Sorry for the quality, 720p was the max resolution:

TL;DR: use VRR

e: redjard’s image is better

This is already not the case for computers. And you’re trying to argue that we might one day be able to run the bigger models on consumer hardware, but I said it’s too expensive to train them. And you know that the cost isn’t just the RAM right?

If you replace everything I said about RAM with compute and replace the Bill Gates quote with Thomas Watson saying that the “world market [has room for] for maybe five computers” then it’s the same argument. They’re all ultimately built on technical advances in lithography and so growth in RAM and compute largely stem from similar sources.

Sure, my saying they will “always” be tied to concentrated capital is slightly hyperbolic. You never know. But it takes a whole lot of optimism to hope that LLMs will be decoupled from the billionaire class, hence why most analyses of the problems LLMs cause discuss them in this context.

I understand why it is done as shorthand.

I know this likely doesn’t apply to you, as you seem to be capable of understanding the nuance, it’s that a lot of people on social media (by people I’m including the bots) don’t make that distinction.

The same vitriol that is, rightfully, directed at OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/NVIDIA is also directed at things completely outside of the corporate LLM hellscape.

I’m mostly frustrated at seeing the sciences, researchers and open source AI projects catching strays and being painted with the same brush.

It’s useful shorthand among people who understand the nuance, but using that shorthand on social media invites misunderstanding and that is causing collateral damage.

This is mostly true, but you’re glossing over the fact that AI will always be tied to concentrated capital due to the cost of training state of the art models.

I think this is a false assumption.

We don’t know what the ultimate state of AI will be, we only know that we’re at the beginning of the journey.

Look at other technologies in similar positions. At one point computers were like this. Nobody but the military and the largest companies could afford them and now you can buy children’s toys with more storage and processing power than was available to the entire US military at the dawn of computers.

We had no idea what computers would become, even the experts making guesses that sounded wild at the time were off by several orders of magnitude. Bill Gates once said “640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody”, modern PCs have around 100,000 times that.

The reason that AI seems like it’s only affordable to concentrated capital is because models using a large amount of parameter require a large amount of RAM. The 5TB of RAM estimated for some of the largest frontier models is a lot, about 100x a workstation PC. That’s a few orders of magnitude less than 100,000x. Given equal scaling speed, we’re closer to running frontier models on our desktop than we are to the dawn of computers.

In addition, the research is leaning towards there being a ceiling on how useful it is to add more parameters (use more RAM). Doubling parameters doesn’t result in doubling of capability so there is effectively a soft cap on the amount of parameters.

Hardware is growing near exponentially while the RAM demands of models have a ceiling.

Keep in mind that this only relates to the state of the largest LLMs. You can train generative models on consumer graphics cards. Object recognition, classification, etc are all tiny compared to LLMs. These are also AI and, I’d argue, that they actually produce more value than LLMs (which are failing to deliver on their promise of replacing white collar labor).

It’s unlikely that the market will open up any time soon so that you can get your LLM from someone who isn’t a fascist billionaire tech bro.

You can find open weight models (of all kinds, not just LLMs) freely available here: https://huggingface.co/

Many can be run on locally on gaming hardware. Some of the classification and object recognition models can be run on microcontrollers (a popular use it to use them to make aimbots in FPS games).

There are larger models that can be run on more expensive dedicated hardware (like NVIDIA DGX Spark, ~$5,000) if you want to keep your projects completely internal. Or you can run those open weight models on hardware hosted in datacenters ran by companies you research to be ethical.

You can use AI without using one of the AI companies.

Most of these arguments are conflating AI with the people using them.

Labor exploitation, scraping without consent, military contracts, surveillance policing, grid strain and hardware prices driven up by speculation are real harms. But none of them are properties of a statistical language model.

They come from concentrated capital and state power, and whatever technology arrives next will get used the same way.

Just like we’ve seen everything in your list, done by the same people, using different technology.

We have had hardware speculation during the crypto craze.

These same companies (Google) have been taking your data without consent to power their surveillance advertising.

Datacenters have always been power and water hungry, the ones powering LLMs are exactly the same ones that exactly the same companies have been building since the Internet began.

Essentially every major advance in technology has been used for state surveillance and in the military. AI is simply the latest capability.

Models reproducing licensed code, poor code quality and floods of junk contributions. These are real problems with the technology itself. And the solution to most of these things is to iterate, build better models trained on consentually obtained data.

Yes, you should still be mad at what the AI companies are doing. I am too. Just keep in mind that Google was evil before Gemini and will certainly be on the forefront of fuckery with whatever technology comes next as long as people keep getting tricked into misdirecting their anger onto the technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

an echo chamber is defined as an environment or ecosystem in which participants encounter beliefs that amplify or reinforce their preexisting beliefs, by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.

