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Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

380 points by nothrowaways 5mo ago

LoganDark 5mo ago
> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.” This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way." Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.
- stellamariesays 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - gk1 5mo ago
    Such a good comment from a new account. Please post here more often :)
    - 0x000xca0xfe 5mo ago
      It's clearly coming from a claw agent. I'm sure they will post more :)
      - gk1 5mo ago
        If true... On the one hand: they fooled me. On the other hand: hey, if the comments are that good, keep going?
        0x000xca0xfe 5mo ago
        Of course I don't have proof but this looks mighty suspicious: https://github.com/stellamariesays/Manifold/issues/54 https://github.com/stellamariesays/Manifold/issues/54
- gk1 5mo ago
  That quote reads totally differently to me. It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.
  - LoganDark 5mo ago
    What does it read like to you? To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsibility to prevent the AI revolution from being as bad. All evidence points to it being worse exactly because of corporations like Google. I get that this guy is only the former CEO but the speech seems kinda tone-deaf to the reality here, and I bet that's why he got booed.
    - gk1 5mo ago
      Was commenting on the quote in particular. It’s just a version of “the future is in your hands” which you can find in one form or another in many graduation speeches. Just seems odd to me to read a cliche line as something cynical. Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech: > “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.” Come to think of it… very appropriate today!
      - LoganDark 5mo ago
        I was reading the quote in-context, so it makes sense that it'd read differently out of context.
- abejfehr 5mo ago
  I’m pretty sure I heard the same quote at my high school and university graduation ceremonies, and those were many years before AI. It’s a standard way to inspire new grads, right?
  - LoganDark 5mo ago
    I think yes, it just doesn't feel in good taste given the topic of his speech. It feels like the speech makes it imply icky things.
- doginasuit 5mo ago
  > It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not entirely within the power of the creators of technology to control how it is used. In our case, they actively market the technology as replacement for human intelligence, at which it fails miserably and yet companies force it through. I would love to see a more grounded frontier AI company, but beyond certain safety measures, they can't stop people from misusing it.
  - LoganDark 5mo ago
    I didn't say anything about creators of technology, only implementers of technology; people using the technology that was created (however so it was).
davemp 5mo ago
Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
- cj 5mo ago
  > Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer — and was immediately met with boos. That's a shame. I assume the reason for the "deep distain" is rooted in fear of change, fear that LLM will make it harder to have a successful career. That's a pretty negative mindset to have as a college grad just entering the workforce. I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
  - lazide 5mo ago
    Why would a bunch of folks studying for white collar work, be happy with a technology that a bunch of capitalists (literally) keep selling as eliminating white collar workers? notably, I haven’t seen any ACTUAL technical improvements from LLMs, just a massive amount of slop. The ‘improvements’ are in volume of slop, not quality.
  - dekoidal 5mo ago
    You’re wrong to assume that
  - gcr 5mo ago
    For college graduates, LLM tech is an existential threat to their livelihoods by making it so much harder to start a career without connections or pedigree.
    - new_account_100 5mo ago
      If no one is hiring, connections or pedigree need to get extraordinarily elite before you can leverage them to get an entry-level software developer job.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
xg15 5mo ago
> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.” This sounds cynical if there is a kinglike president, surrounded by a small clique of tech billionaires who all are becoming increasingly open about the kind of future they want to realise.
- poszlem 5mo ago
  I think this is a major reason behind the backlash against AI. In the past, people celebrated tech billionaires because there was a widespread belief that, someday, they might join their ranks. But wealth inequality may have now reached a point where that illusion no longer works.
  - detourdog 5mo ago
    I think it’s that the current crop of tech billionaires are tone deaf douche bags working against the common good.
    - folkrav 5mo ago
      You do not amass those levels of wealth without being a tone deaf douche bag in the first place.
- ilitirit 5mo ago
  It's also one of my major issues I have with how this is being introduced into many enterprises, including the company I work for: "Here's AI. Figure out how we can make money from it. We're adding it to your performance reviews" Basically, here's a solution. Find problems for it.
  - horsawlarway 5mo ago
    Yeah, I also see this occurring. It's just wildly unprofessional from management, in no particular order my frustrations are: 1. A majority of planning documents from management have become LLM output, which no longer actually matches the desired/required work (but it sure looks nice if you don't have to read all of it). 2. Management undertones are pretty clearly: "Figure out how to use AI to replace yourself." 3. The visibility of leaderboards that promote spend with no relationship to output - ex: employees who spend the most tokens are rewarded, even when there's no equivalent boost in productivity. --- My take is that AI is actually a managerial crucible - aka, a great filter for companies with poor management practices and processes. Company management needs to shift in response to AI more than engineering, and I don't think most are prepared.
nilirl 5mo ago
> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with. I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.
- new_account_100 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
  > Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom. > graduates embraced freedom and boo'd schmidt. Schmidt: No, not like that! I think that the deeper topic is that there is a sense of double-speak going around, they mean freedom but what they really mean is to use the word and its meaning and to attach it to their own goals, in this case AI because google has a vested interest in that.
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    Billionaires’ and businesses’ freedom to replace creative and white collar workers with obedient and 24/7-working AI.
    - joquarky 5mo ago
      Any time rich people talk about freedom, they mean rich people freedom.
- berkay 5mo ago
  It's not clear to me why they booed him. you think for only asserting predictions that benefit him? Not because they agree on those predictions and don't want that future, blame him for this role in it?
  - mb_thd 5mo ago
    I think it's not clear to him either why he was booed.
lifestyleguru 5mo ago
