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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

This is all just cynical bandwagoning. Google/Facebook/Etc. have done provable irreparable damage to the fabric of society via ads/data farming/promulgating fake news, but now that it's in vogue to hate on AI as an "enlightened" tech genius, we're all suddenly worried about.. what? Water? Electricity? Give me a break.

The about-face is embarrassing, especially in the case of Rob Pike (who I'm sure has made 8+ figures at Google). But even Hickey worked for a crypto-friendly fintech firm until a few years ago. It's easy to take a stand when you have no skin in the game.

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I don’t understand what your actual criticism is.

Is your criticism that they are late to call out the bad stuff?

Is your criticism that they are only calling out the bad stuff because it’s now impacting them negatively?

Given either of those positions, do you prefer that people with influence not call out the bad stuff or do call out the bad stuff even if they may be late/not have skin in the game?

It's worth mentioning that AI in its current form was not AT ALL a part of Google's corporate strategy until Microsoft and OpenAI forced their hand.

Remember their embarrassing debut of Bard in Paris and the Internet collectively celebrating their all but guaranteed demise?

It's Google+ all over again. It's possible that Pike, like many, did not sign up for that.

How did Microsoft and OpenAI force their hand? Google could just as easily not waste money on AI, use the corresponding lack of notice-me-sempai demands from their products that their users use AI everywhere as a powerful differentiator, and deliver the difference to shareholders.

They got punished hard in the markets after ChatGPT 3. Many saw (still see) it as a search killer, which is Google's bread and butter. They couldn't not respond.

Both can be bad. What's hard to do though is convincing the people that work on these things that they're actively harming society (in other words, most people working on ads and AI are not good people, they're the bad guys but don't realize it).

Even ignoring that someone's views can change over time, working on an OSS programming language at Google is very different from designing algorithms to get people addicted to scrolling.

Where do you think his "distinguished engineer" salary came from, I wonder? There are plenty of people working on OSS in their free time (or in poverty, for that matter).

Shouldn't you be thinking "it's nice Google diverted some of their funds to doing good" instead of trying to tie Pike's contributions in with everything else?

This conversation isn't about Google's backbone, it's about Pike's and Hickey's. It's easy to moralize when you've got nothing to lose and the lecture holds much less water.

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