Excuse me, but even if in principle of “information wants to be free”, the actual outcome of LLMs is the opposite of democratizing information and access. It completely centralizes accesses, censorship, and profits in the hands of a few mega corporations.
It is completely against the spirit of information wants to be free. Using that catch phrase in protection of mega corps is a travesty.
LLMs are just a concept, an abstraction. A data type for storing data.
The actual problem is political. Has nothing to do with LLMs.
Those are meaningless words when you know the discussion is about LLMs taking in people's intellectual property and selling it back.
Nah that's still a political resource allocation problem
Don't let politics allocate resources to massive data center projects
> LLMs are just a concept, an abstraction. A data type for storing data.
C'mon. You know good and well that what is being discussed is the _use_ of LLMs, with the concomitant heavy usage of CPU, storage, and bandwidth that the average user has no hope of matching.
> You know good and well that what is being discussed is the _use_ of LLMs
Not the person you're replying to, but I've found that some people do argue against LLMs themselves (as in, the tech, not just the usage). Specially in humanities/arts cycles which seem to have a stronger feeling of panic towards LLMs.
Clarifying which one you're talking about can save a lot of typing/talking some times.
> I've found that some people do argue against LLMs themselves (as in, the tech, not just the usage). Specially in humanities/arts cycles which seem to have a stronger feeling of panic towards LLMs.
Maybe?
The person I responded to said "LLMs are just a concept, an abstraction."
Were that true, were they simply words in some dusty CS textbook, it's hardly likely that the humanities/arts people you describe would even know about them.
No, it's the fact that these people have seen regurgitated pictures and words that makes it an issue.
Nah it's the use of massive amounts of resources to run data centers.
A political problem.
If LLMs weren't sucking up all the resources, bitcoin would be.
Which, yes, is partly a resource/political problem, but there are additional arguments against the use of those resources for LLMs.
> It completely centralizes accesses, censorship, and profits in the hands of a few mega corporations.
Have the biggest models be legally forced to be released in the open for end users, then. Best of both worlds.
Wait a few years, and you'll even be able to run those models in commodity hardware.
Enshittification in order to give returns to shareholders suck. The tech is great and empowering for the commons.