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Why not LLMs?
(codeberg.org)
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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2026
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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.
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 understand why you argue that these flaws are not inherent to the technology, but in a practical sense, they might as well be considered inherent. 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.
So will CPUs, trains and new medicines. Some sectors simply need a huge amount of capital.
But this I think is not just likely, but inevitable. As long as at least one company puts out open-source AI models, users will have the option of switching to it. So even if they don't switch, they can use this leverage to keep AI access sellers in check. Eventually, the whole market of selling access to AI will collapse, and the only AI trainers will be people who want to give it out for free (governments, universities) or companies who use it as a loss leader to sell an actual product.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The linked Codeberg page refers to LLMs in their current, corporate-controlled shapIe. It is about using LLMs for coding.
Your argument is rather leading away from that.
Unfortunately "AI," and LLMs in general are, at present, wholly inseparable from the people who use them, and especially, (and more pressingly), the ~~people~~ corporations that make them. This is the reason I maintain my opposition to "AI" (and LLMs in general) despite machine learning as a field and LLMs as technology being truly fascinating, and having immense potential.
In my ideal world the corporations pushing "AI" wouldn't exist, the datasets and recipes would be open, and model training would be a community led effort with Folding@Home style distributed compute used for training, pretty much removing the viability of "AI" companies. Without "AI" companies pushing for adoption, strong social pushback can be used to reign in the slopification of the commons. With those two together (and likely many other smaller changes elsewhere) LLMs can be seen for what they really are and their real pros and cons evaluated.
But that world isn't currently feasible, and probably won't ever be. Neither is toppling even a single corrupt corporation on the level of Alphabet, or Microsoft. So all we can do is evaluate whether we consider certain software's use of "AI"/LLMs is acceptable, and advocate for not using them. Which is why I think efforts like openslopware, and pages like this are a positive thing, even if I don't necessarily agree with some of the specifics.
You do realize LLMs are made outside the US as well. I have zero problem with Chinese companies making LLMs that are released in the open and you can even run on your own hardware.
Shitty corporations are a nigh universal constant, not something exclusive to America. That's American exceptionalism talking.
The difference is that China actually deals with corporations when they act shitty as happened with Alibaba and Jack Ma because China has a dictatorship of the proletariat which creates different material conditions from the dictatorship of capital you have in burgerland. No exceptionalism needed to explain this, just minimal capacity for critical thought that some people lack.
True, but I am afraid that the definition of "they act shitty" in China is very different from the one in the US.
Jack Ma paid because he criticized the regime, not because Alibaba was failing.
Jack Ma paid because he tried to expand Alibaba into a finance and do what western tech bros do. I love how you call Chinese government 'the regime' really highlights the quality of your 'intellect'.
" to expand Alibaba into a finance" is not intrinsically a crime in a free country, so if China is really a free country, why Jack Ma was paid for something he don't yet did ?
Jack Ma was punished because he had the courage (or stupidity given the situation) to criticize Chinese estabilishment for stifling innovation and economics, then Xi Jinping retaliate and Jack Ma went off the radar (only to be remerges after Xi Jinping "rehabilitated" him)
So yes, to me China is a regime. And if you think my intellect is not up to your idea of quality, you are free to move to China and to live in what I suppose you consider a better country.
" to expand Alibaba into a finance" is not intrinsically a crime in a country which allows pedo oligarchs to own everything and rule over the working class
Jack Ma was punished because he wanted capitalists to start having control over the economy. Calling that courage reveals what you stand for.
Enjoy living under pedo oligarch regime that fits with your fascist ideology. Your conception of freedom is literal fascism.
It is not a crime in any free country. It is not that the US is the world, you have a very narrow view of the world
Oh yes, think what you like but the facts are that Jack Ma was punished after criticizing the Chinese govern for stiffling innovation.
Like everyone that has too much power (or is too much succesfull) in the country and became a risk for Xi Jinping.
Funny, I live in a country that experienced real fascism and to think, like you, that fascism is a real thing now make me smile.
You people who call fascist anyone who don't think like you would were the first to be "removed" in a real fascist regime.
But hey, feel free to call fascist everyone and think that capitalism is the problem, while using something that was created in a capitalist society, by capitalist people working for capitalist company...
You're right, it's not a crime in any country where rich pedos rule over the people and cannot be accountable for their crimes. Nowhere did I say the US is the world, it's just the model for the rest of the western regimes.
Ah yes, innovation in China is so stifled that China leads in critical technologies across the board https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outperforming-the-united-states-in-critical-technologies/
Liberalism is literally just fascism when the going is good https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-dialectics-of-domination
You're an utter ignoramus and an imbecile.
~~I'm out of the loop, what happened to them?~~ Never mind, googled it. I like how they regulate things.
i wish someone could put the fear of god into my oligarchs. lol