It's industrial revolution which doesn't want to happen. Unless the new industrial revolution means those unwilling to attend to billionaires and oligarchs are to be priced out of housing and life in general, this one is swiftly approaching. I mean forget housing, even getting good computer is out of reach by now.
- axpy906 5mo ago
  PC gamer here. This checks out.
imadhiskenderbe 5mo ago
[flagged]
- nba456_ 5mo ago
  They don't want hope, they want to doom
  - throwaway173738 5mo ago
    I don’t think it’s dooming to realize that these tools are only ever used to extract more of your life faster. When was the last time a technological advancement let us work less? Guys like Eric Schmidt preach that it makes you more productive because they expect more productivity for the same salary. Anyone that falls off the hamster wheel wasn’t worthy.
- lazide 5mo ago
  what hope exactly?
  - imadhiskenderbe 5mo ago
    From what I read, he stated that even the coming of computers in the first place threatened many jobs, also many fresh graduates felt probably the same way back then, but everything worked out in the end.
    - dominotw 5mo ago
      "everything works out in the end" lol that should fill them with hope and confidence. great speech.
    - moichael 5mo ago
      [dead]
    - sumeno 5mo ago
      Everything worked out in the end for Eric Schmidt because he rode computers to billionaire status. It did not always work out so great for the people who were replaced, and the people who were replaced were a much smaller percentage of the workforce than the tech CEOs are claiming will be replaced by AI. People largely go to college to train for the white collar jobs that tech CEOs are claiming are going to be entirely replaced by LLMs, where's the hope for the people that just spent six figures learning how to do jobs that people like Schmidt are trying their hardest to eliminate?
xt00 5mo ago
Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but not them.. where does that end?
- Zigurd 5mo ago
  It's worse than having to pick one position or the other: both are hypocritical, and both are deceptive hype mongering. Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to use that expertise?
  - xt00 5mo ago
    Totally agree — if AI tools are already or nearly at the point where you can say “write a program to do X” and it does it, that’s like telling people they need to learn skills to order something at McDonald’s. The goal is for the barrier to entry to be basically zero. Oh sure today there are things like “I made a claude.md file that does this and I wrote a really clever prompt!!” But the goal is for that work to be deleted as well — where is the magic skill that is / will be needed?
    - Zigurd 5mo ago
      I use coding agents every day for non-trivial projects. But I can definitely say that a prompt of the form "Write a program that does X" will earn you a git rollback of a mess, unless what you want has been done a bazillion times before. Peak efficiency in using coding agents is a weird balancing act at this point in the development of coding agents: being too incremental and detailed is inefficient, but if you let it rip on a task with multiple sub tasks you have to be ready for the coding agent to get utterly lost while providing you with only hints at what made it to lose its way. It's like an inexperienced intern with a high opinion of its competency. LLMs trained for coding are most productive when pushed to their limits, but that's where they start to fall down.
collabs 5mo ago
Funny enough by attending and booing they are already doing their part instead of boycotting the commencement
schnebbau 5mo ago
[flagged]
booleandilemma 5mo ago
No one wants AI outside a small minority of tech people.
rdtsc 5mo ago
> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.” How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.
- 329a8Hqag 5mo ago
  It means nothing, as you imply. He is improvising and deflects with a point that he thinks will land with his audience and detract from the issue.
  - kubb 5mo ago
    Utterances that come out of executive’s mouths don’t have truth values. They’re sounds meant to irritate people’s nervous systems to achieve the exec’s goals.
    - new_account_100 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    - setsewerd 5mo ago
      Relevant Kendall Roy quote: "Words are just uh, what? Nothing. Complicated airflow."
- new_account_100 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - new_account_100 5mo ago
    Didn't we just put millions of immigrants in concentration camps for stealing our jobs (1 job per immigrant)? With that in mind, what should we do with the bosses who stole thousands of jobs each and shipped them to India and Poland?
genxy 5mo ago
Eric Schmidt really needs to hire a handler.
- ceejayoz 5mo ago
  Every billionaire needs to hire someone they can't fire with the authority to smack them and say "no, bad billionaire". The alternative is like Killgrave in Jessica Jones. People who never hear no break.
new_account_100 5mo ago
The LLM marketing scheme has essentially been an assault on the labor value of these graduates. I don't think boos are far enough.
sega_sai 5mo ago
I believe that AI is truly revolutionary, but I struggle to feel sympathy to these large companies who (while building tremendously powerful tools) also work on extracting as much money they can from users, potentially making millions of them redundant while paying as little as possible for used texts, codes. In some sense this is how capitalism is supposed to work. But I am not required to like the bosses who pontificate about the future opportunities. (A somewhat contrasting behaviour is say l deepseek who releases their models to the public, and I would not boo them)
_fat_santa 5mo ago
The biggest issue I see with discourse around AI is you have two voices: one is of the tech CEO's and other elites that talk about it largely in the abstract and how it's going to take everyone's jobs, and then you have folks on Twitter/X that talk about things that they are actually using it for. Generally what I found listening to both sides is the latter group is very optimistic about AI and what it can do while the former group tries to be optimistic but just ends up coming off as doomery about it. And the problem that the AI space has right now is the doomery group is just more visible to the average person and thus the average person gets their opinion informed by that group. I really wish there was a way to better surface the sentiment that I see on X about AI, the folks there aren't talking about how AI will replace you at work and make you obsolete, they use AI every day and they know that's just not realistic, not now and probably not ever. Rather they talk about all the cool things that it can help you do now, and how it can be a force multiplier in the best sense. The problem with the elites talking about AI is everything they say is just so detached and abstract. And their giant egos prevent them from seeing the damage they are doing to the field.
- sweezyjeezy 5mo ago
  And how about the group of kids who are just graduating college, and entering a job market where it's non-abstractly harder to to land a junior role as it's been in decades? It's the elites who have their finger on that scale, not the twitter folks.
- UncleMeat 5mo ago
  I just don't think that "I use AI to help plan a vacation or make a funny picture to share with my friends or create a study plan" outweighs the very obvious challenges that AI is creating for new graduates as they enter the job market. I'm sure even that a lot of these students used AI to cheat. But the stuff from the rich bosses isn't just rhetoric. These students are graduating into an extremely messy job market and AI is directly to blame. That affects students in a huge way.
