Please ELI5 the arguments people use to claim it's possible to use AI/LLMs ethically, locally, openly etc. (piefed.social)

submitted 12 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) by A_norny_mousse@piefed.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I usually don't even understand the lingo they use. "Open-weighted" is the most recent one, then it usually goes down to specific "models" that everybody is supposed to know about.

These are my thoughts (I will stick to the vague "it" for now, but of course therein lies another question: "and how does all this apply to various specialised AIs"):

Is it really feasible to run it 100% locally? I know there's plenty of people with very powerful rigs indeed, but still. Or are 99% of these people really saying "it would, in theory, be possible to run that locally, therefore your concerns are invalid"?
If yes to the previous: the software doesn't come from nowhere and ultimately still relies on gas-turbine-powered datacenters and stolen IP and stolen personal data, no?

If what I wrote above is true, what exactly are people arguing when they say it's still possible to use LLMs ethically or true to FOSS philosophy, because ... ???

edit

Thanks to all who answered.

I guess it's my fault for asking several questions in one, but this thread has attracted exactly the type of people I'm writing about; several even used the term "open-weighted models" without explaining it.

Asking to get arguments explained, I got more arguments instead.

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[-] A_norny_mousse@piefed.social 1 points 4 hours ago

Thanks. What are quantized models?

[-] NoLemurs@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I'm going to simplify a little here, so don't take this completely at face value.

Models are, quite literally, long series of numbers (called weights). A model might store the weights in 16 bit numbers (that is, 16 binary digits). The size of the model (and how much memory it needs) is determined by how many weights there are, and how many bits each weight takes. You can take a 16 bit model and rework it to use 8 bit, or even 4 bit numbers. The result intuitively behaves a lot like the same model, but with less precision to the weights. That makes the model take way less space in ram, but also makes it more likely for concepts (encoded in the weights) to overlap, which impacts model quality. Often the effect is that fine distinctions get lost.

[-] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Kind of like "compressed". It takes longer/more effort to run them, to produce the same result as a the same model that has not been quantized, where that non-quantized version would consume significantly more RAM but produce the result faster. You would typically only run the quantized model when you're starved for RAM, which most of us are running LLMs locally.

Think like zipping a file with file compression. It takes less space, but has to be unzipped for you to have usable files again.

this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026

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