the culture, alongwith the retrospective tinge of guilt for having enabled it, that drrove this rant. Furthermore, w.r.t the points you raised - it's a matter of scale and utility. Compared to everything that has come before, GenAI is spectacularly inefficient in terms of utility per unit of compute (however you might want to define these). There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be. The egarness and will to throw money and resources at this surpasses the crypto mania which was just as worthless. Even if you consider Rob a hypocrite , he isn't alone in his frustration and anger at the degradation of the promise of Open Culture.

lukan 10mo ago
"There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be" People being more productive with writing code, making music or writing documents fpr whatever is not a improvement for them and therefore for society? Or do you claim that is all imaginary? Or negated by the energy cost?
- devnonymous 10mo ago
  I claim that the new code, music or documents have not added anything significant/noteworthy/impactful to society except for the self-perpetuating lie that it would, all the while regurgitating, at high speeds, what was stolen. And all at significant opportunity cost (in terms of computing and investment) If it was as life altering as they claim where's that novel work of art (in your examples..of code, music or literature) that truly could not have been produced without GenAI and fundamentally changed the art form ? Surely, with all that ^increased productivity^ we'd have seen the impact equivalent of linux, apache, nginx, git, redis, sqlite, ... Etc being released every couple of weeks instead of yet another VSCode clone./s

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

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

tgv 10mo ago

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

cons0le 10mo ago
I've tried many times here to voice my reservations against AI. I've been accused of being on the "anti AI hype train" multiple times today. As if there isn't a massive pro AI hype train. I watched an nfl game for the first time in 5 years, and saw no less than 8 AI commercials. AI Is being forced on people. In commercials people were using it to generate holiday cards for God sake. I can't imagine something more cold and impersonal. I don't want that garbage. Our time on earth is to short to wade through LLM slop text
- stavros 10mo ago
  I don't know your stance on AI, but "AI is being forced on people because I saw a company offering AI greeting cards" is not a stance I'd call reasonable.
  - cons0le 10mo ago
    If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want. It all stinks of resume-driven development
    - stavros 10mo ago
      How are you being forced to use these features? I don't think I've seen a single one I couldn't just... not use.

bgwalter 10mo ago

There is a difference between providing a useful service (web search for example) and running slop generators for modified TikTok clips, code theft and Internet propaganda. If he is currently at Google: congratulations on this principled stance, he deserves a lot of respect.

api 10mo ago

The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now. I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages. His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience. It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact. It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless. There’s more but that’s the gist of it. That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.

mikojan 10mo ago
You do not seem to be familiar with Rob Pike. He is known for major contributions to Unix, Plan 9, UTF-8, and modern systems programming, and he has this to say about his dream setup[0]: > I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that. [0]: https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

mikojan 10mo ago

OpenAI's internal target of ~250 GW of compute capacity by 2033 would require about as much electricity as the whole of India's current national electricity consumption[0]. [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openais-colossal-ai-data-center-targets-would-consume-as-much-electricity-as-entire-nation-of-india-250gw-target-would-require-30-million-gpus-annually-to-ensure-continuous-operation-emit-twice-as-much-carbon-dioxide-as-exxonmobil https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

wpm 10mo ago
My favorite factoid is that the most energetic power production facility on the planet is the Three Gorges Dam, with a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW. That dam took 10 years to build and cost $30B. And OpenAI needs more than ten of them in 7 years.

MrDarcy 10mo ago

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

inlined 10mo ago

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

pokstad 10mo ago

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

watwut 10mo ago
Zuckenberg going MAGA and misinformation on facebook are the same thing. And liberals were criticising facebook for years for misinformation on platform. You needed to read only conservative resources to not be aware that such criticism exists.

pkulak 10mo ago

The difference in carbon emissions for a search query vs an LLM generation are on the order of exhaling vs driving a hummer. So I can reduce this disingenuous argument to: > You spent your whole life breathing, and now you're complaining about SUVs? What a hypocrite.

_ea1k 10mo ago

Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's radar here. The data center is about 300 MW, if I'm not mistaken. Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW. Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem! This is an all too common pattern.

nikanj 10mo ago
How many more jobs are there at the aluminum plant than a datacenter? Big datacenters employ mid-hundreds of people
- 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
  Not only would I suspect that an aluminum plant employs far more people, it is an attainable job. Presumably minimal qualifications for some menial tasks, whereas you might need a certain level of education/training to get a more prestigious and out of reach job at a datacenter. Easier for a politician to latch onto manufacturing jobs.
  - squigz 10mo ago
    I'm pretty sure both the plant and the DC have both "menial" jobs and highly-skilled jobs. You don't just chuck ore into a furnace and wait for a few seconds in reality.

kurikuri 10mo ago

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

planb 10mo ago

Even if I don't share the opinion, I can understand the moral stance against genAI. But it strikes me as a bit unfaithful when people argue against it from all kinds of angles that somehow never seemed to bother them before. It's like all those anti-copyright activists from the 90s (fighting the music and film industry) that suddenly hate AI for copyright infringements. Maybe what's bothering the critics is actually deeper than the simple reasons they give. For many, it might be hate against big tech and capitalism itself, but hate for genAI is not just coming from the left. Maybe people feel that their identity is threatened, that something inherently human is in the process of being lost, but they cannot articulate this fear and fall back to proxy arguments like lost jobs, copyright, the environment or the shortcomings of the current implementations of genAI?

Ritewut 10mo ago

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

duxup 10mo ago

I do wonder about how we as individuals influence this stuff. We want free services and stuff, complain about advertising / sign up for the google's of the world like crazy. Bitch about data-centers while consuming every meme possible ...

jimbob45 10mo ago

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

LastTrain 10mo ago

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

EdiX 10mo ago

AFAIK Rob Pike has been retired for years.

a456463 10mo ago

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

kristianp 10mo ago

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