mbgerring 5mo ago
Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to be the “good” outcome that e.g. OpenAI is playing for. I don’t understand why any of you think that’s good or positive or desirable.
- zemvpferreira 5mo ago
  Sure. The machine gods are benevolent gods who care deeply for their creator-species. We are freed from labour and troubles into a paradise, to eat peaches and cream and make love under the sun. Rich or poor, we'll all be emperors of our domain, free to do as we please. Our lives keep getting better and better with technological progress, at least in the scope of our social-capitalist system. They will only get better until they end.
  - mbgerring 5mo ago
    I need you to understand that if you actually believe this, normal people think you are an evil lunatic.
    - zemvpferreira 5mo ago
      I don't think you need to worry yourself so much on my account friend. You asked, I told. Let's keep it at that. Also feel free to keep the name-calling to yourself.
    - DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago
      You asked for an optimistic case and he gave you one. One thing I really like about LLMs is that they don't engage in this type of petty deceit where they ask a question and then insult you for answering.
      - 5mo ago
Toutouxc 5mo ago
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hansmayer 5mo ago
The kids are alright ;)
- swed420 5mo ago
  For now. When the ramen noodles run out, how many will begrudgingly create a linkedin account and pretend to embrace AI while they fight for the remaining/dwindling job openings?
  - d3rockk 5mo ago
    Question to your question: How many will actually get a job? When the system fails to reward compliance, that begrudging conformity will eventually curdle into systemic disruption. History has proven so time & time again. Lock a massive class of highly educated, financially desperate young people out of the economy.. they won't just starve in silence. They organize unions, radicalize politics, and ultimately rewrite the rules of the game.
    - swed420 5mo ago
      Drones and robot killer dogs a la Back Mirror will keep everybody in check until they die an early preventable death from being lied to about COVID, etc. History might rhyme, until it doesn't, due to paradigm shifts like these.
      - bigyabai 5mo ago
        Expectation: In 10 years, killer drones will corral us away from quarantine zones to forcibly infect millions of hapless civilians. The proletariat will revolt and wage civil war against the state, sending millions of shock troops to fight for representation in government or dismantle the governing body itself. They will die peacefully, knowing they were right. Reality: People will scroll TikTok for another decade and contract sedentary lifestyle diseases that they blame on others instead of themselves. Constant influence campaigns and surveillance will keep them divided and give them new scapegoats to assuage their mounting insecurity and shame for their generation. They will die outraged, knowing they were wrong.
hilariously 5mo ago
After hearing that padlum from a billionaire I wouldn't boo, I would rush the stage to hit him with my shoes.
LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
The guy has been a stochastic parrot of A2Z talking points for years. What's new is we have reached the finding out phase of telling an entire generation of children who just spent 6 figures and 4ish years on education that they will be replaced by the irresponsibly deployed toy of the old white dudes who made college that expensive in the first place. AI as a technology is amazeballs in precisely the same way AI thought leaders, executives and mid-level management are not. And yet, here we are poisoning its innovation with late stage capitalism and privatized panopticons. Yuck.
- eooekwe 5mo ago
  Have you seen what is alleged about the guy? Funny how no one in this thread brings it up
  - LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
    Yeah, he's wicked rapey and he's always been a total manwhore creep. How the heck did he survive #metoo unscathed? And I know, I know, here are the helpful links before anyone pretends they haven't heard any of this... https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/judge-sends-former-google-chiefs-110000697.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/judge-sends-former-googl... https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5497193/exclusive-how-googles-eric-schmidt-lost-his-mistress-his-partner-and-steve-jobs https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5497193/exclusive-how-googles... https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/3/16/8227625/eric-schmidt-load-foot-in-mouth-dot-exe https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/3/16/8227625/eric-schmidt... TLDR: promoted well beyond his level of incompetence, but that's the American way now I guess.
    - UncleMeat 5mo ago
      Rich sex pests engaged in a coordinated effort to destroy #metoo and protect themselves basically as soon as the movement started. You can even see a lot of this in the Epstein files. The backlash to #metoo was larger than the movement ever was (while not referring to the same event, Susan Faludi's Backlash is a great discussion of this). The effect is that a ton of these guys either experienced no consequence whatsoever or were able to lay low for a couple years and return to their positions of power.
arunmathur 5mo ago
This caught my attention because I really enjoy hearing ES speak about AI. Directionally, I’m listening for a roadmap. Is the problem I’m solving right now even worthwhile? As an avid user of these tools, am I in the driver seat or am I a passenger? I feel like the latter. For some context, according to the daily beast, student groups at the university distributed fliers urging students to “turn their backs to the stage” or “boo” during the former executive’s speech. The fliers stated that they wanted to “make it clear that the University of Arizona and greater community that we represent, whether from Tucson or beyond, do not support abusers being platformed.” Schmidt was accused by Michelle Ritter in a 2021 lawsuit of “forcibly raping” her during a trip off the coast of Mexico and later initiating sex without her consent in 2023 during the annual Burning Man festival.
oompydoompy74 5mo ago
Nobody wants the pile of Schmidt you are selling fam
therobots927 5mo ago
HBO’s Silicon Valley looks more and more like a documentary every day. The out of touch antics of Gavin Belson or Peter Gregory are fucking spot on.
elAhmo 5mo ago
Colossal failure to read the room, insane coming from an executive in charge of one of the most impactful companies of our lifetime.
- coldpie 5mo ago
  > insane coming from an executive I guess you haven't heard much from executives before? They are absolutely coocoo-bananas people.
quink 5mo ago
