Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

LoganDark

> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.” This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way." Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.

davemp

Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.

xg15

> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.” This sounds cynical if there is a kinglike president, surrounded by a small clique of tech billionaires who all are becoming increasingly open about the kind of future they want to realise.

nilirl

> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with. I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.

lifestyleguru

It's industrial revolution which doesn't want to happen. Unless the new industrial revolution means those unwilling to attend to billionaires and oligarchs are to be priced out of housing and life in general, this one is swiftly approaching. I mean forget housing, even getting good computer is out of reach by now.

xt00

Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but not them.. where does that end?

collabs

Funny enough by attending and booing they are already doing their part instead of boycotting the commencement

booleandilemma

No one wants AI outside a small minority of tech people.

rdtsc

> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.” How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.

genxy

Eric Schmidt really needs to hire a handler.

new_account_100

The LLM marketing scheme has essentially been an assault on the labor value of these graduates. I don't think boos are far enough.

sega_sai

I believe that AI is truly revolutionary, but I struggle to feel sympathy to these large companies who (while building tremendously powerful tools) also work on extracting as much money they can from users, potentially making millions of them redundant while paying as little as possible for used texts, codes. In some sense this is how capitalism is supposed to work. But I am not required to like the bosses who pontificate about the future opportunities. (A somewhat contrasting behaviour is say l deepseek who releases their models to the public, and I would not boo them)

_fat_santa

The biggest issue I see with discourse around AI is you have two voices: one is of the tech CEO's and other elites that talk about it largely in the abstract and how it's going to take everyone's jobs, and then you have folks on Twitter/X that talk about things that they are actually using it for. Generally what I found listening to both sides is the latter group is very optimistic about AI and what it can do while the former group tries to be optimistic but just ends up coming off as doomery about it. And the problem that the AI space has right now is the doomery group is just more visible to the average person and thus the average person gets their opinion informed by that group. I really wish there was a way to better surface the sentiment that I see on X about AI, the folks there aren't talking about how AI will replace you at work and make you obsolete, they use AI every day and they know that's just not realistic, not now and probably not ever. Rather they talk about all the cool things that it can help you do now, and how it can be a force multiplier in the best sense. The problem with the elites talking about AI is everything they say is just so detached and abstract. And their giant egos prevent them from seeing the damage they are doing to the field.

mbgerring

Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to be the “good” outcome that e.g. OpenAI is playing for. I don’t understand why any of you think that’s good or positive or desirable.

hansmayer

The kids are alright ;)

hilariously

After hearing that padlum from a billionaire I wouldn't boo, I would rush the stage to hit him with my shoes.

LogicFailsMe

The guy has been a stochastic parrot of A2Z talking points for years. What's new is we have reached the finding out phase of telling an entire generation of children who just spent 6 figures and 4ish years on education that they will be replaced by the irresponsibly deployed toy of the old white dudes who made college that expensive in the first place. AI as a technology is amazeballs in precisely the same way AI thought leaders, executives and mid-level management are not. And yet, here we are poisoning its innovation with late stage capitalism and privatized panopticons. Yuck.

arunmathur

This caught my attention because I really enjoy hearing ES speak about AI. Directionally, I’m listening for a roadmap. Is the problem I’m solving right now even worthwhile? As an avid user of these tools, am I in the driver seat or am I a passenger? I feel like the latter. For some context, according to the daily beast, student groups at the university distributed fliers urging students to “turn their backs to the stage” or “boo” during the former executive’s speech. The fliers stated that they wanted to “make it clear that the University of Arizona and greater community that we represent, whether from Tucson or beyond, do not support abusers being platformed.” Schmidt was accused by Michelle Ritter in a 2021 lawsuit of “forcibly raping” her during a trip off the coast of Mexico and later initiating sex without her consent in 2023 during the annual Burning Man festival.

oompydoompy74

Nobody wants the pile of Schmidt you are selling fam

therobots927

HBO’s Silicon Valley looks more and more like a documentary every day. The out of touch antics of Gavin Belson or Peter Gregory are fucking spot on.