Comment by selfhoster1312
1 month ago
As someone who's strongly anti-AI, i find Zitron to be absolutely too much pro-AI for my taste. He defends AI that's not LLMs. He barely touches on ecological impacts of AI, and barely mentions the enshittification of things. He's only really against the LLM craze, OpenAI/Anthropic over-evaluation (because Deepseek and local models will do the same for nearly free), and the crazy speculative bubble around datacenters.
If you find him very negative about AI, and i find him very positive about AI, he might just be this reasonable centrist.
Out of curiosity, what would you like to hear him saying about non-LLM AI?
There's plenty of arguments to be had. I guess there could be some useful applications of non-LLM AI (eg. translation tools), but quality output is still a concern. Environmental impact is also still a concern. If output is of sufficient quality, who reaps the benefits is a concern ; if not, who pays the price of shittier products is a concern.
Whether LLM or non-LLM tech, the question of surveillance capitalism and how models need to be fed swaths of privacy-invading data (eg. self-driving cars filming everything all the time) is also a concern.
Overall, i think the ecological concern is still the biggest one. We are at the start of a major climate crisis, and any self-preserving measures were already hard fought by industry. I fear that any form of AI investment will lead (because it's already leading) to destroying any hope of saving an inhabitable planet.
Really only large language models require huge swaths of training data and extremely expensive training/inference. Other “AI”, like basic neural networks or something like path finding, is basically free. It’s just an algorithm, a small one that runs on computers.
The term AI is very overloaded. When people say AI, they really mean LLMs. AI like old Siri has basically no cost. It’s not environmentally damaging, as it runs on device. It’s not privacy gore, because it runs on device.
Or take, for example, lane keep assist systems on vehicles. This doesn’t require a huge data center or anything, it’s basic computer vision and a small on-vehicle model.
Yes AI has a “cost”, but for virtually all non-LLM AI the ecological cost is the same as any other application or algorithm. Siri doesn’t burn more energy than instagram.
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To play devil's advocate - unless you were to take the position of declaring bankruptcy on the possibility that a complex society of competing actors can agree on climate change - and therefore this being an unsolvable problem that you need AI to solve, as humans can't handle the complexity.
I find a lot of the debate on either climate change or AI collapses if you point out that "we shouldn't do this, we should ALL just do this" is an extremely unrealistic position in an international complex ecosystem of competing actors.
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