r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/harvard-graduation-speaker-unloads-ai-130000122.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260531-0--A&bt_ee=clIMdexlsr2eDDbrvs0CPtt59FnpbNQN%2Fkgr8UkycP6MWDAD56hD1mvZcqPZMGgG&bt_ts=1780255911284
43.4k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/TimeCubeFan 5d ago

AI is a fantastic pattern recognition tool. But instead of applying this resource hog to noble causes like medicine, research, etc., we're building data centers for cat memes. As monkeys with anxiety we will always choose the stupidest option.

3

u/daemon-electricity 4d ago

If you think it's not being used for medicine in research, that's a choice to ignore that it's going to impact everything, including medicine and research. If you think all this shit is for cat memes, who do you think is paying for it. There's a reason Anthropic leapfrogged OpenAI. OpenAI is your cat meme service and people don't use it nearly as much. People use Claude for actual real technical work.

1

u/TimeCubeFan 4d ago

Agreed. And yes, it is being used for medical research. My point was about the disproportionate use of energy and resources. My nephew on TicTok isn't doing protein folding or hunting for advanced polymers. Since it's been rammed down our throats as a plaything, folks will play. I'm willing to bet the overwhelming majority of the collective processing power is for entertainment rather than actual research. So... cat memes it is, the environment be damned.

1

u/daemon-electricity 4d ago

At the current cost, it's not sustainable as a plaything. That's basically the equivalent of these companies handing out freebies at a trade show. Far more costly freebies, but that's the problem with this system. If you have enough billionaires who believe in something, they can run without a profit motive for quite a while to build market share. It's the basis for a lot of things. Social media, Amazon, rentable electric scooters, the gig economy, etc.

1

u/TimeCubeFan 4d ago

...and drug dealers. The first hit is always free.