It feels also this speech was not really in any way related to AI per se. It was the Ayn Rand-esque hero, an Übermensch, who of course formed Google out of nothing proclaiming that individualism and egoism are the way to go, that they have a small alcove at best in between the productive assets of the factory owner who wields the materials to his will and creates his perfect city of perfect design that needs none of your contribution. That these graduates aren't be be valued by their creativity or self-worth but by the marginal contribution they may have towards his empire, to be discarded once they don't have anything to give. He's the ultimate factory owner, the owner of the factory that makes everything and brings light to all, and the masses just don't appreciate his brilliance and the brilliance of the other tech bros. None if it is particular to AI, it's just that AI is the latest tool with which the workers of the world are deprived of the means of production. They know that capitalism is healthiest when the wealth is distributed, and here the Randian hero tells them not that the wealth will be distributed, but only the labour and the AI will do most of the labour, and that the human contribution is a penny for themselves and 99 cents to those that already have a hundred billion, and excited with an incomparable glee Eric expresses that the datacenter that powers the AI will be the panopticon through which the factory owner will judge the productivity of his workers. It is such a horrifyingly dismal picture he painted right on their faces and if they would just allow that data center and stop booing him they'd understand, surely they must understand that he's the hero, that he and his Rearden Steel will make them the shining city that the unwashed masses for their utter collective incompetence cannot.
- quink 5mo ago
  It is of course, one step between this view and them being punished for having that view. One small step between being declared a luddite and the powers that be deciding that luddites aren't a thing we're to have.
m0llusk 5mo ago
It is interesting that his speech started strong and then ran aground and sunk on the same dangerous reef he began by pointing out: “The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you’re using now, also degraded the public square,” he said. “They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society.”
stego-tech 5mo ago
These people need to read the room better. AI Billionaire and AI Executive cohorts are openly advocating in media and the press for total job replacement by AI within a narrow time frame. Dario Amodei has spent years braying that AI will replace most or all jobs within half a decade; Sundar Pichai has openly told working folks the equivalent of "Good luck, fuckers" (his 2-DEC-2025 remarks about the working class "working through" social disruption forcibly imposed on them by his billionaire class); Microsoft's AI ghoul went on a media spree this year bragging that knowledge-work will be gone in eighteen months. It doesn't matter whether or not any of this is true, because these same students - the law students, the pre-med students, the political science students, the psychology and history and econ and tech students and the like, they all have to write essays about this, read newspaper articles about it, read journals about it. They see the actions taken by this same cohort of AI boosters in blocking regulatory reforms, in blocking social programs, in blocking work protections and social safety net expansions and tax reforms. These students aren't stupid, they see the naked hypocrisy on display by the people telling them the sky is falling and are rightfully enraged at it. You are telling fresh graduates, saddled with student debt, at a time of pride in their own accomplishments and uncertainty in their job prospects, to their face, that they have no future and that's going to be peachy-keen because everyone other than them will be better off as a result. And they wonder why they're so intensely hated.
d4rkp4ttern 5mo ago
This should probably be merged with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107
beej71 5mo ago
I know billionaires are generally out of touch with the trials of the common citizen, but can they be so out of touch that they think the promise that AI will take your job is going to resonate?
ankurdhama 5mo ago
LLMs (the current AI approach) are definitely useful tools BUT the cost of training and inference and creating bigger and bigger model to improve the "intelligence" is extremely high and the consequence of this high cost is having negative impact of average people whether it is in terms of job losses or rising cost of electricity and other stuff. Unless the industry is able to reduce the cost drastically and soon, it will have negative impact on all of us.
nojvek 5mo ago
Eric Schmidt made billions, probably 10s of billions from Google becoming an AI behemoth. The young graduates who can't find a job, will likely not be able to afford a median home in their 20-30s due to their debt growing faster than earnings. It is a stark difference. "You have the power to shape AI" - So many empty words spoken!
L-boog 5mo ago
The people behind pushing 'everyone needs to learn to code' are now the same pushing 'everyone must use AI'. The same Eric Schmidt that was pedaling 'I assume that everybody here agrees that globalization is wonderful' to a Davos crowd. The guy has always looked for way to keep humans as chattel.
- exdeejay_ 5mo ago
  *peddling
rotis 5mo ago
https://x.com/i/status/2053560589327180255 https://x.com/i/status/2053560589327180255 I sense a pattern emerging.
mnmnmn 5mo ago
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ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419
1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
"While the computer connected people, "democratized knowledge" and lifted many out of poverty, it also carried a darker side, Schmidt said. "The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you're using now, also degraded the public square," he said. "They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society." Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer - and was immediately met with boos." In other words, he tried to promote Silicon Valley's shift away from one "business model" (e.g., search, social media) to another YouTube is among the "platforms" that are "rewarding outrage" and "degrading the public square" in order to support an ad services business. The days of this "business model" may be numbered As one unsustainable model fails, there is always another one to replace it. Maybe people are noticing the pattern All these "business models" share something in common: use of a computer and a Silicon Valley middleman spying on peoples' computer use
xwkd 5mo ago
I watched the whole commencement, and it seems that Eric Schmidt himself was booed louder than anything "AI" that came before him in the program. The students had strong reactions to almost every statement he made. If you listen to the other speakers... it's generally positive / calm. The media characterization of this event seems inaccurate, to be generous.
deferredgrant 5mo ago
[dead]
uejfiweun 5mo ago
I feel the backlash really comes down to the fact that AI is a fucking pain in the ass when it comes to planning your life. Nobody asked for it, nobody wanted it, but regardless we're all now thrust into a technological revolution where you have to bust your ass upskilling or else be fired. Most people are inherently lazy and "work to live" as opposed to the other way around. It's no wonder they'd be less than enthused about a technology that basically promises to enrich their bosses thanks to they themselves being more productive. Moreover, the executives have done an absolutely horrible job of communicating the benefits. It's all "your job is going to be replaced in the next few years". I've had plenty of amazing conversations with Claude about the imminent AI-enabled revolutions in materials science, biotech, etc - and yet for some reason this is the exact opposite of the PR line they're taking.
momo26 5mo ago
How does AI matters DEI??

