I firmly believe it will slow down significantly. My prediction for the future is that there will be a much bigger focus on a few “base” models that will be tweaked slightly for different roles, rather than “from the ground up” retraining like we see now. The industry is already starting to move in that direction.
While I agree in principle, one thing I’d like to clarify is that TRAINING is super energy intensive, once the network is trained, it’s more or less static. Actually using the network isn’t dramatically more energy than any other indexed database lookup.
Actually, Windows does allow you to use an alternate “compositor”— a feature which is used quite frequently in the industrial/embedded space. Windows calls them “custom shells”. The default is Explorer, but it can be set to any executable.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/customize/shell-launcher
People who improve a property for free are not “suckers”, they are tenants improving their own home because it’s their home, and it brings them joy. We need to fundamentally stop treating real estate as though it is an investment, it shouldn’t be. People should not have to live everyday life as if their home isn’t theres, because that is an insane expectation, and really negatively affects mental health. People deserve to have a space that is just theirs, even if they don’t outright own it, it is a form of cruelty to disallow people from improving their own space, either explicitly, or implicitly through the financial system.
Regardless of how the system currently works, we need to stop accepting this bullshit from landlords. They bitch and moan all day about the “risk” they take on, and the work they do, but ultimately, this is that risk and that work. I’m sure this’ll garner lots of “that’s just how things work” comments, and frankly, I do not care. Landlords do not deserve my, or frankly anyone else’s sympathy. They are leveraging their capital to ransom out a vital resource for survival at the cost of everyone else in society.
Homelessness is worse than debt, just to be clear. You can survive with debt, there is no risk of death. Homelessness can, and often is deadly. This is just a fact.
We are at, and even past running out of space that is in commute proximity to an economic zone capable of supporting a non-impoverished lifestyle for the VAST majority of citizens. There’s tons of space in the middle of no where, but that space isn’t useful to anyone because no one can support themselves there. I don’t mean “find work” support yourself (though that too), I mean “have a grocery store within an hour drive one way from your house” support yourself.
As for working under capitalism, you’re right, it still sucks, but you can choose where you work, and there are choices to be had pretty much everywhere. The same is not true of housing, especially with the rise of suburban sprawl. You can choose to work remotely for any business you want, but you can’t choose to “exist” remotely. You have to take up space somewhere. Sure there’s space in the middle of nowhere, but how will you buy gas for your car with no gas station, food to feed yourself with no grocery store. Most of the country is like this. That is the whole problem, you simply can’t survive outside of an economic zone of a certain size, and all the housing in that area is being hoarded. I’m not arguing against the evils of capitalism, but to claim that not being allowed to exist anywhere isn’t a bigger problem then “I’m not being paid what I’m worth” is just a misunderstanding of the problem.
Agreed, in fact renting actively takes AWAY the solution to housing, because you can’t save AND the money you pay in just enables landlords to buy up more property, thus making it all more valuable.
Are there though? Beyond food, water, and shelter— stuff gets a lot more… easy to avoid. Food is something easy enough to shop elsewhere, and it’s possible for competitors to come in and undercut existing brands. Water is (for most of the US) relatively easy to acquire cheaply, or even free. But shelter is something that is pretty much impossible to compete with. Every area has a finite amount of space, and once it’s owned, it’s owned. Sure one landlord might lower their rent to attract new tenants, but it’s effectively guaranteed to never have more than a few competitors before you start moving a significant distance away. It’s one of the few things that’s impossible to avoid. You HAVE to exist somewhere, you can’t choose not to, and you can’t shop around endlessly like you can with other things.
Wealth inequality is definitely a huge problem, but the issue with landlords is that they are artificially restricting the supply of, and price gouging an already incredibly limited resource that scene needs to survive. At least with food, someone else can always make more and sell it for cheaper, or you can decide to eat something else. But with how housing is now, it’s not uncommon for just a few companies to snatch up nearly all available houses in an area, and there’s only so much “I’ll just move a little farther out” before you are an unsustainable distance from your workplace. That isn’t true of hardly any other market.
He’s not scamming the religious, he’s bribing them. Elect Trump, and he’ll enact their zionist dreamscape. This is a transaction.
