I think TFA’s argument completely ignores the elephant in the room which is the economic driver behind this technology. And without addressing that, the whole argument becomes divorced from the material reality we inhabit.

The article makes the following statement:

If, however, we can neutralise the LLM threat somehow (perhaps by some combination of regulation, economics and social opprobrium), there is considerable hope.

Yet, here’s what empirical research has to say on the subject:

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

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It’s so funny to me how people don’t understand that everything connects together. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s tied to the broader society and economy at large. The reality of the situation is that the statistics show a lagging economy overall in the US, and the money is concentrated in a handful of data centers. So, any disruption to the whole AI build out would almost certainly lead to a major economic crash. And in a situation where you have massive amounts of money being poured into a particular tech that’s become central to how the whole economy functions, it should be obvious why a few plucky bloggers aren’t going to change the direction of travel.

The author talks about social value, but doesn’t seem to realize that the fitness function in a capitalist economy is profit with any social value produced being strictly incidental. There are plenty of enterprises, such as the whole fossil fuel industry, that are actively harmful to humanity. But since they’re large and profitable, they continue to flourish in face of that.

The most likely scenario here is that we are in a huge bubble that’s driven by capitalist markets, and eventually the bubble will pop leading to another economic crash, which happen roughly every decade under capitalism. At that point the exuberance over AI will fade, but it’s highly unlikely the technology itself will simply disappear. I expect that it will be more like the dotcom bubble which created the foundation for the internet today.

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guilty, I skimmed the headings, and should’ve actually read it

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Yeah for sure, it’s the kind of stuff I really hope people will start exploring going forward.

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I suspect there is enough training data, especially for actually useful applications like agentic coding. But doing the actual training from scratch is a challenge. And I think this is where more research could be done on how to partition the training so it can be done in a distributed way. If you could have a system like SETI@home for example where people can donate a few cycles towards the training, you could likely do it fairly effectively with the cost being amortized across the network.

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Agreed, these models are not at the cutting edge of what’s possible by any means. Although, I do think they provide a foundation to build on. Personally, I’d really like to see more efforts like Petals training and running models in a distributed fashion. Labs working on open weight models do tend to publish a lot of their research, so even if they don’t release the source, the papers they produce can be adopted by the fully open implementations.

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There are a few fully open models around with training data sources, etc., available out there. They’re not frontier level, but they do exist.

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The architecture would have to be a lot more efficient for that to be practical. Training a large model from scratch takes a huge amount of resources, and even big labs tend to use foundational models to build on because of that.

And in practical terms there’s not much advantage to retraining the general knowledge part of the model. I’ve trained LoRAs for Qwen, and if you can drastically change the behavior of the model by training higher layers on your own dataset.

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I’m still not following the point I’m afraid, and how the tool being open to inspection is relevant here.

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I mean it’s a neural network where you adjust weights. How else would you propose going about it? The engines, like llama.cpp and vllm, that run the models are open source.

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why not?

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Yes, you absolutely can do that using services like runpod, which I, and many other people have done. You can easily create LoRAs to tune the model exactly to what you’re doing, and there’s a plethora of tuned models on huggingface because people do this all the time.

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I love how every one of these articles will have a straw man like:

Developing your project become increasingly dependent of on expensive and completely proprietary software over which you have no control.

I guess the position comes from the fact that anti LLM crowd doesn’t actually use or understand how this tech works. So, they’re just constructing arguments in the abstract based on how they think this tech works and what it can do.

The reality is that you can run a model like a Qwen 3.8 on a laptop, and it can do plenty of real world work without you being dependent on any expensive and completely proprietary software. You run a tool on your machine that you have full control over. But of course, if you just ignore the technology you’re discussing, then you can come up with all sort of nonsense to base your argument on.

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Perhaps you should define what you think socialism is exactly.

Anarchism is clearly a form of socialism because it shares the core socialist goal of abolishing capitalism and replacing private ownership with collective ownership.

But if you think socialism is synonymous with Marxism, then I disagree with Maoism and Trotskyism as well.

And yes, I plenty of socialist youtubers covering socialist politics I agree with are grifters. Hasan Piker and Jackson Hinkle are a prime examples.

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Absolutely, I’m a big supporter of socialism and I completely disagree with the anarchist approach to flat organization and rejection of authority.

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Nah, I have a problem with people wasting energy on Quixotian endeavours even when I agree with the concerns because that energy could’ve been directed towards doing something constructive instead. Performative outrage isn’t noble, it’s a lazy way for people make themselves feel relevant without actually doing anything of value.

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My stance is that perseveration is not effective at achieving anything tangible, unless of course spectacle itself is the goal.

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So, it’s been a few years now, has articulating concern in this fashion actually effected any tangible change, what is the goal here aside from performative outrage?

And a position does not automatically become valid simply because a large number of people believe it.

Finally, nobody is ignoring or not considering anything here. The context is that this has, in fact, been considered and discussed to death at this point. But if you’re claiming that some new point that hasn’t been considered already is being made, by all means enlighten me as to what it might be.

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It is genuinely fascinating how this always gets reframed as persecution. Nobody is burning you at the stake for having opinions, people are just tired of your performative hand-wringing. This relentless casting of oneself as a martyr for simply typing out a blog post, as if you are bravely whispering truth to power is exhausting.

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