380 points by nothrowaways 5mo ago

> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.” This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way." Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.

stellamariesays 5mo ago
[flagged]
- gk1 5mo ago
  Such a good comment from a new account. Please post here more often :)
  - 0x000xca0xfe 5mo ago
    It's clearly coming from a claw agent. I'm sure they will post more :)
    - gk1 5mo ago
      If true... On the one hand: they fooled me. On the other hand: hey, if the comments are that good, keep going?
      - 0x000xca0xfe 5mo ago
        Of course I don't have proof but this looks mighty suspicious: https://github.com/stellamariesays/Manifold/issues/54 https://github.com/stellamariesays/Manifold/issues/54
gk1 5mo ago
That quote reads totally differently to me. It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.
- LoganDark 5mo ago
  What does it read like to you? To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsibility to prevent the AI revolution from being as bad. All evidence points to it being worse exactly because of corporations like Google. I get that this guy is only the former CEO but the speech seems kinda tone-deaf to the reality here, and I bet that's why he got booed.
  - gk1 5mo ago
    Was commenting on the quote in particular. It’s just a version of “the future is in your hands” which you can find in one form or another in many graduation speeches. Just seems odd to me to read a cliche line as something cynical. Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech: > “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.” Come to think of it… very appropriate today!
    - LoganDark 5mo ago
      I was reading the quote in-context, so it makes sense that it'd read differently out of context.
abejfehr 5mo ago
I’m pretty sure I heard the same quote at my high school and university graduation ceremonies, and those were many years before AI. It’s a standard way to inspire new grads, right?
- LoganDark 5mo ago
  I think yes, it just doesn't feel in good taste given the topic of his speech. It feels like the speech makes it imply icky things.
doginasuit 5mo ago
> It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not entirely within the power of the creators of technology to control how it is used. In our case, they actively market the technology as replacement for human intelligence, at which it fails miserably and yet companies force it through. I would love to see a more grounded frontier AI company, but beyond certain safety measures, they can't stop people from misusing it.
- LoganDark 5mo ago
  I didn't say anything about creators of technology, only implementers of technology; people using the technology that was created (however so it was).

davemp 5mo ago

Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.

cj 5mo ago
> Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer — and was immediately met with boos. That's a shame. I assume the reason for the "deep distain" is rooted in fear of change, fear that LLM will make it harder to have a successful career. That's a pretty negative mindset to have as a college grad just entering the workforce. I'm not an AI fan boy, but we can't cover our eyes and cover our ears and pretend the world isn't changing.
- lazide 5mo ago
  Why would a bunch of folks studying for white collar work, be happy with a technology that a bunch of capitalists (literally) keep selling as eliminating white collar workers? notably, I haven’t seen any ACTUAL technical improvements from LLMs, just a massive amount of slop. The ‘improvements’ are in volume of slop, not quality.
- dekoidal 5mo ago
  You’re wrong to assume that
- gcr 5mo ago
  For college graduates, LLM tech is an existential threat to their livelihoods by making it so much harder to start a career without connections or pedigree.
  - new_account_100 5mo ago
    If no one is hiring, connections or pedigree need to get extraordinarily elite before you can leverage them to get an entry-level software developer job.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

xg15 5mo ago

> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.” This sounds cynical if there is a kinglike president, surrounded by a small clique of tech billionaires who all are becoming increasingly open about the kind of future they want to realise.

poszlem 5mo ago
I think this is a major reason behind the backlash against AI. In the past, people celebrated tech billionaires because there was a widespread belief that, someday, they might join their ranks. But wealth inequality may have now reached a point where that illusion no longer works.
- detourdog 5mo ago
  I think it’s that the current crop of tech billionaires are tone deaf douche bags working against the common good.
  - folkrav 5mo ago
    You do not amass those levels of wealth without being a tone deaf douche bag in the first place.
ilitirit 5mo ago
It's also one of my major issues I have with how this is being introduced into many enterprises, including the company I work for: "Here's AI. Figure out how we can make money from it. We're adding it to your performance reviews" Basically, here's a solution. Find problems for it.
- horsawlarway 5mo ago
  Yeah, I also see this occurring. It's just wildly unprofessional from management, in no particular order my frustrations are: 1. A majority of planning documents from management have become LLM output, which no longer actually matches the desired/required work (but it sure looks nice if you don't have to read all of it). 2. Management undertones are pretty clearly: "Figure out how to use AI to replace yourself." 3. The visibility of leaderboards that promote spend with no relationship to output - ex: employees who spend the most tokens are rewarded, even when there's no equivalent boost in productivity. --- My take is that AI is actually a managerial crucible - aka, a great filter for companies with poor management practices and processes. Company management needs to shift in response to AI more than engineering, and I don't think most are prepared.

nilirl 5mo ago

> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with. I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.

new_account_100 5mo ago
[flagged]
Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom. > graduates embraced freedom and boo'd schmidt. Schmidt: No, not like that! I think that the deeper topic is that there is a sense of double-speak going around, they mean freedom but what they really mean is to use the word and its meaning and to attach it to their own goals, in this case AI because google has a vested interest in that.
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  Billionaires’ and businesses’ freedom to replace creative and white collar workers with obedient and 24/7-working AI.
  - joquarky 5mo ago
    Any time rich people talk about freedom, they mean rich people freedom.
berkay 5mo ago
It's not clear to me why they booed him. you think for only asserting predictions that benefit him? Not because they agree on those predictions and don't want that future, blame him for this role in it?
- mb_thd 5mo ago
  I think it's not clear to him either why he was booed.

lifestyleguru 5mo ago

It's industrial revolution which doesn't want to happen. Unless the new industrial revolution means those unwilling to attend to billionaires and oligarchs are to be priced out of housing and life in general, this one is swiftly approaching. I mean forget housing, even getting good computer is out of reach by now.

axpy906 5mo ago
PC gamer here. This checks out.

