@tante

That doesn't seem to be the best idea @pluralistic

AI and LLM output is 90% bullshit, and most people don't have the time nor the patience to work out which 10% might actually be useful.

That's completely ignoring the environmental and human impacts of the AI bubble.

Try buying DDR memory, a GPU or an SSD / HDD at the moment.

@simonzerafa @tante

What is the incremental environmental damage created by running an existing LLM locally on your own laptop?

As to "90% bullshit" - as I wrote, the false positive rate for punctuation errors and typos from Ollama/Llama2 is about 50%, which is substantially better than, say, Google Docs' grammar checker.

@pluralistic @tante

Of course, I am speaking in generalities.

Encouraging the use of LLM's is counterproductive in so many ways, as I highlighted.

Pop a power meter on that LLM adorned PC and let us all know what the power usage looks like with and without your chosen LLM running on a typical task 🙂

That's power that generated somewhere, even if it's with renewable energy.

The main issue with LLM's is that they don't encourage critical thinking, in a world which is already suffering from a massive shortage.

@simonzerafa @tante

As I wrote (and it seems you haven't read what I wrote, which is weird, because that seems like a good first step if you're going to criticize my conduct), I'm running Ollama on a laptop that doesn't even have a GPU.

Its power consumption is comparable to, say, watching a Youtube video.

I know this because my laptop is running free software that lets me accurately monitor its activity, and because the model is also free software.

@simonzerafa @tante

Checking for punctuation errors is does not discourage critical thinking. It's weird to laud "critical thinking" and also make this claim.

@tante @pluralistic @simonzerafa I agree in principle with Cory, but I really wish that he had clarified that:

1. Ollama is not an LLM, it's a server for various models, of varying degrees of openness.
2. Open weights is not open source, the model is still a black box. We should support projects like OLMO, which are completely open, down to the training data set and checkpoints.
3. It's quite difficult to "seize that technology" without using Someone Else's Computer to do so (a.k.a clown/cloud)

@tante @pluralistic @simonzerafa But ALSO: using a multi-billion-parameter synthetic text extruding machine to find spelling and syntax errors is a blatant example of "doing everything the least efficient way possible" and that's why we are living on an overheating planet buried under toxic e-waste.

If I think about it harder I could probably come up with a more clever metaphor than killing a mosquito with a flamethrower, but you get the idea.

@dhd6 @tante @simonzerafa

No. It's like killing a mosquito with a bug zapper whose history includes thousands of years of metallurgy, hundreds of years of electrical engineering, and decades of plastics manufacture.

There is literally no contemporary manufactured good that doesn't sit atop a vast mountain of extraneous (to that purpose) labor, energy expenditure and capital.

@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa As always, yes and no. A bug zapper is designed to zap bugs, it is a simple mechanism that does that one thing, and does it well. An LLM is designed to read text and generate more text.

That we have decided that the best way to do NLP is to use massively overparameterized word predictors that we have trained using RL to respond to prompts, rather than just, like, doing NLP, is just crazy from an engineering standpoint.

Rube Goldberg is spinning in his grave!

@dhd6 @tante @simonzerafa

Remember when Usenet's backbone cabal worried about someone in Congress discovering that the giant, packet-switched research network that had been constructed at enormous public expense was being used for idle chit chat?

The nature of general purpose technologies is that they will be used for lots of purposes.

@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa indeed, I guess the question is whether the scale of the *ahem* waste, fraud and abuse *ahem* of resources that LLMs seem to imply, even in benign use cases like yours, is out of line with historical precedent or not.

Am I an old man yelling at a cloud?

No, it's the children who are wrong!

@dhd6 @tante @simonzerafa

Rockets were literally perfected in Nazi slave labor camps.

@pluralistic @dhd6 @tante @simonzerafa what a shit take dude. rockets being perfected by nazis, project paperclip, and now a neonazi in charge of one of the largest space tech programs on the planet, along with a bullshit generating LLM.

so yeah, maybe this is all fash tech, and maybe taking a stand of "I'm not touching that shit with a thousand-meter pole" is not "neoliberal purity culture". and ollama of all things? the shit pumped out by fucking Meta? are you shitting me?

@elle @dhd6 @tante @simonzerafa

"You used the wrong open model because I don't like the company that made it" is the actual definition of nonsense purity culture.

@pluralistic @dhd6 @tante @simonzerafa you wrote a book on how much of a shitbag company corpos like Meta are. now you're saying "oh it's not that bad, look it's marginally better than Google Docs spell checker"?! did someone hack your fucking account?

there are legitimately open models that originate from academic institutions, train on open data with full consent. even those models take tens-of-thousands of euros to train. well outside the resources available to most open-source enjoyers