This conveniently ignores the progress being made with smaller and smaller models in the open source community.
Nowadays you can actually get a semi decent chat bot working on a n100 that consumes next to nothing even at full charge.
Someone needs to tell google that AI powered search is not working right now, and that they better wait a few years to try massively implementing that in a successful way.
Other AI fields are working really good. But search engine “instant AI answers” for general use are not in a phase when they should be as widely used as google (or microsoft) is trying to use them right now.
As with literally every technical progress, tech itself is no problem, capitalism usage of it is.
The problem is the concentration of power, Sam “regulate me daddy” Altman’s plan is to get the government to create a web of regulation that makes it so only the big tech giants have access to the uncensored models.
Of course, as usual with capitalism and basically everything, we had hope to recieve a tool making expressing themselves easy for workers lacking time and training to do art, and we will superexpensive proprietary software and monopolies quite possibly gatekeep by law. Again just as in software some hope is in open source.
In what sense does a small community working with open weight (note: rarely if ever open source) llm have any mitigating impact on the rampant carbon emissions for the sake of bullshit generators?
Not a small community by any means. It inherently is opposed to the unnecessarily large and wasteful models of corporations. But when people just lump i al l under “AI”, the actually useful local models are the ones most likely to get harmed while Google, meta, and the other megacorps will be able to operate with impunity.
Those people doing the majority of the lumping, and it’s not even close, are the corporations themselves. The short hand exists. Machine learning is doing fine. Intentionally misinterpreting a message to incidentally defend the actions of the corporations doing the damage you are opposed to ain’t it.
