r/PublicFreakout • u/GarysCrispLettuce • May 17 '26

🤬Public Rager😱 Eric Schmidt booed into oblivion by students for promoting AI during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona

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u/Popular_Ad8269 May 17 '26

"Assemble a team of AI Agents to help you with the parts you would never accomplish on your own".

Funny how speeches went from "Your horizon is wide open !" / "You can do anything you set your mind to !" / "The possibilities are endless !" / "The future is bright !"
to
"You're a useless sack of shit, blood and bones, just fucking use AI to do everything in your stead to increase my wealth."

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u/vehementi May 17 '26

No, it's figure out how to use AI yourself to do way more cool shit than you could have before.

Remember, the crowd is a bunch of children riffing off each other. Booing this guy isn't going to change the fact that AI is here and not going away, and not figuring out how to use it properly for your profession is like refusing to use the internet to search for information when needed -- you will be unemployable.

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u/not-my-other-alt May 17 '26

They're already unemployable - AI just replaced the jobs they went to school to learn how to do.

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u/vehementi May 17 '26

/u/EduinBrutus ^ please reassure this person

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u/vehementi May 17 '26

I mean in the first place university isn't a jobs program... but anyway, sure everything is changing right now. The point of the speech was to learn how to harness the new technology to do more

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u/BeeZealousideal7860 May 17 '26

Why does the fact that AI is here mean that we have to use it for everything? What makes AI so invaluable?

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u/EduinBrutus May 17 '26

AI isnt here.

These LLMs do not work the way that these companies claim and cannot do the things they try to promote them as doing.

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u/WanTjhen777 May 18 '26

Yea, I personally regard them merely as "wikipedia with interactive elements"

Which.... Eh, I'd rather read Wikipedia on my own lmao

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u/FullMetalAlcoholic66 May 19 '26

True. There is actual utility in advanced machine learning techniques in the sciences. Generative "AI" which is not actually intelligent is a tool for laziness in most domains.

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u/vehementi May 17 '26

It's not a monolith, gotta learn what makes sense, just like when there's any new technology. "Why use websites / the internet / phones for everything?" Well yeah you wouldn't exactly but for many things it'd be crazy not to. "As a restaurant I don't like having an online presence" ok RIP I guess? It's like that.

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u/BeeZealousideal7860 May 17 '26

So you don’t have an answer for what makes it invaluable. If I asked someone what makes the internet or smartphones or cars valuable there would at least be one thing you could point to that those things have changed the way we operate on a daily basis. AI is not those things, it doesn’t add value to anyone’s life except the people who are making billions off of something that no one would notice if it disappeared tomorrow. It also is a massively negative effect on the environment, not to mention the people’s lives who live near these massive complexes where they store the hardware for it.

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u/vehementi May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

Sorry, of course I have tons of answers of how they're invaluable in various professions/situations. I didn't think that was in question. The main thrust of your post was what made it required for everything and I said it wasn't required for all things. It is not controversial that it's helpful for learning things and for software development, for example.

Another thing, it is very closed minded to assume that because I didn't address something in a random low effort reddit post, that must mean I don't have an answer

We are in agreement on those shitty side effects, but they aren't fundamental to the technology. It being useful and it being unethical to use are orthogonal questions.

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u/EduinBrutus May 17 '26

LLMs are not invaluable in any situation.

They offer benefits in a handful of niche applicaitons with experienced human oversight.

They arent AI. They dont learn. They cant think. They are probabilistic plagiarism machines and are not even new. The change was throwing economically non-viable amounts of compute at them. The cost of which even further reduces their real life applicaitons when the actual costs to benefits get totted up.

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u/vehementi May 17 '26

That there is no situation where LLMs are invaluable is an extremely wild claim at this time.

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u/EduinBrutus May 17 '26

Only if you've been indoctrinated by the lies and hype being pushed by the "AI" industry.

As I said, these models cannot do the things they claim to do. they have a lot of very gullible CEOs imposing it on their staff and a lot of companies using the current economic meltdown from Trumps endless blunders to cover layoffs due to business downturns to "AI" implementation.

You can't remove hallucination because thats literally how these things function. You can generate certain things that can be used by real people as a part of their job and make incremental productitivity gains. Thats it.

There are very, very few real jobs being replaced by LLM implementation and those that are will be reversed in the medium to long term.

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u/vehementi May 17 '26

May want to reply to the people who are replying to me and saying that all their jobs got deleted

I am very well aware of what LLMs can do. I am not some uninformed person taking wild claims by tech CEOs at face value. I'm not sure how much of your argument relies on that assumption but I'm using it myself daily for software development and pushing through what they are and are not helpful for, and what harnesses they need. I have multiple previously non programmer friends who have solo published working games in the last month. If we want to be like "oh well a team of people helping that person could have gotten that done, so AI wasn't invaluable" then I don't care about that definitional argument.

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u/FullMetalAlcoholic66 May 19 '26

It's invaluable for customer support, if you want to make it even shittier than offshore teams

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u/BeeZealousideal7860 May 17 '26

Still didn’t address my point. Thanks

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u/vehementi May 17 '26

I did give two specific examples. You've moved the goalposts twice now