I’ve been on Lemmy for about 2 weeks now, and I’ve noticed a trend:
The VAST majority of posts that mention AI in any manner are some dig or criticism or some other negative commentary, and the rare ones that have anything positive to say about it almost always have negative whatever-Lemmy’s-version-of-karma-is.
I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.
The whole trope that LLMs need absurd levels of energy use has not been true for a while now. People latched on to this idea because early models were hideously inefficient, as is the case with pretty much any new technology. Today, you can run local coding models on your laptop that surpass the capabilities of frontier models needing whole data centres to run just a year ago. You no longer need an inordinate amount of computing power to run any of this stuff, and performance gains haven’t stopped. There’s no indication that we’re close to any sort of a limit here.
Also, nowhere did I say that a socialist world would have developed it in the same fashion. I’m merely pointing out that it would have been developed, and there would have been many existing use cases which I listed which have little to do with commercial incentives. I get the impression that you’re conflating hype with the actual legitimate use of which there are plenty already.
Finally, there is really nothing stopping people from developing this technology in open source fashion. And that’s the way to decouple this tech from commercial incentives going forward. There are already open models to build on, and that should be leveraged to develop completely open alternatives which are community driven.