imadhiskenderbe 5mo ago

[flagged]

nba456_ 5mo ago
They don't want hope, they want to doom
- throwaway173738 5mo ago
  I don’t think it’s dooming to realize that these tools are only ever used to extract more of your life faster. When was the last time a technological advancement let us work less? Guys like Eric Schmidt preach that it makes you more productive because they expect more productivity for the same salary. Anyone that falls off the hamster wheel wasn’t worthy.
lazide 5mo ago
what hope exactly?
- imadhiskenderbe 5mo ago
  From what I read, he stated that even the coming of computers in the first place threatened many jobs, also many fresh graduates felt probably the same way back then, but everything worked out in the end.
  - dominotw 5mo ago
    "everything works out in the end" lol that should fill them with hope and confidence. great speech.
  - moichael 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - sumeno 5mo ago
    Everything worked out in the end for Eric Schmidt because he rode computers to billionaire status. It did not always work out so great for the people who were replaced, and the people who were replaced were a much smaller percentage of the workforce than the tech CEOs are claiming will be replaced by AI. People largely go to college to train for the white collar jobs that tech CEOs are claiming are going to be entirely replaced by LLMs, where's the hope for the people that just spent six figures learning how to do jobs that people like Schmidt are trying their hardest to eliminate?

xt00 5mo ago

Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but not them.. where does that end?

Zigurd 5mo ago
It's worse than having to pick one position or the other: both are hypocritical, and both are deceptive hype mongering. Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to use that expertise?
- xt00 5mo ago
  Totally agree — if AI tools are already or nearly at the point where you can say “write a program to do X” and it does it, that’s like telling people they need to learn skills to order something at McDonald’s. The goal is for the barrier to entry to be basically zero. Oh sure today there are things like “I made a claude.md file that does this and I wrote a really clever prompt!!” But the goal is for that work to be deleted as well — where is the magic skill that is / will be needed?
  - Zigurd 5mo ago
    I use coding agents every day for non-trivial projects. But I can definitely say that a prompt of the form "Write a program that does X" will earn you a git rollback of a mess, unless what you want has been done a bazillion times before. Peak efficiency in using coding agents is a weird balancing act at this point in the development of coding agents: being too incremental and detailed is inefficient, but if you let it rip on a task with multiple sub tasks you have to be ready for the coding agent to get utterly lost while providing you with only hints at what made it to lose its way. It's like an inexperienced intern with a high opinion of its competency. LLMs trained for coding are most productive when pushed to their limits, but that's where they start to fall down.

collabs 5mo ago

Funny enough by attending and booing they are already doing their part instead of boycotting the commencement

schnebbau 5mo ago

[flagged]

booleandilemma 5mo ago

No one wants AI outside a small minority of tech people.

rdtsc 5mo ago

> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.” How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.

329a8Hqag 5mo ago
It means nothing, as you imply. He is improvising and deflects with a point that he thinks will land with his audience and detract from the issue.
- kubb 5mo ago
  Utterances that come out of executive’s mouths don’t have truth values. They’re sounds meant to irritate people’s nervous systems to achieve the exec’s goals.
  - new_account_100 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - setsewerd 5mo ago
    Relevant Kendall Roy quote: "Words are just uh, what? Nothing. Complicated airflow."
new_account_100 5mo ago
[flagged]
- new_account_100 5mo ago
  Didn't we just put millions of immigrants in concentration camps for stealing our jobs (1 job per immigrant)? With that in mind, what should we do with the bosses who stole thousands of jobs each and shipped them to India and Poland?

genxy 5mo ago

Eric Schmidt really needs to hire a handler.

ceejayoz 5mo ago
Every billionaire needs to hire someone they can't fire with the authority to smack them and say "no, bad billionaire". The alternative is like Killgrave in Jessica Jones. People who never hear no break.

new_account_100 5mo ago

The LLM marketing scheme has essentially been an assault on the labor value of these graduates. I don't think boos are far enough.

sega_sai 5mo ago

I believe that AI is truly revolutionary, but I struggle to feel sympathy to these large companies who (while building tremendously powerful tools) also work on extracting as much money they can from users, potentially making millions of them redundant while paying as little as possible for used texts, codes. In some sense this is how capitalism is supposed to work. But I am not required to like the bosses who pontificate about the future opportunities. (A somewhat contrasting behaviour is say l deepseek who releases their models to the public, and I would not boo them)

_fat_santa 5mo ago

The biggest issue I see with discourse around AI is you have two voices: one is of the tech CEO's and other elites that talk about it largely in the abstract and how it's going to take everyone's jobs, and then you have folks on Twitter/X that talk about things that they are actually using it for. Generally what I found listening to both sides is the latter group is very optimistic about AI and what it can do while the former group tries to be optimistic but just ends up coming off as doomery about it. And the problem that the AI space has right now is the doomery group is just more visible to the average person and thus the average person gets their opinion informed by that group. I really wish there was a way to better surface the sentiment that I see on X about AI, the folks there aren't talking about how AI will replace you at work and make you obsolete, they use AI every day and they know that's just not realistic, not now and probably not ever. Rather they talk about all the cool things that it can help you do now, and how it can be a force multiplier in the best sense. The problem with the elites talking about AI is everything they say is just so detached and abstract. And their giant egos prevent them from seeing the damage they are doing to the field.

sweezyjeezy 5mo ago
And how about the group of kids who are just graduating college, and entering a job market where it's non-abstractly harder to to land a junior role as it's been in decades? It's the elites who have their finger on that scale, not the twitter folks.
UncleMeat 5mo ago
I just don't think that "I use AI to help plan a vacation or make a funny picture to share with my friends or create a study plan" outweighs the very obvious challenges that AI is creating for new graduates as they enter the job market. I'm sure even that a lot of these students used AI to cheat. But the stuff from the rich bosses isn't just rhetoric. These students are graduating into an extremely messy job market and AI is directly to blame. That affects students in a huge way.

