News article about this: https://www.businessinsider.com/students-boo-eric-schmidt-google-ceo-ai-university-arizona-2026-5
The kids are alright
His face is much redder by the time he finished the speech.
If they’d just let the graphics card bubble pop with crypto, by now we’d be in the recovery stage and regulating digital securities.
But that would require admitting to irrationality in the financial system and putting in the work to fix it, which would be mildly embarrassing. So instead, the bourgeoisie have chosen the maximally embarrassing thing of being delusional about a crummy computer program.
And the bubble is now so big, the pop won’t be a normal boom-bust. I half suspect its gonna end the dollar as reserve currency.
Dollar as reserve currency is long gone.
Yeah now it’s Blackwell lol
Give people affordable healthcare
-No
Give people affordable homes
-No
Give people liveable income
-No
Give people a product marketed as pseudo-beneficial to humanity, while making yourself richer.
-Hell yesss
make computers expensive.
make travel expensive.
burn the atmosphere up.
Holy fuck. It’s their big day, and he uses it to pitch his fucking shitty fucking products. Read the room dumbarse
Ads on graduation speech. What a time to be alive!
AI aside, this was incredibly disrespectful to the graduates. He basically stole the ceremony to pitch his business. These people have no shame.
How much of this is a rejection of Schmidt or his personal brand of AI and how much is a rejection of the future this technology is leading us into?
Since the boos are basically always after he refers to AI… I’d say most of it is a rejection of “AI.”
very few people know or care about who schmidt is or was
Butlerian Jihad When?
Whenever you’re ready
Beat me to it.
I’m fully ready, fuck this techno-trash future we are all hurtling towards. All the worst parts of dystopian cyberpunk with none of the cool shit.
And I’m in IT, I fucking love technology!
Kids are SO Ungrateful! WHY can’t they just APPRECIATE the Epstein Class for ELIMINATING their Job Prospects like GOOD SEXY Kids?
-Rich People!
The kids are alright.
A billionaire praising AI as the next big thing doesn’t belong at a graduation ceremony.
Imagine working 2, 4, 8, whatever number of years, then you get to a night meant to honor your accomplishments… then you have to sit through a billionaire performing autofellatio in the form of an advertisement
Not just any advertisement. An advertisement for something that is likely limiting their job opportunities that they have been studying years for.
CEOs paid some marketing team to go out to all these universities saying we can get some giant CEO to come up and speak to your graduates about the wonders and excitement of the new AI future.
This is the second or third CEO that is getting booed at so far. I’m wondering how many more will come out as grad season continues.
🍿
“The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.”
The problem with Schmidt’s perspective, and to some degree that of the linked article itself, is that they take an “AI” future for granted. Like it’s a given that we need to adapt to whatever the tech giants put before us.
But the thing is, the only place where (the success of) “AI” is necessary — that’s in those companies’ projected earnings. They sunk billions into a technology that could be a big deal in certain number crunching research fields, but to recoup the investment they marketed the product as an everything assistant for everybody.
The corporations pushing “AI” into personal computers, into workspaces, into public governance; they’re huge, but they’re hardly infallible. They may wish, as in “bet their savings”, that this utopian tech dream will work out better than the metaverse …but that’s all it is.
They’re just trying to talk their ROI into existence. We need to counter that talk, and that future. It’s ours to decide over.
The problem is that it isn’t ours to decide in many countries. Billionaires control everything, or at the very least have a 10 ton thumb on the scale and have a monopoly on violence.
Look at the US, vehement opposition to almost all datacenters over the entire country, the entire voterbase tells their politicians on every level that they all don’t want them. What happens? The politicians completely ignore the population and the people that voted for them, use the people’s tax money to build the billionaire surveillance complexes that will literally suck all of the water out of the ground and cause blackouts and create maybe 10 jobs.
We see that here is Europe more and more too, especially with anything having to do with banks. We data centers popping up everywhere and half of new automation engineer jobs are for data center pop ups here in Belgium with 0 option to even publicly dissent, much less vote against them.
it’s fucking ghoulish that these salesmen treat a college commencement as just another platform to push their product and grow hype
I was hoping someone would throw tomatoes or something at him.
