Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
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Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.
Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily.
And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".
boothby · · focus · HN ↗
There's a way that many people fear this is true: what you're getting for "free" has some external cost that you aren't taking into account.
Cost 1. The environment. Tech companies were once significantly interested in efficiency, their carbon footprint, etc. With the advent of LLMs, this was thrown out the window. Concerned people are now thinking about water footprint, heat footprint, noise footprint, and probably more. These things are hard to put a dollar figure on in a short comment, but the sustanability of a liveable climate for the billions living on this planet is literally priceless.
Cost 2. Employment. We face a significant cull of employability -- graphic artists, programmers, mathematicians, paralegals, and more are rightly fearful for the end of their career. If we're getting intelligence for "free" in 2026 dollars, but we can't get jobs in 2030, will all that content still be affordable in 2035?
Cost 3. Infinite investor dollars. The AI companies are burning cash at a historically unprecedented rate. This has attracted a lot of attention from traditional investors, like pensions, banks, etc. If all of this ends up in a free product, that doesn't sound like it'll return those investments. And that can crash the economy -- I ask again about real affordability in 2035.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
1. is mostly bullshit that's used by anti-AI crowd to gather further support. Data center companies did not stop caring about footprint, they're still pursuing that for the same reason they did it before: it aligns with overall lowering of costs. AI added an extra incentive to improve efficiency because the demand far outstrips supply of compute.
For 1., also the general argument stands: yes, these data centers use energy, just like everything else humans do. What matters is the value it provides to people, and in case of AI, it's one of the most objectively useful expenditure of watts on compute (your point 2. notwithstanding).
boothby · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not even sure I agree that demand is outstripping compute -- nvidia's circular demand-inflating investment/buildout/loan situation certainly muddies the waters on that, see my point 3.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
> Your point about efficiency is particularly obtuse: efficiency doesn't mean burning less fuel, and getting more compute per Joule. Not reducing the overall carbon footprint, but accelerating the burn rate as fast as we can build.
Efficiency does mean getting more compute per Joule. They are doing that. They are also building out as fast as they can, because both of those address the same problem: demand for compute outstripping supply for it. They can't just pursue the build-out strategy, because hardware production is now supply-constrained too - that's where the "RAMpocalypse" came from.
Yes, this is a huge build-out, and little to none of that is 100% carbon-neutral, so ecological footprint adds up. But that's normal and expected and a kind of tradeoff humanity has been making forever: building new stuff, be it hospitals or airports or data centers, has an environmental footprint, and we only hope what we get from it is more important to us on the margin, and that we can offset the environmental costs some other way.
> I'm not even sure I agree that demand is outstripping compute -- nvidia's circular demand-inflating investment/buildout/loan situation certainly muddies the waters on that, see my point 3.
I'm not talking about financial "demand". I'm talking about real demand, for compute. There's nothing to doubt here, it's pretty clear that all major AI players are constantly running at capacity - it's obvious in the very structure and limits they place on even the highest tiers. Unless you believe half the data centers are just spinning busy-loops and burning energy to inflate stock prices and generate a fake reason to build out more compute capacity - if yes, then I don't know what to tell you.
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[0] - Like the water story, where the reported datacenter usage numbers look big in isolation, but once you relate them to "how much water is there" and "how much is used by other industries", it turns out to be a nothingburger. The only numbers that survive are those showing the story is really about those other industries having a competitor for cheap water now, and having to pay a bit more than they're used to.
boothby · · focus · HN ↗
Water scarcity is a problem around the world; even my rainy hometown of Vancouver had steep water restrictions this year. The question "how much water is there" is incredibly disingenuous, to the point of feeling like a motte and bailey: yes, the universe, or the earth contains vast oceans of the stuff but datacenters are using drinking water which is quite scarce. Just because "other industries" use a lot of water doesn't make it okay -- I level exactly the same criticism at other industries which waste water at such an egregious degree.
To be clear: if data centers only charged up a pool of water to use as coolant, that's fine. But when the weather is warm, they run millions of gallons of tapwater down the drain just to cool off. And heat spikes are happening with increasing frequency, severity and duration.
We as a species need to conserve water and emit less CO₂, full stop. The tech industry doesn't get a pass just because other industries are dirty.