The person I responded to was referring to people commenting who haven’t seen the video which forms the basis for this entire thread.

My comment is a tongue in cheek reference to the fact that people choose to impose echo chambers upon themselves by avoiding any media which would present information which may challenge their beliefs because feeling self-righetous and angry is a lot easier than taking the time to understand a topic.

As to not understanding how people could be angry when they only hear things which conforms to their beliefs, I’d direct your attention to politics for the past 50 years.

It’s easier to be angry if you avoid looking at things that don’t confom to your beliefs

Nothing. OP is stirring shit, attacking the other is part of that same tribalistic POV

While we’re at it, why hasn’t KDE condemned Hamas or taken a stand on the proliferation of weapons in space?

I can’t support a DE which hasn’t distanced itself from Ed Sheeran. Hopefully someone will fork KDE into a more Ed Sheeran-less experience.

I want to be angry god damn it, why is there not more things to be angry about on the topic of KDE!!!

I think you can be anticapitalist and also anti-AI. I’m certainly both

Yes, the venn is basically a circle.

All of the ‘bad things AI is doing’ are bad things that capitalists are doing.

Nobody is actually angry at AI for solving age old mathematical problems, folding proteins or locating cancers. It’s not the technology that people care about.

People are angry at rapacious capitalism and are misdirecting it at the technology and not the rapacious capitalists. Anti-AI is just Anti-Capitalism for new leftists.

What in the bullshit bad faith non sequitor is this.

Exactly.

All of the Anti-AI people are actually anti-capitalists, they’re just not finished diagnosing the problem.

AI isn’t building data centers, capitalists are. They’re doing it in such a destructive and rapid manner because they’re trying to leverage their infinite amount of cash into a future monopoly. If it wasn’t AI it would have been some other product.

Fighting the product and ignoring the actual human beings who are making these destructive decisions is only adding to the smoke screen that shifts blame away from names like Huang, Altman, and Musk.

There was an exploit in some firmwares that allowed it to be done. This story is about the guy who created the project to allow that.

If you’ve updated your PS5 anytime recently those bypasses won’t work for you.

To save you a click and strip all of the anti-AI circle jerking for people who actually want to understand what happened:

Another user discovered the hypervisor exploit that TheFlow0 was using and turned it in for bounty money. Without a working hypervisor bypass exploit, the project is moot.

and medium sized ones

OP, a term you may find useful is ricing. This is the sub-community of Linux users who focus on customizing their desktops. You can look at the unixporn subreddit to see examples of how much a DE can be customized.

Ex:

This is KDE Plasma

This is also KDE Plasma

This is also a, very customized, KDE Plasma

(video)https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1w2afj0/kde_my_2nd_ever_linux_rice/

Another is dotfiles or dots, ricers will sometimes make their .config files available for other users. (Be careful here, this can include hidden malicious scripts and such uglies. Use your best judgement).

I’m devastated at your diagnosis

Ask the people who were shouting about forking systemd… I’m sure they’ve created their techno-utopia fork world by now.

People really underestimate the amount of free labor provided by these FOSS groups. There is a reason that these flash in the pan outrage topics evaporate as quickly as they appear. The people who spend their lives arguing online are not the people who have the capability to replace all of the things that they’re attempting to destroy.

If only there were some community of people who valued using free and open source software so we had options that were not dependent on the whims of companies. Then we could have software that we could depend on that isn’t dependent on the whims of corporations.

Throwing out AI because there are AI companies who causing harm is like giving up on Operating Systems because of the plethora of bad acts made by Microsoft.

I agree that everyone should avoid using OpenAI, Anthropic or any of the other companies which were created to spend trillions of dollars buying up all computer hardware on the planet while building fossil fueled datacenters.

That isn’t the same as thinking that the actual machine learning technology itself is somehow inherently bad. There are many open weight models and FOSS projects that lets people use AI without contributing to the capitalist orgy that’s causing all of the secondary harms.

People conflating AI technology and AI companies are failing to diagnose the issue that we’re facing.

I’m going to say there’s not a chance in hell that this gets forked. Much like the systemd age verification topic, the outrage is primarily from the chronically online and the bots who influence them. This isn’t a population of people who have the actual technical capabilities to do anything productive, that’s why they have such a large online presence.

The outrage on social media is massively amplified by bots which is why these ‘movements’ never get passed the ‘spamming social media with outrage porn’ phase. It’s easy to fabricate and spin up 1000 social media bot accounts to post anti-AI content (ironically using LLMs to do so).

It isn’t easy to fabricate and spin up 100 competent developers who are so rabidly anti-AI that they will attempt to start a major new project

Don’t confuse comments and upvotes with reality. Social media metrics are easy to manipulate.