LLMs are tools. They're not replacements for human creativity. They are not reliable sources of truth. They are interesting tools and toys that you can play with.
So have fun and play with them.
See, it's not fun for the planet.
Locally run models use a fraction of the energy. Less than playing a game with heavy graphics.
Yes, more or less. But the issue is not about running local models; that's fine even if it's only for curiosity. The issue is about shoving so-called AI in every activity with the promise it will solve most of your everyday problems, or for mere entertainment. I'm not against "AI", I'm against the current commercialization attempts to monopolize the technology by already huge companies that will only seek profit, no matter the state of the planet and the other non-millionaire people. And this is exactly why even a bubble burst is concerning to me, as the poor are the ones that will truly suffer the consequences of billionaires betting in their mansions with their spare palaces.
The actual problem is the capitalist system of relations. If it's not AI, then it's bitcoin mining, NFTs, or what have you. The AI itself is just a technology, and if it didn't exist, capitalism would find something else to shove down your throat.
Neither are most of human endeavors.
And if you think about the fact that this AI bubble is going to be a massive collapse and crash the finances of America and cause a massive regression in conservative policy and a massive progression of liberal policy, (since the playbook has always been for the conservatives to hand the reins over to the liberals until they fix the financial system of America when the conservatives break it), then it's actually a good thing. We're just in its bad phase.
I expect it's a bubble that will burst. Climate change is no joke and only very stubborn people keeps denying it. AI is not like the massive use of combustion-based energy. That was strike two.
Well-said. LLMs do have some useful applications, but they cannot replace human creativity nor are they omniscient.
Mostly just toys.
If you can't rely on them more (not 'just as much,' more) than the people who would do whatever the task is, you can't use them for any important task, and you aren't going to find a lot of tasks which are simultaneously necessary and yet unimportant enough that we can tolerate rolling nat 1s on the probability machine all the time.
We should reject them.
LLM are the future, but we must still learn to use it correctly. The energy problem depends mainly on 2 things, the use of fossil energy and the abuse of AI including it without need in everything, because the hype, as data logging tool for Big Brother or biased influencers.
You don't need a 4x4 8 cylinder Pick-up to go 2km to the store to buy bread.
It's simply another case where we have amazing technologies but we lack the right ways to use them, that's what our culture does: creating amazing techs that can solve lots of human problems and then discarding the part that actually solves a problem unless it's also profitable for the individual.
It literally is a problem of people wanting to submit other people for power games, that's not how all societies work, but that's a foundation for ours, but we're playing this game so much that we almost broke the console (planet earth and our own bodies health).
It's an anthropological problem, not a technological one.
This is the point, We have big advances in tech, physic, medicine. science....thanks to AI. But the first use we give it is to create memes, reading BS chats, and build it in fridges, or worst, build it in weapons to kill others.
What advances?
AI in medicine permits the analysis of contagious diseases and the corresponding manufacture of treatments and vaccines in a fraction of the time compared to traditional methods. The manufacture of new materials, research and optimisation in physical, meteorological, and environmental processes, which without AI would have been impossible. The positive effects of AI are undeniable. But as it was said, negative its implementation, its way of using it by people like a child with a new toy, why it is fashionable and cool or biased (commercial or/and politically) AI by big corporations, with AI build in even a Toaster as selling argument.
Artificial Intelligence isn't the real problem, but human intelligence and ethics.
Do you have examples?
Because most of what you are listing is stuff that has been using ML for years (possibly decades when it comes to meteorology) and just slapped "AI" on as a buzzword.
I feel like they are confounding LLMs AND general AI/ML. The latter is useful in many areas, while the former is mostly hype imo.
