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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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We regret to inform you that one of Google's "AI leader"s is a transphobe:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/googles-2-7-billion-ai-hire-tests-companys-speech-limits-inflammatory-posts (paywall)
https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social/post/3m52bffg2222x (screenshot of relevant section)
Hey it's the character.ai guy, a.k.a. first confirmed AI assisted kid suicide guy.
Kind of feel the transphobia is barely scratching the surface of all the things wrong with this person.
That must be one of the more dumber things I have read in a while.
I think he is stating that people don't have an invisible eternal Gender like a Christian thinks people have an invisible eternal Soul. I am a materialist so I don't think either exists. Shazeer goes on to complain about "sterilizing children" which is a red flag of transphobia (ie. people who post a lot about that tend to have a screw loose).
There is no need to give transphobes the benefit of the doubt really.
You don't believe in gender? I mean you're wrong IMO but we're cool. But if someone says the words "I don't believe have an attribute called gender" as part of a bunch of totally obvious anti-trans dog-whistles when butting into a discussion about transgender day of remembrance? Now it's a problem.
People who get angry about trans people and trans theory remind me of Dawkins and friends, because what starts as a factual/philosophical concern (there are probably no gods / the idea that people have a true gender inside them sounds mystical) gets twisted in a reactionary direction. I don't have to understand why trans or nonbinary people feel the way they do to support them as they explore ways of being humans in the world.
BTW the official way to support trans people as they "explore ways of being humans" is to punch Nazis in the face and dunk on techbros. Go forth and tell all your cis friends!
(If anyone finds some ways of not being human to explore do let me know, I'm holding out for Magical Girl)
I'd go for Motoko Kusanagi's prosthetic body, myself, as long as I could afford the upkeep. That whole "don't darken your Soul Gem" thing would go terribly for me.
Speaking this into existence. In an interview, Saltman suggests soul gems as the next phase in energy production for LLMs
I think that gender is a collection of roles in a specific society which people perform and have performed on them. Its not something which exists outside that context, any more than "being the king" exists outside of a legal system. Of the three statements on BlueSky, its the third (the statement about sterilizing children) which makes me think he has been consuming angry things about trans people online.
@CinnasVerses @sailor_sega_saturn two bits, the one about god and the one about sterilizing children. The second is obvious, straight from transphobic material. The first is directly against what I've seen some people say, "god put me in the wrong body", as their explanation why they seek gender reassignment treatment.
At that point, what he thinks about attributes people might or might not have is of little relevance.
Sure, saying that about being in the wrong body was a dick move. You don't have to accept all the theory to see that many people are in bodies that feel wrong to them, and many people are expected to present in ways that feel wrong to them. The quote implies that they should just try harder to perform the gender they were assigned at birth.
@CinnasVerses one would guess that they should work harder so his beliefs are not inconvenienced, or some similar egocentric drivel.
Now I'm wondering if that was written by gemini or grok.
Indeed, we also don't have an attribute called friendship, nor does money have a value attribute or stuff like that. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It shows a total lack of understanding of what people are talking and arguing about, just what looks like a very dumb attempt at a gotcha, while butting into a conversation that has been had for years now.
Time to derail conversations about computers by saying you don't believe in digital ones and zeros because of the volt values are not one or zero.
Its also one of the authors of "Attention Is All You Need", one of the founding texts of the AI ideology.
As far as I can tell there's absolutely no ideology in the original transformers paper, what a baffling way to describe it.
James Watson was also a cunt, but calling "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" one of the founding texts of eugenicist ideology or whatever would be just dumb.
this is a recurring problem with them/their posts; if you look across history you can see a continual pattern of “de jour grumpword a la $somecommunity” leak forth
I have on occasion asked them to try to make better posts. they don’t seem to give a fuck to do so tho
to the latter part of my comment: both my own and also other peoples’ criticisms just turn into a dead avenue. the applicable poster just ghosts that subthread while happily posting elsewhere
guess there’s no desire to do better!
Some legitimate academic papers and essays have served as fuel for the AI hype and less legitimate follow-up research, but the clearest examples that comes to mind would be either "The Bitter Lesson" essay or one of the "scaling law" papers (I guess Chinchilla scaling in particular?), not "Attention is All You Need". (Hyperscaling LLMs and the bubble fueling it is motivated by the idea that they can just throw more and more training data at bigger and bigger model). And I wouldn't blame the author(s) for that alone.