Maybe a brick or two.
He already looks like he took a tomato or two to the face
That will happen sooner or later
Here’s hoping for sooner
I don’t think Schmidt is doing that. He’s just drunk the Kool-Aid.
He’s a multi-billionaire either way. For him it’s not about making more money. It’s about his self-image as an important guy in tech who was still on the cutting edge at 71. I don’t think he thinks he’s important or relevant enough to shape the future anymore. I think he just wants to be seen as someone who can be invited to conferences and public speaking events because he’s still relevant.
IMO that’s a really, really big part of the AI ecosystem. A lot of executives are implementing AI at their companies because they’re afraid they’re going to be seen as old fuddy duddies who didn’t know that the world had changed.
For most of these commencement speakers, it’s more of an “emperor has no clothes” situation than it is a conspiracy to pump up the stock price.
As we all know, once you’re rich, you stop wanting more money. 😉
When you’re that rich, there are things that matter more than more money. Money is good, but more important is power, respect, etc.
i don’t think you get that rich without your entire brain being rewired to treat money AS power, respect, etc.
Maybe. But, that doesn’t mean that you look at a commencement speech to pump up AI stocks. It’s more likely that you look at that kind of a speech as a way to prove to the world how smart and influential you are.
They want more of everything. They want more power, more respect, and more money. They want it all. They want everything.
They’re hungry ghosts, they just want more and more forever and ever to fill the empty screaming void at the core of their being.
This was a very well-said take. No notes.
Doing my humble, unassisted meatsack best.
Uh-huh. Sounds like something an AI would say. Let’s see what’s really behind that mask…
rips off face Ah-HA!!!
OH, GOD! There’s so much blood! Whyyyy 😭
Adding a gore Art warning
When Scooby Doo went really dark 🤣💀
Got a little Hannah Barbaric
Ok, I have a note (and happy to run the risk of being ‘boo’d’ for making a ‘speach’. There, I feel better now).
It seems to me most of the (current) animosity is very squarely aimed at the large corporations, but comes under the general heading of ‘anti-AI’. I was working in that field in the early ‘90s and it had some interesting applications which we’ve seen deliver some real benefits. The recent avalanche of ‘our LLM can replace everything else you have’ is the problem, not AI. And large groups of people tend to prefer a nice black & white answer not a nuanced conversation. I’m not for a second defending Schmidt on that, but I worry the real important stuff will get lost in the noise.
We’re on the same page about the problem, I think. And as I said in my original comment, there are absolutely reasonable applications for LLMs, they just won’t pay back the investments chucked into the research quick enough. So we get instead our current “AI” moment.
Now, as a counterpoint to your argument about black and white positions — I see a lot of people filling the gray areas with what is essentially whataboutism:
- “The next model will be much better”
- “People said the same thing about the internet”
- “Sure it sucks and make stuff up, but it’s good enough for me”
- “You can’t stop progress”…
In that context, I think it’s important to take a black and white stance, staying off that slippery slop(e) of bad faith arguments. “AI” as it is being marketed to us is bullshit, and needs to stop.
But once that bubble is burst (and it will one way or another), research needs to continue in a more focused manner into the fields where LLMs can actually make a positive difference (hint: it’s neither search engines or your operating system).
Yes, I suspect we are. Having said that, LLMs even today are sometimes useful for search—perhaps only because traditional search has become so poor.
Whether they are any use or not is a totally different question to whether they’re worth the money being piled into them though. And that’s my original point really—it’s the behaviour of large corporations that’s more of an issue than some large matrix operations doing clever things with language tokens.
It’ll be sad and unnecessary if we throw the cancer diagnostics out with the work stealing, resource wasting, slop machine.
It would be a tragedy if we accepted the latter so that we can obtain the former.
Limited models trained on good datasets have limited applications in analysis of similar data.
LLMs are a gigantic soul-sucking scam with no practical usage.
You are creating a distinction without a difference.
You think there’s no difference between a technology and a corporation pushing a technology?
I think there is no difference between the title AI and the word grift.