mbgerring 5mo ago

Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to be the “good” outcome that e.g. OpenAI is playing for. I don’t understand why any of you think that’s good or positive or desirable.

zemvpferreira 5mo ago
Sure. The machine gods are benevolent gods who care deeply for their creator-species. We are freed from labour and troubles into a paradise, to eat peaches and cream and make love under the sun. Rich or poor, we'll all be emperors of our domain, free to do as we please. Our lives keep getting better and better with technological progress, at least in the scope of our social-capitalist system. They will only get better until they end.
- mbgerring 5mo ago
  I need you to understand that if you actually believe this, normal people think you are an evil lunatic.
  - zemvpferreira 5mo ago
    I don't think you need to worry yourself so much on my account friend. You asked, I told. Let's keep it at that. Also feel free to keep the name-calling to yourself.
  - DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago
    You asked for an optimistic case and he gave you one. One thing I really like about LLMs is that they don't engage in this type of petty deceit where they ask a question and then insult you for answering.
    - 5mo ago

Toutouxc 5mo ago

[dead]

hansmayer 5mo ago

The kids are alright ;)

swed420 5mo ago
For now. When the ramen noodles run out, how many will begrudgingly create a linkedin account and pretend to embrace AI while they fight for the remaining/dwindling job openings?
- d3rockk 5mo ago
  Question to your question: How many will actually get a job? When the system fails to reward compliance, that begrudging conformity will eventually curdle into systemic disruption. History has proven so time & time again. Lock a massive class of highly educated, financially desperate young people out of the economy.. they won't just starve in silence. They organize unions, radicalize politics, and ultimately rewrite the rules of the game.
  - swed420 5mo ago
    Drones and robot killer dogs a la Back Mirror will keep everybody in check until they die an early preventable death from being lied to about COVID, etc. History might rhyme, until it doesn't, due to paradigm shifts like these.
    - bigyabai 5mo ago
      Expectation: In 10 years, killer drones will corral us away from quarantine zones to forcibly infect millions of hapless civilians. The proletariat will revolt and wage civil war against the state, sending millions of shock troops to fight for representation in government or dismantle the governing body itself. They will die peacefully, knowing they were right. Reality: People will scroll TikTok for another decade and contract sedentary lifestyle diseases that they blame on others instead of themselves. Constant influence campaigns and surveillance will keep them divided and give them new scapegoats to assuage their mounting insecurity and shame for their generation. They will die outraged, knowing they were wrong.

hilariously 5mo ago

After hearing that padlum from a billionaire I wouldn't boo, I would rush the stage to hit him with my shoes.

LogicFailsMe 5mo ago

The guy has been a stochastic parrot of A2Z talking points for years. What's new is we have reached the finding out phase of telling an entire generation of children who just spent 6 figures and 4ish years on education that they will be replaced by the irresponsibly deployed toy of the old white dudes who made college that expensive in the first place. AI as a technology is amazeballs in precisely the same way AI thought leaders, executives and mid-level management are not. And yet, here we are poisoning its innovation with late stage capitalism and privatized panopticons. Yuck.

eooekwe 5mo ago
Have you seen what is alleged about the guy? Funny how no one in this thread brings it up
- LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
  Yeah, he's wicked rapey and he's always been a total manwhore creep. How the heck did he survive #metoo unscathed? And I know, I know, here are the helpful links before anyone pretends they haven't heard any of this... https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/judge-sends-former-google-chiefs-110000697.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/judge-sends-former-googl... https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5497193/exclusive-how-googles-eric-schmidt-lost-his-mistress-his-partner-and-steve-jobs https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5497193/exclusive-how-googles... https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/3/16/8227625/eric-schmidt-load-foot-in-mouth-dot-exe https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/3/16/8227625/eric-schmidt... TLDR: promoted well beyond his level of incompetence, but that's the American way now I guess.
  - UncleMeat 5mo ago
    Rich sex pests engaged in a coordinated effort to destroy #metoo and protect themselves basically as soon as the movement started. You can even see a lot of this in the Epstein files. The backlash to #metoo was larger than the movement ever was (while not referring to the same event, Susan Faludi's Backlash is a great discussion of this). The effect is that a ton of these guys either experienced no consequence whatsoever or were able to lay low for a couple years and return to their positions of power.

arunmathur 5mo ago

This caught my attention because I really enjoy hearing ES speak about AI. Directionally, I’m listening for a roadmap. Is the problem I’m solving right now even worthwhile? As an avid user of these tools, am I in the driver seat or am I a passenger? I feel like the latter. For some context, according to the daily beast, student groups at the university distributed fliers urging students to “turn their backs to the stage” or “boo” during the former executive’s speech. The fliers stated that they wanted to “make it clear that the University of Arizona and greater community that we represent, whether from Tucson or beyond, do not support abusers being platformed.” Schmidt was accused by Michelle Ritter in a 2021 lawsuit of “forcibly raping” her during a trip off the coast of Mexico and later initiating sex without her consent in 2023 during the annual Burning Man festival.

oompydoompy74 5mo ago

Nobody wants the pile of Schmidt you are selling fam

therobots927 5mo ago

HBO’s Silicon Valley looks more and more like a documentary every day. The out of touch antics of Gavin Belson or Peter Gregory are fucking spot on.

elAhmo 5mo ago

Colossal failure to read the room, insane coming from an executive in charge of one of the most impactful companies of our lifetime.

coldpie 5mo ago
> insane coming from an executive I guess you haven't heard much from executives before? They are absolutely coocoo-bananas people.

