Comment by 1718627440
3 months ago
> Folks point this out, but they don't ever talk about what the alternative was.
That LLMs would be as expensively priced as they really are on society and energy costs? A lot of things are possible, whether they are economically feasible is determined by giving them a price. When that price doesn't reflect the real costs, society starts to wast work on weird things, like building large AI centers, because of a financial bubble. And yes putting people out of business does come with a cost.
"Innovation" is not an end goal.
Innovation is absolutely an end goal, at least in terms of our legal framework. The primary impetus for copyright and patent law is is innovation: to credit those that innovate their due, and I do think this stems from our society seeing innovation as an end goal. But the intent of the system is always different than its actual effect, and I'm fairly passionate about examining the shear.
I run my AI models locally, paying for the hardware and electricity myself, precisely to ensure the unit economics of the majority of my usage are something I can personallly support. I do use hosted models regularly, though not often these days, which is why I say "the majority of my usage".
In terms of the concerns you express, I'm simply not worried. Time will sort it out naturally.