jcoglanJun 3
zooming out a little bit, it does feel alarming to me that a lot of people whose stated politics are progressive or socialist or both are willing to give huge tech companies an easy ride for fully seizing the means of production for everyone, no matter where you personally work
Show threadSimon WillisonJun 3

@jcoglan what's the alternative?

It turns out LLMs are pretty easy to build now that we know how to do it. 5TB of data (not difficult to obtain) and a few millions of dollars in compute electricity turns out to do the job.

Show threadjcoglanJun 3
@simon I'm hearing "what's the alternative" a lot recently and if I took that attitude to very many things I would have to stop believing in anything
Show threadSimon WillisonJun 3
@jcoglan my chosen alternative is to try and teach people how to use these things productively and responsibly in a way that adds more value than it takes away
Show threadnormy foxyoreos

@simon @jcoglan Simon. Taking the best read of this possible, if you think your current role is just encouraging responsible usage, and that you are not also fueling *increased usage* of these tools, and that you are not being linked to by AI evangelists, and that you are not carrying any water for companies like Meta, Google, and OpenAI - then you are utterly disconnected from the actual real impact of your writing.

You are not a passive observer of AI market trends, you are a cheerleader.

Jun 5 at 9:05amWeb
Show threadnormy foxyoreosJun 5

@simon @jcoglan you're really gonna say "what's the alternative" to market capture at the same time you're writing excitedly about whatever the most recent OpenAI product is?

The alternative is not doing that. You have more influence than you are pretending you have here, and if you don't think that your writing has helped any of these companies grow, you are sticking your head in the sand.