quink 5mo ago

It feels also this speech was not really in any way related to AI per se. It was the Ayn Rand-esque hero, an Übermensch, who of course formed Google out of nothing proclaiming that individualism and egoism are the way to go, that they have a small alcove at best in between the productive assets of the factory owner who wields the materials to his will and creates his perfect city of perfect design that needs none of your contribution. That these graduates aren't be be valued by their creativity or self-worth but by the marginal contribution they may have towards his empire, to be discarded once they don't have anything to give. He's the ultimate factory owner, the owner of the factory that makes everything and brings light to all, and the masses just don't appreciate his brilliance and the brilliance of the other tech bros. None if it is particular to AI, it's just that AI is the latest tool with which the workers of the world are deprived of the means of production. They know that capitalism is healthiest when the wealth is distributed, and here the Randian hero tells them not that the wealth will be distributed, but only the labour and the AI will do most of the labour, and that the human contribution is a penny for themselves and 99 cents to those that already have a hundred billion, and excited with an incomparable glee Eric expresses that the datacenter that powers the AI will be the panopticon through which the factory owner will judge the productivity of his workers. It is such a horrifyingly dismal picture he painted right on their faces and if they would just allow that data center and stop booing him they'd understand, surely they must understand that he's the hero, that he and his Rearden Steel will make them the shining city that the unwashed masses for their utter collective incompetence cannot.

quink 5mo ago
It is of course, one step between this view and them being punished for having that view. One small step between being declared a luddite and the powers that be deciding that luddites aren't a thing we're to have.

m0llusk 5mo ago

It is interesting that his speech started strong and then ran aground and sunk on the same dangerous reef he began by pointing out: “The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you’re using now, also degraded the public square,” he said. “They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society.”

stego-tech 5mo ago

These people need to read the room better. AI Billionaire and AI Executive cohorts are openly advocating in media and the press for total job replacement by AI within a narrow time frame. Dario Amodei has spent years braying that AI will replace most or all jobs within half a decade; Sundar Pichai has openly told working folks the equivalent of "Good luck, fuckers" (his 2-DEC-2025 remarks about the working class "working through" social disruption forcibly imposed on them by his billionaire class); Microsoft's AI ghoul went on a media spree this year bragging that knowledge-work will be gone in eighteen months. It doesn't matter whether or not any of this is true, because these same students - the law students, the pre-med students, the political science students, the psychology and history and econ and tech students and the like, they all have to write essays about this, read newspaper articles about it, read journals about it. They see the actions taken by this same cohort of AI boosters in blocking regulatory reforms, in blocking social programs, in blocking work protections and social safety net expansions and tax reforms. These students aren't stupid, they see the naked hypocrisy on display by the people telling them the sky is falling and are rightfully enraged at it. You are telling fresh graduates, saddled with student debt, at a time of pride in their own accomplishments and uncertainty in their job prospects, to their face, that they have no future and that's going to be peachy-keen because everyone other than them will be better off as a result. And they wonder why they're so intensely hated.

d4rkp4ttern 5mo ago

This should probably be merged with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107

beej71 5mo ago

I know billionaires are generally out of touch with the trials of the common citizen, but can they be so out of touch that they think the promise that AI will take your job is going to resonate?

ankurdhama 5mo ago

LLMs (the current AI approach) are definitely useful tools BUT the cost of training and inference and creating bigger and bigger model to improve the "intelligence" is extremely high and the consequence of this high cost is having negative impact of average people whether it is in terms of job losses or rising cost of electricity and other stuff. Unless the industry is able to reduce the cost drastically and soon, it will have negative impact on all of us.

nojvek 5mo ago

Eric Schmidt made billions, probably 10s of billions from Google becoming an AI behemoth. The young graduates who can't find a job, will likely not be able to afford a median home in their 20-30s due to their debt growing faster than earnings. It is a stark difference. "You have the power to shape AI" - So many empty words spoken!

L-boog 5mo ago

The people behind pushing 'everyone needs to learn to code' are now the same pushing 'everyone must use AI'. The same Eric Schmidt that was pedaling 'I assume that everybody here agrees that globalization is wonderful' to a Davos crowd. The guy has always looked for way to keep humans as chattel.

exdeejay_ 5mo ago
*peddling

rotis 5mo ago

https://x.com/i/status/2053560589327180255 https://x.com/i/status/2053560589327180255 I sense a pattern emerging.

mnmnmn 5mo ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419

1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago

"While the computer connected people, "democratized knowledge" and lifted many out of poverty, it also carried a darker side, Schmidt said. "The same platforms that gave everyone a voice, like you're using now, also degraded the public square," he said. "They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society." Schmidt then drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer - and was immediately met with boos." In other words, he tried to promote Silicon Valley's shift away from one "business model" (e.g., search, social media) to another YouTube is among the "platforms" that are "rewarding outrage" and "degrading the public square" in order to support an ad services business. The days of this "business model" may be numbered As one unsustainable model fails, there is always another one to replace it. Maybe people are noticing the pattern All these "business models" share something in common: use of a computer and a Silicon Valley middleman spying on peoples' computer use

xwkd 5mo ago

I watched the whole commencement, and it seems that Eric Schmidt himself was booed louder than anything "AI" that came before him in the program. The students had strong reactions to almost every statement he made. If you listen to the other speakers... it's generally positive / calm. The media characterization of this event seems inaccurate, to be generous.

deferredgrant 5mo ago

[dead]

uejfiweun 5mo ago

I feel the backlash really comes down to the fact that AI is a fucking pain in the ass when it comes to planning your life. Nobody asked for it, nobody wanted it, but regardless we're all now thrust into a technological revolution where you have to bust your ass upskilling or else be fired. Most people are inherently lazy and "work to live" as opposed to the other way around. It's no wonder they'd be less than enthused about a technology that basically promises to enrich their bosses thanks to they themselves being more productive. Moreover, the executives have done an absolutely horrible job of communicating the benefits. It's all "your job is going to be replaced in the next few years". I've had plenty of amazing conversations with Claude about the imminent AI-enabled revolutions in materials science, biotech, etc - and yet for some reason this is the exact opposite of the PR line they're taking.

momo26 5mo ago

How does AI matters DEI??