As one person on Mastodon said, “AI is a toxic industry created by toxic people with toxic ideals”.

I wouldn’t go that far. As it turns out AI is a buzz word and buzz words have little meaning

Yea I thought about that too. But apparently some people find “AI” useful.

If an LLM can save me 30 minutes writing nice emails and responses and help me brainstorm, debug, or elucidate my thoughts then it is very useful.

You really put 30 minutes of your own time above all of downsides this has for the rest of us who don’t have a use for it (most of the world)?

What downsides are there?

All of the resources and energy spent to get you this product you like. You can’t discount what it took to create something just because the final product is small and efficient. Take a look at the manufacturing footprint of nearly all complex hardware.

I’m not saying you created the AI but you are one of its supporters, without which there would be no AI.

If this was all just pitched as developing a new plain English coding language, I think the hype following it would be far more appropriate, but then the funding wouldn’t follow to support the massive development costs of AI.

Its become a circle of hype chasing money chasing hype.

Its not you that is the problem so to speak though, its the collective “you’s” who think the same way.

I’m not discounting it. Improving productivity for office workers by 1% across the world is a massive amount

The power used to train the AI is alot, but after that using the AI uses a lot less electricity, if an AI spikes my gpu by 10 seconds to type something that would have taken me 30 minutes, I’ve saved on electricity:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06219

I find LLMs very useful

Too much of an environmental impact for the usefulness imo.

I don’t care. They are really helpful for a many different tasks. It doesn’t pull that much power to run locally on my machine.

“See I like AI because I’m selfish. Also those bad things are in the past, I’m using an ethical AI system now! But also, who gives a fuck because I only care about myself!”

Yeah you get it guy! Maybe you can be Trumps secretary of technology!

Mister/miss, LLMs that can run locally are fine. It’s the infrastructure and the large scale of commercial cloud LLMs that create some issues. You have to read some researches on this topic.

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