I usually don’t even understand the lingo they use. “Open-weighted” is the most recent one, then it usually goes down to specific “models” that everybody is supposed to know about.

These are my thoughts (I will stick to the vague “it” for now, but of course therein lies another question: “and how does all this apply to various specialised AIs”):

  • Is it really feasible to run it 100% locally? I know there’s plenty of people with very powerful rigs indeed, but still. Or are 99% of these people really saying “it would, in theory, be possible to run that locally, therefore your concerns are invalid”?
  • If yes to the previous: the software doesn’t come from nowhere and ultimately still relies on gas-turbine-powered datacenters and stolen IP and stolen personal data, no?

If what I wrote above is true, what exactly are people arguing when they say it’s still possible to use LLMs ethically or true to FOSS philosophy, because … ???

edit

Thanks to all who answered.

I guess it’s my fault for asking several questions in one, but this thread has attracted exactly the type of people I’m writing about; several even used the term “open-weighted models” without explaining it.

Asking to get arguments explained, I got more arguments instead.

  • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
    31·
    4 hours ago

    If you can play modern games, you can probably run a local LLM. The more VRAM the better it’ll go.

    For ethics, there’s two issues. The first is power consumption. Running a model locally isn’t consuming any more power than running a game that fully pushes your system. It’s not really a concern.

    The second issue is content generation. It’s all created through the theft of content others have made. There’s no getting around that. As far as I’m aware there are no ethical models that specifically have not stolen content. If you’re just using it to chat with or whatever, I think it’s fine. You probably aren’t taking work from anyone, at least to any degree more significant than piracy. If you’re generating stuff to be distributed, then you’re distributing stolen work. If that’s ethical or not is up to you to decide.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        21·
        2 hours ago

        I feel like this question is asked in bad faith if you are able to list seven “main” ethical issues here. I don’t know if I could list seven different issues that aren’t just breaking down power consumption and content theft into smaller pieces, and I’m pretty anti-AI. I guess you could include hardware consumption too. Financing maybe, but that doesn’t play a part in local models generally. Care to explain?