Comment by jabedude
2 months ago
Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?
Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack.
Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.
Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
Data center power usage has been fairly flat for the last decade (until 2022 or so). While new capacity has been coming online, efficiency improvements have been keeping up, keeping total usage mostly flat.
The AI boom has completely changed that. Data center power usage is rocketing upwards now. It is estimated it will be more than 10% of all electric power usage in the US by 2030.
It's a completely different order of magnitude than the pre AI-boom data center usage.
Source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1
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> Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
How much of that compute was for the ads themselves vs the software useful enough to compel people to look at the ads?
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You could at least argue while there is plenty of negatives, at least we got to use many services with ad-supported model.
There is no upside to vast majority of the AI pushed by the OpenAI and their cronies. It's literally fucking up economy for everyone else all to get AI from "lies to users" to "lies to users confidently", all while rampantly stealing content to do that, because apparently pirating something as a person is terrible crime govt need to chase you, unless you do that to resell it in AI model, then it's propping up US economy.
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Someone paid for those ads. Someone got value from them.
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“this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
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The ad system uses a fairly small fraction of resources.
And before the LLM craze there was a constant focus on efficiency. Web search is (was?) amazingly efficient per query.
What makes you think he didn’t mind it?
We weren't facing hardware shortages in the race to shovel ads. Little different.
Btw., how do you calculate the toll that ads take on society?
I mean, buying another pair of sneakers you don't need just because ads made you want them doesn't sound like the best investment from a societal perspective. And I am sure sneakers are not the only product that is being bought, even though nobody really needs them.
That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.
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It's dumb, but energy wise, isn't this similar to leaving the TV on for a few minutes even though nobody is watching it?
Like, the ratio is not too crazy, it's rather the large resource usages that comes from the aggregate of millions of people choosing to use it.
If you assume all of those queries provide no value then obviously that's bad. But presumably there's some net positive value that people get out of that such that they're choosing to use it. And yes, many times the value of those queries to society as a whole is negative... I would hope that it's positive enough though.
> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree.
I find it difficult to express how strongly I disagree with this sentiment.
You can make an argument supporting your disagreement.
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It's extremely anti-human.
Serving unwanted ads has what cost-benefit-ratio vs serving LLM:s that are wanted by the user?
Asking about the value of ads is like asking what value I derive from buying gasoline at the petrol station. None. I derive no value from it, I just spend money there. If given the option between having to buy gas and not having to buy gas, all else being equal, I would never take the first option.
But I do derive value from owning a car. (Whether a better world exists where my and everyone else's life would be better if I didn't is a definitely a valid conversation to have.)
The user doesn't derive value from ads, the user derives value from the content on which the ads are served next to.
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Ads are extremely computationally cheap
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Every content generated by LLM was served to me against my will and without accounting for preferences.
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> LLM:s that are wanted by the user
If they want LLM, you probably don't have to advertise them as much
No the reality of the matter is that people are being shoved LLM's. They become the talk of the town and algorithms share any development related to LLM or similar.
The ads are shoved down to users. Trust me, the average person isn't as much enthusiastic about LLM's and for good reasons when people who have billions of dollars say that yes its a bubble but its all worth it or similar and the instances where the workforce themselves are being replaced/actively talked about being replaced by AI
We live in an hackernews bubble sometimes of like-minded people or communities but even on hackernews we see disagreements (I am usually Anti AI mostly because of the negative financial impact the bubble is gonna have on the whole world)
So your point becomes a bit moot in the end but that being said, Google (not sure how it was in the past) and big tech can sometimes actively promote/ close their eyes if the ad sponsors are scammy so ad-blockers are generally really good in that sense.
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> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree
That's just not true... When a mother nurses her child and then looks into their eyes and smiles, it takes the utmost in cynical nihilism to claim that is harmful.
I could be misinterpreting parent myself, but I didn't bat an eye on the comment because I interpreted it similarly to "everything humans (or anything really) do increases net entropy, which is harmful to some degree for earth". I wasn't considering the moral good vs harm that you bring up, so I had been reading the the discussion from the priorities of minimizing unnecessary computing scope creep, where LLMs are being pointed to as a major aggressor. While I don't disagree with you and those who feel that statement is anti-human (another responder said this), this is what I think parent was conveying, not that all human action is immoral to some degree.
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> Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.
Just like the invention of Go.
> Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.
Well the people who burnt compute got it from money so they did burn money.