Agreed
The problem is pushing a business model that likely seeks to put many of the graduates he’s speaking to out of a job.
Yes, the other things you say are also true, along with the tactless use of a commencement speech to advertise said business, but telling the people about how great AI is while failing to consider the effects on them is…well, very Billionaire of him.
If a machine can do my job better than me, then a machine should be doing that job. That’s progress. Eventually all of this mindless toil should be done by machines so that people have the ability to pursue their dreams. The actual problem is that we’ve built a society where people need to toil mindlessly in order to live. This could be solved with something like a Universal Basic Income, so if my job gets taken by an LLM I can go back to school and learn a new trade. Or write some books. Or go ramble around Europe as an art bum. Or whatever.
Having said that, I think that LLMs are being used to replace jobs where the machine can’t do it better than a human. It saves the company money in the short term, but it’s going to catch up with them in the long term. On the other hand, some people are doing jobs that don’t need doing, and replacing those with an LLM doesn’t change anything, because the job was bullshit to begin with.
At the end of the day, people need food, lodging, and healthcare. They don’t need “jobs”. We should be fighting to get people’s needs met, not fighting to keep people in their shitty jobs that they hate anyway.
Economics should be people centered not robots
We don’t need machines to do everything to get that. We already have everything for a post scarcity-society. It’s there now. But a lot of assholes want a bigger pile of money, and honestly, I’m pretty sure they don’t actually want you or I to exist to get in the way of their utopia which is them hanging out on beaches while robots do everything for them.
At the end of the day, people need food, lodging, and healthcare. They don’t need “jobs”. We should be fighting to get people’s needs met, not fighting to keep people in their shitty jobs that they hate anyway.
On one hand, I agree with you.
On the other hand, what you’re saying is, “Life would be better if we would become wholly dependent on a white supremacist, genocidal, colonial institution”.
I don’t think what you’re suggesting is possible on the land known as the United States of America until it’s no longer called that.
You’re assuming everybody in this conversation is American? 🤔 I for one am not part of the “we” you describe there…
Your nation is either beholden to the imperialist pigdogs which run America or you will be targeted by them. So sorry (truly), but yes, you are “we”, even if it’s a more extended “we”. Maybe you can fly under the radar if your country is both poor and resource-poor.
…Aside from that this is a thread about an American university, so
Your nationality or ethnicity has little to nothing to do with who is making these systems.
I completely agree with everything here, and I just want to reiterate:
👏 Universal 👏 Basic 👏 Income
Counterpoint, we don’t need a society that requires universities to churn out graduates who need jobs. That’s it, we have everything we need as a society already, and we are well past the post-scarcity part, but someone always wants a bigger boat.
We’ll all do what we need to in order to get food, shelter, and all the basics. But we are past the point of needing a 40 hour work week, and putting people into menial positions just so they can get a paycheck.
You might as well say people shouldn’t have children.
What about my response gives you the impression that I think people shouldn’t procreate?
LLMs absolutely have a market. It’s a market that’s probably in the low tens of billions of dollars worldwide. Non-critical translation, content writing, image generation, mockup. Etc etc. there are absolutely uses for LLMs and other generative AI.
The problem is that hundreds upon hundreds of billions have been invested, with hundreds more on the way. The current investment will never be recovered.
And these aren’t durable investments, the equipment has a very limited shelve life, the chips aren’t going to last nearly long enough to recover their cost, and the data centers are already obselete for the next generation.
Edit: getting downvotes for recognising that there is in fact a market for generative AI, by people who didn’t catch that “the low tens of billions” is about 1% of what AI boosters are proclaiming.
LLMs absolutely have a market. […] content writing, image generation
Hard disagree on those two examples. That market is exclusively made up of people who a) can’t write or make images themselves, and b) have an utter disregard for people who spent their lives doing so.
I do, however, agree completely with your points re the feasibility of returns on investments into “AI”, and the expiration dates on the technical infrastructure. We have been presented with a solution without a preexisting problem — but oh boy, what exciting new problems comes after! /s
LLMs shouldn’t be used in place of artists because LLMs can’t make art. There’s a quote I heard somewhere that sums this up perfectly: “LLMs should be used to help creative people do tedious things, not to help tedious people do creative things.”
