jonny (nonvenomous)RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116604745957981805
"links will become an afterthought" is not even coded language for "the rest of the internet is merely training data and we will own the entire means of accessing information online"
as Dr. Bender says upthread, the Rethinking Search paper just says this explicitly, also AMP, etc. I only mildly edited their figure here
The shift to "search journeys" is just another way of referring to "whole life immersive surveillance" where the intention is to slowly train you to expect more and more of your personal information to be visibly injected into search results as a surface for "personalization" and eventually move towards "zero-query search" where advertisements-i-mean-helpful-information are proactively volunteered to you.
this language appears in full form as early as 2018 and was chilling even then:
The zero-query search paradigm can be expressed with the slogan “the query is the user.” In practice, the context of the user is used to infer information needs. (Entity Oriented Search)
Who gives a single shit how good the "AI" can code when the purpose of "AI" is and always has been enclosure of all information in an ad-driven surveillance platform. If you love LLMs, this is the future you, yes you, are actively helping create.
There IS NO LLM USE not associated with the project to seize all information as a product. That is the WHOLE gamble being made that is driving all those billions into getting as many people as possible dependent on the most preposterously expensive and inefficient model of computing ever devised. It is only worth it if the upside is owning the whole economy.
Every step you take towards building LLMs into your daily habits and work ratchets the spring tighter on the mousetrap until, surprise! It clamps shut while your whole ass is wrapped around the cheese. Don't make me laugh with local models nonsense, if you think that those don't get deprecated the moment they pose the slightest whiff of a threat to the profit model - meta isn't releasing weights to be nice, it's to capture labor and control the tooling space. Don't be a sucker.
joshbuddy@joshbuddy
What is the user share of local models vs hosted? Total guess, but I'd bet its less than 1%. How high would it need to be before they shut off the spigot of the weights they spent millions to train? 5%, 10%? I don't know but they don't pose a threat to the profit model now and building organizations and projects around LLM tooling of any kind certainly isn't making a world of independent information sources and work patterns any healthier.
If the AI companies stop releasing weights, how long do you think people who are using them in tool harnesses designed for the latest models keep using them? Do you think the largest companies in the world could afford a lobbying push to treat open weights as scary foreign weapons? The government bought TikTok, why would it be off the table to push Deepseek weights off huggingface and into the realm of piracy? Piracy is also a cat out of the bag, but it's not a threat, streaming companies are doing fine.
The idea that local models are on a course to catch up to or overtake the commercial models and then global capital will have to just do a Charlie Brown sulk back to hell sounds pretty far fetched to me. Given the course of corporate involvement in open source so far, it seems more like a temporary tactic in an economic and political war for dominance without any guarantee of longterm stability.