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.

  • one_old_coder@piefed.social
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    13 days ago

    They call it open-weighted and not open-source because they don’t have the training material (stolen books lol) but still want to pretend they are l33t hackers not bound to BigTech.

    Yes, it’s possible to use it locally with a $2000 computer (that’s for the cheapest ones) but you’ll only get a few words per second. It doesn’t matter to the vibe coders who don’t know how to code.

    The software to run that is open-source but the training of the model (the “open-weight” black box) requires to destroy the environment at least once.

    Last but not least the free models are obviously censored but people don’t care about censorship anymore for some reason. “Tiananmen didn’t happen? Not my problem” without understanding that more is hidden.

    Anyway, no, there is nothing ethical about it.