That’s a very good way of framing it, yes! But at the moment it feels like the tedious people are at the wheel.
That market is exclusively made up of people who a) can’t write or make images themselves, and b) have an utter disregard for people who spent their lives doing so.
And that market is, unfortunately, absolutely huge. There is a frighteningly large demand for mediocre crap.
The LLM age has shown us how quickly the market is willing to settle for “not nothing” instead of “something good”.
And a worldwide market in the 20 billion range is by no means remotely near the multiple trillions needed to actually fulfills what the AI boosters are promising.
The LLM age has shown us how quickly the market is willing to settle for “not nothing” instead of “something good”.
You’re on to something there. During the “AI” hype, I’ve seen several people claim that this could be the last gasp for late stage capitalism. Growth has plateaued, and they did not have anything more to sell us at a profit.
So they introduce a new artificial need, and promote it like their continued existence depended on it… because it does. But that was exactly my original point: nobody needs “AI”, except the people peddling it.
In my experience, there are a lot of places very content to do a pretty bad job of stuff if it’s low effort on the part of the person collecting the surplus labour value, and is making money.
The greatest deprogramming I’ve had through corporate experience is that capitalist myth that competition forces companies to try and make a better product.
Maybe in the odd case it does. But, for the most part, capitalism is pretty happy to just race to the bottom. A 2% worse product that costs 5% less to manufac6that I can sell for the original price? THAT is what every company is trying to do. Make a better product? Get the fuck outta here.
There is a market, for AI slop… because it’s just a special case of a preexisting major market of “slop”. We already had shovelware. Low effort high volume content creators. Telemarketers with accents so think you have to wonder if the costs saved by offshoring those workers could possibly recoup the reduced sales rates. It’s all just slop. AI can absolutely disrupt the Slop Market. And it is.
But, as the other commenter pointed out… it’s a tens-of-billions global industry, and AI is being invested in as if its a trillions global industry.
They need to make AI better, or make the slop industry larger. They won’t meaningfully do the first, but can make some headroom on the second. Either way, not nearly enough for profitability.
Right now my money is on industry to repurpose barely used datacenter hardware which will become available for pennies on the dollar back to consumer-usable hardware.
Although I agree that there will always be produced “content” that is worse than other, I don’t think there’s any cause to compare human labour to “AI” slop. People can be stuck in jobs they don’t care about, most often because of unreasonable work conditions or wages.
“AI” produces slop because that’s what it is made for. That’s its dire success criteria, making something that’s statistically just above but not quite terrible quality. Manufacturers and employers prefer that over human labour performing similarly, i.e. quiet quitting. Because so far “AI” doesn’t have workers’ rights. Or higher aspirations.
And I cannot agree with your point about “telemarketers with accents” as a marker of low quality. That phrasing is a whole thicket of weeds that I’m not wading into.
I’m actually not saying anything is “better” than anything else. I’m saying there is a distinct industrial strategy that involves maximizing engagements primarily through volume of attempts at the minimal cost. It’s very much a bimodal reality, clustered around trying to maximize completions against a constrained set of touches, or merely maximizing touches. I didn’t mention it earlier, but “scams” also fit this profile. And I’m just calling it all slop. It’s the cheapest thing that you can feed the pigs that’ll eat anything anyways. Maximize channel saturation at the absolute lowest cost possible, the message itself being largely irrelevant.
AI excels at that specific task. You can agree or disagree all you want but studies trying to establish “is anyone actually seeing material profit gains out of AI”, are seeing this exact pattern. People trying to use the slop machine to do anything besides making slop aren’t having a great time. People who’s business model is slop are doing great.
Unfortunately, those things are pretty much the only things it’s good at and the companies losing billions on them are going to try to recoup as much as possible by doing as much of that as they can.
those things are pretty much the only things it’s good at
No. It most definitely is not.
Because he’s a motherfucker.
Shame these kids got an advertisement instead of a commencement speech.
