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Comment by nkohari | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

No one is saying he can’t have an opinion, just that there isn’t much value in it given he made a bunch of money from essentially the same thing. If he made a reasoned argument or even expressed that he now realizes the error of his own ways those would be worth engaging with.

He literally apologized for any part he had in it. This just makes me realize you didn’t actually read the post and I shouldn’t engage with the first part of your argument.

Apologies are free. Did he donate even one or two percent of the surely exorbitant salary he made at Google all those years to any cause countering those negative externalities? (I'm genuinely curious)

He apologized for the part he had in enabling AI (which he describes as minor) but not that he spent a good portion of his life profiting from the same datacenters he is decrying now.

>You think Rob Pike was super happy about it?

He sure was happy enough to work for them (when he could work anywhere else) for nearly two decades. A one line apology doesn't delete his time at Google. The rant also seems to be directed mostly if not exclusively towards GenAI not Google. He even seems happy enough to use Gmail when he doesn't have to.

You can have an opinion and other people are allowed to have one about you. Goes both ways.

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.

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).

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.)

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