But they don't care about burning money if they can get more money via investors/other inputs faster than they can burn (fun fact: sometimes they even outspend that input)
So in a way the investors are burning their money, now they burn the money because the market is becoming irrational. Remember Devin? Yes cognition labs is still there etc. but I remember people investing into these because of their hype when it did turn out to be moot comparative to their hype.
But people/market was so irrational that most of these private equities were unable to invest in something like openai that they are investing in anything AI related.
And when you think more deeper about all the bubble activities. It becomes apparent that in the end bailouts feel more possible than not which would be an tax on average taxpayers and they are already paying an AI tax in multiple forms whether it be in the inflation of ram prices due to AI or increase in electricity or water rates.
So repeat it with me: whose gonna pay for all this, we all would but the biggest disservice which is the core of the argument is that if we are paying for these things, then why don't we have a say in it. Why are we not having a say in AI related companies and the issues relating to that when people know it might take their jobs etc. so the average public in fact hates AI (shocking I know /satire) but the fact that its still being pushed shows how little influence sometimes public can have.
Basically public can have any opinions but we won't stop is the thing happening in AI space imo completely disregarding any thoughts about the general public while the CFO of openAI proposing an idea that public can bailout chatgpt or something tangential.
Shaking my head...
Somebody just burned their refuse in a developing country somewhere. I guess if it was cold, at least they were warming themselves up.
Cutting trees for fuel and paper to send a letter burned resources. Nobody gained in that transaction
I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans.
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Someone taking the time and effort to write and send a letter and pay for postage might actually be appreciated by the receiver. It’s a bit different from LLM agents being ordered to burn resources to send summaries of someone’s work life and congratulating them. It feels like ”hey look what can be done, can we get some more funding now”. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it adds any good value to this world
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How is it that so many people who supposedly lean towards analytical thought are so bad at understanding scale?
Use recycled paper.
Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's radar here. The data center is about 300 MW, if I'm not mistaken.
Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW.
Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem!
This is an all too common pattern.
How many more jobs are there at the aluminum plant than a datacenter? Big datacenters employ mid-hundreds of people
Not only would I suspect that an aluminum plant employs far more people, it is an attainable job. Presumably minimal qualifications for some menial tasks, whereas you might need a certain level of education/training to get a more prestigious and out of reach job at a datacenter.
Easier for a politician to latch onto manufacturing jobs.
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AFAIK, the data center employs more people. I'm not really sure why that's the case, but neither is >1k.
I'd guess that this is also an area where the perception makes a bigger difference than the reality.
How many other jobs in the area depend on being able to get their aluminum stock orders fulfilled close by?
Google had achieved carbon neutrality and committed to wiping out their carbon legacy until AI.
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.)
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.
>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.
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.
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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.)
My guess is the scale has changed? They used to do AI stuff, but it wasn't until OpenAI (anyone feel free to correct me) went ahead and scaled up the hardware and discovered that more hardware = more useful LLM, that they all started ramping up on hardware. It was like the Bitcoin mining craze, but probably worse.
Rob left Google a couple of years ago.
What about Ken Thompson?
So what's he doing now? Is he retired?
I think so, or at least something like that. In https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode60-rob-pike he mentioned that he has now been working more on Ivy (https://github.com/robpike/ivy) in his spare time.
Not "retired" but a similar term.
OpenAI's internal target of ~250 GW of compute capacity by 2033 would require about as much electricity as the whole of India's current national electricity consumption[0].
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
My favorite factoid is that the most energetic power production facility on the planet is the Three Gorges Dam, with a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW.
That dam took 10 years to build and cost $30B.
And OpenAI needs more than ten of them in 7 years.
I do wonder about how we as individuals influence this stuff.
We want free services and stuff, complain about advertising / sign up for the google's of the world like crazy.
Bitch about data-centers while consuming every meme possible ...
Even if I don't share the opinion, I can understand the moral stance against genAI. But it strikes me as a bit unfaithful when people argue against it from all kinds of angles that somehow never seemed to bother them before.
It's like all those anti-copyright activists from the 90s (fighting the music and film industry) that suddenly hate AI for copyright infringements.
Maybe what's bothering the critics is actually deeper than the simple reasons they give. For many, it might be hate against big tech and capitalism itself, but hate for genAI is not just coming from the left. Maybe people feel that their identity is threatened, that something inherently human is in the process of being lost, but they cannot articulate this fear and fall back to proxy arguments like lost jobs, copyright, the environment or the shortcomings of the current implementations of genAI?
