Seconded — "AI" is a great teaching resource. All bigger models are great at explaining stuff and being good tutors, I'd say easily up to the second year of graduate studies. I use them regularly when working with my kid and I'm trying to teach them to use the technology, because it is truly like a bicycle for the mind.

I am not so sure about 'the mixed bag' vs 'unquestionably cancer', but I think the problem is that he is complaining while working for such a company.

> As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent.

No, we really don't. There are plenty of places to work that aren't morally compromised - non-profits, open source foundations, education, healthcare tech, small companies solving real problems. The "we all have to" framing is a convenient way to avoid examining your own choices.

And it's telling that this framing always seems to appear when someone is defending their own employer. You've drawn a clear moral line between Google ("mixed bag") and AI companies ("unquestionably cancer") - so you clearly believe these distinctions matter even though Google itself is an AI company.

> But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer

Google's DeepMind has been at the forefront of AI research for the past 11+ years. Even before that, Google Brain was making incredible contributions to the field since 2011, only two years after the release of Go.

OpenAI was founded in response to Google's AI dominance. The transformer architecture is a Google invention. It's not an exaggeration to claim Google is one of the main contributors to the insanely fast-paced advancements of LLMs.

With all due respect, you need some insane mental gymnastics to claim AI companies are "unquestionably cancer" while an adtech/analytics borderline monopoly giant is merely a "mixed bag".

> Don't be ridiculous.

OP says, it is jarring to them that Pike is as concerned with GenAI as he is, but didn't spare a thought for Google's other (in their opinion, bigger) misgivings, for well over a decade. Doesn't sound ridiculous to me.

That said, I get that everyone's socio-political views change are different at different points in time, especially depending on their personal circumstances including family and wealth.

Google published a post gloating on how much consumerism it increased.

Okay, but the discourse Rob Pike is engaging in is, “all parts of an experience are valid,” so you see how he’s legitimately in a “hypocrisy pickle”

Sure, but it also doesn't preclude him from being wrong, or at least incomplete as expressed, about his work having the exact same resource-consuming impact when used for ad tech, or addition impact with toxic social media.

He was paid by Google with money made through Google’s shady practices.

It’s like saying that it’s cool because you worked on some non-evil parts of a terrible company.

I don’t think it’s right to work for an unethical company and then complain about others being unethical. I mean, of course you can, but words are hollow.

If it's "Who is worse Google or LLMs?", I think I'll say Google is worse. The biggest issue I see with LLMs is needing to pay a subscription to tech companies to be able to use them.

“I collected tons of money from Hitler and think Stalin is, like, super bad.” [sips Champagne]

Of course, the scale is different but the sentiment is why I roll my eyes at these hypocrites.

If you want to make ethical statements then you have to be pretty pure.

This is a tangent, but ads have become a genuine cancer on our world, and it's sad to see how few people really think about it. While Rob Pike's involvement in this seems to be very minimal, the fact that Google is an advertising company through-and-through does weaken the words of such a powerful figure, at least a little bit.

If I had a choice between deleting all advertising in the world, or deleting all genAI that the author hates, I would go for advertising every single time. Our entire world is owned by ads now, with digital and physical garbage polluting the internet and every open space in the real world around us. The marketing is mind-numbing, yet persuasive and well-calculated, a result of psychologists coming up with the best ways to abuse a mind into just buying the product over the course of a century. A total ban on commercial advertising would undo some of the damage done to the internet, reduce pointless waste, lengthen product lifecycles, improve competition, temper unsustainable hype, cripple FOMO, make deceptive strategies nonviable. And all of that is why it will never be done.

Yeah, I've built ad systems. Sometimes I'd give a presentation to some other department of programmers who worked on content, and someone would ask the tense question: Not to be rude, but aren't ads bad?

And I'd promptly say: Ads are propaganda, and a security risk because it executes 3rd party code on your machine. All of us run adblockers.

There was no need for me to point out that ads are also their revenue generator. They just had a burning moral question before they proceeded to interop with the propaganda delivery system, I guess.

It would lead to unnecessary cognitive dissonance to convince myself of some dumb ideology to make me feel better about wasting so much of my one (1) known life, so I just take the hit and be honest about it. The moral question is what I do about it, if I intervene effectively to help dismantle such systems and replace them with something better.