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Comment by jesse_dot_id | Hacker News Reader

I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.

This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. The robber barons and monopolists tend to come out of the woodwork when incredible technologies emerge. It just sucks that we still haven't evolved them out of society.

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> Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.

The thing is they don’t control them anymore, governments do by and large now, so a lot of the issues that came with their ownership and special privileges no longer exist. There is no way that is how this is going to go down with Google et al

AI should fall under libraries. It's benefit/value is derived from the knowledge of humankind.

Unfortunately, their unregulated scraping even takes down public libraries.

> The thing is they don’t control them anymore, governments do by and large now

All of the class 1 freight railroads in North America are privately owned.

BNSF

Canadian National

CPKC

CSX

Norfolk Southern

Union Pacific

> is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM

No it won't. Natural language manipulation is never a bottleneck in STEM.

They seem to be having at least some impact

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2527564-mathematicians-...

I do not understand how you can believe that and I'm not really keen on trying to.

I'm fairly certain LLMs have been used to solve some novel problems already.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anishasircar/2026/04/17/ai-solv...

Aside from everything everyone else has mentioned, AI != LLMs

There is no "AI" that isn't an LLM in 2026.

>This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM.

We could do without them.

Tell that to the family of someone who dies a year before one of those discoveries that would have saved their life...

I guess you don't know anyone who has cancer.

I know plenty who have cancer because of STEM "advances". No shortage of STEM conveniences being carcinogenic.

But the argument is always the small percentage that get medical treatment. Never the millions who get sick.

We could probably do without computers too, but that would be idiotic because they speed everything up. There's a good chance that the next pandemic is swatted down by LLM-powered vaccine development much faster than COVID-19 was.

"We could do without them." is not a great take when it comes to people dying prematurely.

In fact, I would bet that this particular technology will lead to climate change solutions eventually. If nothing else, it will drive an energy revolution in either nuclear or solar power. Probably too late to solve the AMOC collapse, but mitigation is still in play through science.

> LLM-powered vaccine development

Good lord!

I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements. They're going to be a neverending source of cringe and laughs for the next 50 years.

(I've heard one C-level dude say with a straight face that LLMs were a "more significant invention than writing".)

> Good lord!

>I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements.

---

This has been in use for awhile.

https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/26/3/bbaf263/8158336

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12970898/

How it gets used: https://mlconference.ai/blog/ai-in-vaccine-development/

No, you cannot use LLMs to develop vaccines. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying to you.

Also, you're confusing "AI" and LLMs.

You're a Google search away from fact checking me if you want to do that.

I'm a DevOps engineer, not a C suite guy, but I tend to agree with you in general. I think there is a lot of smoke being blown into the hive around this technology but having used it extensively, and having witnessed its progression first hand in engineering, these tools are insanely useful and have made giant leaps forward in just ~4 years.

Don't know if you're a believer in Moore's Law or not, but I don't think your tune is going to take anywhere near 50 years to change. I'd be surprised if it took 5 years.

No offense, but your post reads like LLM psychosis. Mostly because you failed to understand my post at all and rushed in to defend AI's honor. (Why? I don't think AI wants or needs your oaths of loyalty.)

Ah yes, the mark of a cogent argument: the phantom diagnosis.

>No offense

Uh huh..

it looks like they have been used at least once to help develop a vaccine. they're not as significant as writing but they do seem to have their uses.

https://theconversation.com/a-man-used-ai-to-help-make-a-can...

>We could probably do without computers too, but that would be idiotic because they speed everything up

That they "speed everything up" would be a great reason to get rid of them or constrain them.

Maybe you're sitting pretty right now, but try posting this from your deathbed, or that of your kid.

The lack of compassion that people display here is shocking to me.

"Don't automate science, because there are junior scientists could be denied the thrill of specific discoveries."

Cancer patients are not accessories to anyone's self-actualization.

Maybe you're sitting pretty right now, but try posting this from your deathbed, or that of your kid, caused by the "advances"

But you would be banning trains if they were built to just run smack into the centre of town squares loaded with bombs, rendering the cities to dust, as a part of their design and boasted about by the owners.

At least until the maniacally evil train ownership debacle was better organized to prevent such harm in their core application.

I think that perhaps your perception of the impacts of data centers is a bit over the top.

I parsed that wrong (better?) as running smack (heroin) into the center of town

And so I thought it was a reference to the overall AI psychosis, FOMO, and dopamine marketing. That is the big impact that bothers me, regardless of whether this deployment uses massive new datacenters. It is a toxic social impact even if it somehow reduced atmospheric CO2 with every token.

There are datacenters all over the place and have been for a very long time. Some of them host physical servers for people and companies, maybe only a literal closet somewhere in a building. Others are giant hyperscaler datacenters that have tons of 24/7 lighting and are the size of multiple football fields.

We need to be very careful here, or we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

That is also my concern. This feels like a Satanic panic type of thing and if people don't form nuanced opinions, politicians will latch on to the issue and before you know it, many people who are heavily reliant on machine learning who don't realize it are going to have a bad time when stuff starts getting banned.

It 100% feels like a satanic panic type of thing

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