I’m curious to get a general pulse on how people here view the rapid evolution of AI, specifically on lemmy. On one side, there’s growing interest in local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools. On the other, there seems to be a growing list, I can’t keep track of, that are seen as major concerns. I’m not here to pick sides or be biased in one corner. Im genuinely curious what people have to say about AI in general. And maybe it will help me and other get a better handle on how we perceived it in our ever changing world.
I spent my life as a researcher in the ML space (now called AI) because I didn’t want people to have to deal with the same hardships I did. I saw the incredible strides we made in search and creative tooling. Nobody else will have to spend days rotoscoping a character. We will be able to find any picture just by searching for a blurry, low resolution one.
But it’s turning into a system that is used to funnel money from the most vulnerable population into the coffers of the wealthy. Instead of equalizing, it’s exacerbating inequality.
As I see it, a model trained on pubic data should be a public good. You can charge people at cost for inference and training, but unless you provided the data you’re obligated to give the weights back.
There’s a lot of hostility to AI and I think a lot of it is ill informed or ignorant. People are opposed to data centers, but they’re focused on the “AI” part, when in reality said data centers use less water than laws and serve more than just AI. They give you Nerflix and search results and YouTube. (Not to say it’s never an issue, just that there’s more nuance. Water constrained areas are not a good place for data centers.) I’m personally more opposed to data centers because it prevents me from owning my own hardware. I want to buy a thing and use it as I desire. I don’t want to pay a subscription fee to use my own computer.
There are a host of other objections, but I’ll leave it here for now. There are a lot of good reasons for hating LLMs, but mostly people jump on the bandwagon and hate them for stupid or inaccurate reasons, preventing us from having productive conversations.