AI exist since the first Chess Bot. Naturally due to the limited HW power in these years, AI applications where very limited. It bcame presenz with the current computing capability, thousends of times more powerfull, see the differences between the PC only the last 25-30 years, nothing to do. even a current low cost smartphone is way better as an high end PC from 15 years ago. It's currently a hype with more than 10.000 AI apps and a cpmpetition between developers and big corporations, with users which abuse it with and for crappy results without common sense, as toy instead of an tool to help in the tasks as it should be, and not for substitute the own work and research. Reason because Bandcamp ban all music made with AI, to protect the artist and their work (https://lemmy.ml/post/41786760). As Example what i mean, it is not the same to use AI to help in a task, as writing aprompt an let the AI do your work, your painting, your music, your research, to sell it as own (mostly without even contrasting it)
here are just a few
You don't need a 4x4 8 cylinder Pick-up to go 2km to the store to buy bread.
In the U.S., yes.
I was referring to civilised first world countries
no way you could get to the store with only 8 cylinders. what are we? animals!
LLM's in particular don't use that much energy. Image and video generation are the real concerns.
Well, if one user ask something to a LLM, there are certainly not much sources needed, but yhere are millons of users doing it to thousends of different LLM. That need a lot of server power. Anyway, it's not the primary problem with renevable energy sources, the risks are others, biased information, deep fake, privacy, etc., with the misuse by corporations and political collectives.
Not true, try to selfhost your own and you will see his much it eats just to chat with it. Using just 3b model eat like 200 watts of power. Use it for an hour an you are eating as much as some laptops eat in a day while surfing. Of course if you are compare with gaming, it may be comparable with heavy games but then again that is also using a lot of power.
Seems like the easiest fix is to consider the produce of LLMs to be derivative products of the training data.
No need for a new license, if you're training code on GPL code the code produced by LLMs is GPL.
Let me know if you convince any lawmakers, and I'll show you some lawmakers about to be invited to expensive "business" trips and lunches by lobbyists.
The same can be said of the approach described in the article, the "GPLv4" would be useless unless the resulting weights are considered a derivative product.
A paint manufacturer can't claim copyright on paintings made using that paint.
Indeed. I suspect it would need to be framed around national security and national interests, to have any realistic chance of success. AI is being seen as a necessity for the future of many countries ... embrace it, or be steamrolled in the future by those who did, so a soft touch is being embraced.
Copyright and licensing uncertainty could hinder that, and the status quo today in many places is to not treat training as copyright infringement (eg. US), or to require an explicit opt-out (eg. EU). A lack of international agreements means it's all a bit wishy washy, and hard to prove and enforce.
Things get (only slightly) easier if the material is behind a terms-of-service wall.
You are not gonna protect abstract ideas using copyright. Essentially, what he's proposing implies turning this "TGPL" in some sort of viral NDA, which is a different category of contract.
It's harder to convince someone that a content-focused license like the GPLv3 protects also abstract ideas, than creating a new form of contract/license that is designed specifically to protect abstract ideas (not just the content itself) from being spread in ways you don't want it to spread.
LLMs don't have anything to do with abstract ideas, they quite literally produce derivative content based on their training data & prompt.
LLMs abstract information collected from the content through an algorithm (what they store is the result of a series of tests/analysis, not the content itself, but a set of characteristics/ideas). If that makes it derivative, then all abstractions are derivative. It's not possible to make abstractions without collecting data derived from a source you are observing.
If derivative abstractions were already something that copyright can protect then litigants wouldn't resort to patents, etc.
The problem is not the algorithm. The problem is the way they're trained. If I made a dataset from sources whose copyright holders exercise their IP rights and then train an LLM on it, I'd probably go to jail or just kill myself (or default on my debts to the holders) if they sue for damages.
This is the correct take. This tech isn't going away, no matter how much whinging people do, the only question is who is going to control it going forward.
How dare you break the jerk! /s
Checking whether a proprietary LLM model running on the "cloud" has been trained on a piece of TGPL code would probably be harder than checking if a proprietary binary contains a piece of GPL code, though.
Not necessarily, the models can often be tricked into spilling the beans of how they were trained.
One of the four essential freedoms is the freedom to study the software and modify it. Studying means training your brain on the open source code. Can one use their brain to write proprietary code after they studied some copylefted code?
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