It is absolutely possible to run 100% locally, but in practice, at the high end, only quantized models. The full size top end models require hundreds of GB of video ram, and while you can buy that, it’s stupidly expensive. Quantized models can often perform nearly as well with a small fraction of the ram, but they do sacrifice a little in precision.

These models (well the good ones) ultimately all trace their origins to what you’d likely consider “stolen” data. Whether that’s ethical is debatable. If you’re in the “information should be free” camp, there may not be an issue here.

As for the power/environmental impact, for what they do LLMs are actually very low impact per-request. If you’re concerned about your personal AI power use, then I hope you never fly in an airplane, and minimize your driving because those are much bigger issues.

It’s the scale of use that makes AI an environmental problem, and that’s a question about corporate use of AI, not personal use of AI.

Honestly, this is nothing new.

Listening to ChatGPT is a solid improvement over listening to Tucker Carlson.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not good! I don’t exactly trust the Sam Altmans of the world. But this is the same circus, different clowns.

Right?

The information is out there if you know how to sift through the nonsense.

Though trying to do this with nutrition really is hard mode. I don’t know of another topic that’s quite as flooded with nonsense.

I’d add that traditional search can’t reasonably hope to compete with AI in this environment. If you’re running a traditional search engine right now, there’s a real argument that the best business decision is to accelerate the enshitification to capture as much value as you can from your remaining audience while you still have it.

This is the usual cycle with these sorts of technologies - once a replacement arrives, the natural choice is to shift from growth to exploitation.

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

this is all done with custom models by individuals.

This is really important for people to understand.

Powerful open weight models are already out there. Anyone can download them and run them. There is no possibility for government control of AI content without North Korean style internet controls.

Politicians and corporations will absolutely start trying to push for more controls. They will tell you to “think of the children” and they will use this to take power for themselves, knowing full-well that they can’t actually meaningfully prevent this from happening. We need people to understand that the push for control here has nothing to do with morality or protecting anyone.

The government doesn’t get to decide you’re guilty

I want to call out how important this is. This is one of the strongest checks against corruption in the countries that have it.

As a concrete example, if we didn’t have this in the US, I’m not sure there would be much to stop Trump’s justice department from bringing cases against Trump’s enemies in front of Trump appointed judges, and sending them to jail. Jack Smith and James Comey would likely be in jail right now if we didn’t have jury trials.

Curry is a global cuisine.

It may originate in India, but it has been incorporated into local cuisines all over the world. Most countries in Asia have their own versions of curry at this point. I’d argue that the UK does too, even if they call it “Indian”. Even the concept of curry as a category of food is largely a British invention, and many of the things we’ve been calling curry for more than a hundred years have little relation to Indian food.

Also, India is a large and diverse country. Many Indians don’t eat beef, but there are absolutely whole populations of Indians who eat beef curry regularly.