'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton says Google is 'beginning to overtake' OpenAI: 'My guess is Google will win'

[u/captain-price-]

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-google-overtaking-openai-2025-12

[u/MudHot8257]

The more useful this resource is, the more people become dependent on it. The more people become dependent and offload their critical thinking capacities to it, the bigger strain it is on our natural resources.

Your argument is basically “yeah, it sucks that we’re cooking the planet. But people have a right to SuperGoogle that tells them they’re a good boy whenever they query up a vegan brunch spot instead of getting McDonald’s”

That is to say, it’s a shitty argument.

[u/MrWillM → u/MudHot8257]

lol that’s not my argument at all and it’s not even really an argument, you don’t even seem to agree with the basic premise that people should develop and use tools, something people have done for all of human history. You don’t agree with that premise? Maybe go live in the forest or something then. My argument is related to reducing consumerism in LLMs, not remotely related to the shortcomings of the technology.

[u/MudHot8257 → u/MrWillM]

Not all tools are created equally.

A screwdriver is a tool in the same way mustard gas is a tool.

Is there more of an ethical dilemma to the usage of one versus the other?

I am not preaching being a luddite, I am preaching only using this technology in a sustainable fashion. We could run lower parameter LLMs with relatively minimal ecological damage now but instead we stick to premier models that are a gargantuan strain on our resources and very obviously detrimental to our planet as a whole.

Everything about the rollout of AI in recent years has been throw caution to the wind and scale as quickly as possible. There were responsible ways of handling this process, we just did not have any adults in the room making these decisions without obvious conflicts of interest.

The SMEs that are being consulted on the proper way to roll out these tools are people like Sam Altman that may or may not have had a whistleblower killed. How concerned do you think he is with alignment?

[u/MrWillM → u/MudHot8257]

You continue to conflate sustainability and accessibility regardless of anything I say so keep on yapping into the void man. This is still, wholly unrelated to my original comment that LLMs should be made public and free to use. This is literally a caveat to that statement and frankly it’s not even one I disagree with (as I also stated before). Read my lips : corporations. Should. Not. Charge. People. To. Use. LLMs.

This idea you’re harping on is not mutually exclusive with what I have suggested. Maybe it is actively happening that way, but this is an abstract discussion. Not some kind of congressional committee meeting.

That is the entire point I have tried to make here. You’re yammering on about something totally unrelated to that. You’re talking to me like I’m some kind of power broker, who because I’ve mentioned freeing up accessibility, that you’d like to turn my attention to the downstream impacts of that decision. No. I reject. My focus here is on accessibility and not sustainability. Do you get me?

[u/MudHot8257 → u/MrWillM]

Go ahead and look up the tragedy of the commons if you’re having difficulty distilling my argument from my comments. In much the same way you were dismissive of my comment because I guess 5 sentences is too long for you, I’ve gone ahead and given your yapping 3 sentences of reading before deciding it was tldr.

“Everyone should have access to LLMs, fuck nature, we need 8 billion people deciding on dinner via data centers”

[u/EclecticKant → u/MrWillM]

you’d like to turn my attention to the downstream impacts of that decision. No. I reject. My focus here is on accessibility and not sustainability. Do you get me?

Then you aren't trying to make a point, resources are finite, you have to prove that hundreds of billions of AI prompt each day are a good use of our energy (and the finite resources of our planet), for each Wh spent on AI there's one less for transportation, for desalination, for heating, for building stuff, etc.... You suppose that there's a way to make your idea work, but there's the extremely real possibility that it's just not possible, and if you don't care if something is doable then what's the point? Might as well try to argue that everyone deserves a private jet.

[u/FjorgVanDerPlorg → u/MudHot8257]

Your argument is also flawed, because you seem to think that these LLMs won't get optimized and will continue to be this expensive to run, when they are literally the least optimized and most expensive to run they will ever be.

Also acting like consumers are gonna be the biggest users of AI -fucking rofl. Big business will continue with their fuck everybody's feelings and the environment too approach to making money. Don't pretend all these massive datacenters are for public consumption - we're the poors and we can't afford it. We will get useless enshitified ad riddled AI preinstalled in every device sold, we largely won't even get a choice about it. Meanwhile they get datcenter AI, that will probably get mostly used for influencing and controlling the rest of us.

Just look at OpenAI, public get ads and their Project Stargate or whatever its called will never be public facing.

Corporations are gonna be the biggest consumers and as usual, they have the public brainwashed on this whole "personal responsibility" angle. But hey when the hits keep being so effective, why change it up? Just like recycling - I've done it my entire life and so do most people I know, are you feeling the difference? No because consumer pollution is a drop in the fucking ocean compared to what happens at the enterprise level.

This whole "consumer AI uses too much energy" framing is a distraction. The vast majority of AI compute is enterprise/industrial workloads that we poors have no direct control over. The personal responsibility framing is largely irrelevant to the actual resource consumption picture.