Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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Yeah, you're just wrong. Lemmy hates the a.i. business, not convolutional neural network transformer technologies.
Most of lemmy is fully aware the a.i. does incredible work already in protein discovery, in cancer research, in climatology, etc. But LLMs, the stochastic parrots they are, have shown that their cost/benefit ratio is ridiculous.
As Ed Zitron said: if your business model is selling forty dollars for 1 dollar, you don't actually have a business model. That's the current state of LLM services today. Everyone that is willing to pay for LLM service today is currently paying a dollar and getting back about $10 - $100 of compute in return. That's not economically sustainable, there are no theories for, nor indications of, costs coming down for providers, and consumers are already saying it costs too much even at these prices.
And this problem has gotten worse, not better, in the last 5 years. Costs are going up by multiples for the providers and in multiple areas. To make LLM responses more useful they now have to make the systems run dozens of inferences in parallel and select among them. The cost of fiber optics, of GPUs, of RAM, of storage, of electricity, of generators, of data center leases, of data center construction, and many other inputs has gone through the roof with some inputs jumping 300% and other inputs locking in price increases for a decade-long contract.
There are lots of problems with LLMs, but Lemmy has a much more mixed response with open-weight LLMs or ethically sourced LLMs than it does with the business of LLMs. Because the business of LLMs is very clearly a failed business currently sucking up our entire economy.
That's interesting. Most critical arguments in Lemmy I see is that AI is a technological dead end, which I'm sure had been said of many other technology before, rather than the technology being monopolized by select few to control us. In that case, this is why I favour AI being open source and publicly owned.
You're being way too broad with your use of the word. a.i. means a lot of things that are very clearly not dead ends. Text generating LLM technology is a dead end, logically speaking, because it consumes the same stuff it produces. That's fundamentally the definition of a spiral, and the last couple years of major improvements to LLM services have come from adding "skills" and "reasoning", not from model evolution.
a.i. being publicly owned makes a ton of sense, but it just doesn't financially work. The industry is completely and deeply in the red. There are no paths to fixing this that have been identified.