Mastodawn

Remember the early days of Uber and Lyft, when rides were dirt cheap because the companies were operating at a loss in order to capture the minds/wallets of the masses?

The rug pull in the AI/LLM world when the companies adjust pricing to actually make a profit is going to be spectacular. Especially when you consider the numbers of people / orgs that are addicted to or dependent on such technology.

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Administrator May 10

@wdormann Do you think companies that start installing LLMs directly on users' machines may have an edge in this war? Considering they're offloading the price of energy onto the end user?

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy!

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.

That Privacy Guy!

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Face Thumb

@mdm @wdormann Yes. That will reduce the blood loss. You still have to train it, but you can train it once for all users, you can even distribute the training for the next model among your users too. The problem is efficiency, cloud providers *could* get efficiency through scale, use renewable energy, reuse cooling water. They typically dont, they do whatever is cheapest which is usually to freeload on the local town's resources.