There aren't any rules that prevent us from changing course.
The points you raise, literally, do not affect a thing.
Can't speak for Rob Pile but my guess would be, yeah, it might seem hypocritical but it's a combination of seeing the slow decay of the open culture they once imagined culminating into this absolute shirking of responsibility while simultaneously exploiting labour, by those claiming to represent the culture, alongwith the retrospective tinge of guilt for having enabled it, that drrove this rant.
Furthermore, w.r.t the points you raised - it's a matter of scale and utility. Compared to everything that has come before, GenAI is spectacularly inefficient in terms of utility per unit of compute (however you might want to define these). There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be. The egarness and will to throw money and resources at this surpasses the crypto mania which was just as worthless.
Even if you consider Rob a hypocrite , he isn't alone in his frustration and anger at the degradation of the promise of Open Culture.
"There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be"
People being more productive with writing code, making music or writing documents fpr whatever is not a improvement for them and therefore for society?
Or do you claim that is all imaginary?
Or negated by the energy cost?
I claim that the new code, music or documents have not added anything significant/noteworthy/impactful to society except for the self-perpetuating lie that it would, all the while regurgitating, at high speeds, what was stolen.
And all at significant opportunity cost (in terms of computing and investment)
If it was as life altering as they claim where's that novel work of art (in your examples..of code, music or literature) that truly could not have been produced without GenAI and fundamentally changed the art form ?
Surely, with all that ^increased productivity^ we'd have seen the impact equivalent of linux, apache, nginx, git, redis, sqlite, ... Etc being released every couple of weeks instead of yet another VSCode clone./s
Data centers seem poised to make renewable energy sources more profitable than they have ever been. Nuclear plants are springing up everywhere and old plants are being un-decommissioned. Isn’t there a strong case to be made that AI has helped align the planet toward a more sustainable future?
The dose makes the poison. Data centers are just now being built haphazardly without cause because they anticipate demand that does not yet exist.
Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure?
The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal.
You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries can be cached, too).
Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
> jstummbillig:
> Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
Why would you lie: https://imgur.com/a/1AEIQzI ???
For those that don't want to see the Gemini answer screenshot, best case scenario 10x, worst case scenario 100x, definitely not "3x that rounds to 0x", or to put it in Gemini's words:
> Summary
> Right now, asking Gemini a question is roughly the environmental equivalent of running a standard 60-watt lightbulb for a few minutes, whereas a Google Search is like a momentary flicker. The industry is racing to make AI as efficient as Search, but for now, it remains a luxury resource.
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Rob Pike retired from google a few years back. As per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398351
They claim they have net zero carbon footprint, or carbon neutrality.
In reality what they do is pay "carbon credits" (money) to some random dude that takes the money and does nothing with it. The entire carbon credit economy is bullshit.
Very similar to how putting recyclables in a different color bin doesn't do shit for the environment in practice.
They don't have it. They aimed for it. However:
"Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website"
as noticed by the Canadian National Observer
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/g...
They know the credits are not a good system. The 1st choice has always been a contract with a green supplier, often helping to build out production. And they have a lot of that, with more each year. But construction is slow, in the mean time they use credits, which are better than nothing.
Someone making a complain does not imply that they were ok with it prior to the complaint. Why are you muddying the waters?
There is a difference between providing a useful service (web search for example) and running slop generators for modified TikTok clips, code theft and Internet propaganda.
If he is currently at Google: congratulations on this principled stance, he deserves a lot of respect.
AFAIK Rob Pike has been retired for years.
Everything has been doing has been bad faith and harmful since a looong time
They are building data centers of TPUs now, not general purpose processors.
Pecunia non olet.
The difference in carbon emissions for a search query vs an LLM generation are on the order of exhaling vs driving a hummer. So I can reduce this disingenuous argument to:
> You spent your whole life breathing, and now you're complaining about SUVs? What a hypocrite.
Rob retired from Google years ago fwiw.
I really hate this kind of lazy argument: Oh. do you use toilet paper? Then kindly keep your mouth shut while we burn the planet down.
This reminds me of how many Facebook employees were mad at Zuckerberg for going MAGA, but didn’t make any loud noise at the rapid rise of teenagers committing suicide or the misinformation and censorship done by their platform. People have blinders on.
Zuckenberg going MAGA and misinformation on facebook are the same thing. And liberals were criticising facebook for years for misinformation on platform.
You needed to read only conservative resources to not be aware that such criticism exists.
Oh look, the purity police have arrived, and this time they're the AI-bros. How righteous does one have to be before being allowed to voice criticism?
I've tried many times here to voice my reservations against AI. I've been accused of being on the "anti AI hype train" multiple times today.
As if there isn't a massive pro AI hype train. I watched an nfl game for the first time in 5 years, and saw no less than 8 AI commercials. AI Is being forced on people.
In commercials people were using it to generate holiday cards for God sake. I can't imagine something more cold and impersonal. I don't want that garbage. Our time on earth is to short to wade through LLM slop text
I don't know your stance on AI, but "AI is being forced on people because I saw a company offering AI greeting cards" is not a stance I'd call reasonable.
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The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now.
I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages.
His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience.
It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact.
It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless.
There’s more but that’s the gist of it.
That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.
You do not seem to be familiar with Rob Pike. He is known for major contributions to Unix, Plan 9, UTF-8, and modern systems programming, and he has this to say about his dream setup[0]:
> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.
[0]: https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
I don't know his history, but he sounds like he grew up in Unix world where everything wanted to be offloaded to servers because it started in academic/government organizations..
Home Computer enthusiasts know better. Local storage is important to ownership and freedom.
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I wonder how 2012 Rob Pyke would feel about 2025 internet and resource allocation?
I do recognize his name and knew him as a major creator of Go and contributor to UNIX and Plan 9, but didn’t know this quote.
In which case he’s got nothing to complain about, making this rant kind of silly.
This comment is the most "Connor, the human equivalent of a Toyota accord" I've read in a while.
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I think it's incredibly obvious how it connects to his "argument" - nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI. So dressing up his hatred of the technology in vague environmental concerns is laughably transparent.
He and everyone who agrees with his post simply don't like generative AI and don't actually care about "recyclable data centers" or the rape of the natural world. Those concerns are just cudgels to be wielded against a vague threatening enemy when convenient, and completely ignored when discussing the technologies they work on and like
You simply don't like any criticism of AI, as shown by your false assertions that Pike works at Google (he left), or the fact Google and others were trying to make their data centers emit less CO2 - and that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI.
And you can't assert that AI is "revolutionary" and "a vague threat" at the same time. If it is the former, it can't be the latter. If it is the latter, it can't be the former.
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> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI.
You mean except the bit about how GenAI included his work in its training data without credit or compensation?
Or did you disagree with the environmental point that you failed to keep reading?
I often find that when people start applying purity tests it’s mainly just to discredit any arguments they don’t like without having to make a case against the substance of the argument.
Assess the argument based on its merits. If you have to pick him apart with “he has no right to say it” that is not sufficient.
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> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI
Except it definitely is, unless you want to ignore the bubble we're living in right now.
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Someone else in the thread posted this article earlier.
https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar...
It seems video streaming, like Youtube which is owned by Google, uses much more energy than generative AI.
A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However:
1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs
2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus.
3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias
I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test.
Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.
Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.
The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.
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This is based on assuming 5 questions a day. YouTube would be very power efficient as well if people only watched 5 seconds of video a day.
How many tokens do you use a day?
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Thankfully YouTube provides a lot more value to society than gen-AI.
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It's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters.
I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).
Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.
I think that criticizing when it benefits the person criticizing, and absense of criticism when criticism would hurt the person criticizing, makes the argument less persuasive.
This isn't ad hom, it's a heuristic for weighting arguments. It doesn't prove whether an argument has merit or not, but if I have hundreds of arguments to think about, it helps organizing them.
It is the same energy as the "you criticize society, yet you participate in society" meme. Catching someone out on their "hypocrisy" when they hit a limit of what they'll tolerate is really a low-effort "gotcha".
And it probably isn't astroturf, way too many people just think this way.
being inside the machine doesn’t exempt you from tradeoff analysis, kind sir
As it so happens Rob Pike performed absolutely 0 tradeoff analysis
Do you really think that the only reason people would be turned off by this post by Rob Pike is that they are being paid by big AI?
No, which is why I didn’t say that. I do think astroturfing could explain the rapid parroting of extremely similar ad hominems, which is what I actually did imply.
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This is the most astro-turfy comment ITT
Uh, have you missed the tech news in the past three years?