You don’t need to exercise your stock options to access their value. It’s common practice to take loans out against their value, which allows you to access your money effectively tax free by instead paying interest against the loan. This is (again) a fairly commonplace practice used to make collecting tax difficult, and allow them to make the argument to regulators that they aren’t actually being paid that much, it’s totally just options they would never sell off. That’s why C suite has such a “burn everything to the ground, as long as our stock price goes up” mentality, because if it doesn’t, they have to start worrying about interest on their loans— because they have fairly low liquidity (percentage wise).
Base pay is a meaningless figure in tech. Total comp is all that matters. The true high rollers intentionally keep their base pay low to dodge taxes. This doesn’t mean they aren’t still getting and using this money, it’s just an intentional straw man to allow them to make this exact argument.
My comment has nothing to do with Taylor Swift. In fact, I’m a fan of hers. I’m entirely talking about the companies, BP and Shell.
No they have so much power because decades of lobbying have made it impossible to get anywhere without traveling on a road in a car— Which uses gas. This is not a problem citizens can feasibly solve, this sort if problem can only be fixed with government intervention.
You can attach a fake one in software via XVFB (X Virtual Frame Buffer). It’s a little involved if you aren’t familiar with X, but it only took me an hour or so to get setup. Then you don’t need any hardware at all, and can set whatever resolution you’d like.
If that were solely true, there would be a lot more competition in the field right now. Amazon, (and to a much lesser extent the other 2 big names, GCP and Azure) are so massive not because they have a lot of power (plenty of other companies like digital ocean or OVM have plenty of scaling power too)— but because the integrations between their products are so seamless. Most of that functionality has a foundation in FOSS software that they’ve built on top of.
That would be a dream come true for Youtube. Think about how that would affect them financially, they would be serving significantly less load, but they would still rake in all those Youtube premium subscriptions. It would effectively be campaigning to remove the users who aren’t monetized from the platform.
Depending on the profile, it’s not just a little latency that would be slightly annoying, it can be easily half a second or more, which is enough to be disorienting even in normal slow paced gameplay.
I’m out and about today, so apologies if my responses don’t contain the level of detail I’d like; As for the law being collective morality, all sorts of religious prohibitions and moral scares HAVE ended up in the law. The idea is that the “collective” is large enough to dispel any niche restrictive beliefs. Whether or not you agree with that strategy aside, that is how I believe the current system works in an ideal sense (even if it works differently in practice), that’s what it is designed to protect from my perspective.
As for anti-AI artists, let me pose a situation for you to illustrate my perspective. As a prerequisite for this situation, a large part of a lawsuit, and the ability to advocate for a law is based on standing, the idea that you personally, or a group you represent has been directly, tangibly harmed by the thing you are trying to restrict. Here is the situation:
I am a furry, and a LARGE part of the fandom is based on art and artists. A core furry experience is getting art commissioned of your character from other artists. It’s commonplace for all these artists to have a very specific, identifiable signature style, so much so that it is trivial for me and other furs to be able to identify artists by their work alone at just a glance. Many of these artists have shifted to making their living full time off of creating art. With the advent of some new generational models, it is now possible to train a model exclusively off of one singular artists style, and generate art indistinguishable from the real thing without ever contacting them. This puts their livelihood directly at risk, and also muddies the waters in terms of subject matter, and what they support. Without laws regulating training, this could take away their livelihood, or even give a (very convincing, and hard to disprove) impression that they support things they don’t, like making art involving political parties, or illegal activities, which I have seen happen already. This almost approaches defamation in my opinion.
One argument you could make is that this is similar to the invention of photography, which may have directly threatened the work of painters. And while there are some comparisons you could draw from that situation, photography didn’t fundamentally replace their work verbatim, it merely provided an alternative that filled a similar role. This situation is distinct because in many cases, it’s not possible, or at least immediately apparent which pieces are authentic, or not. That is a VERY large problem the law needs to solve as soon as possible.
Further, I believe the same, or similar problems exist in LLMs, like they do in the situation involving generative image models above. Sure with enough training, those issues are lessened in impact, but where is the line of what is ok and what isn’t? Ultimately the models themselves don’t contain any copyrighted content, but they (by design) combine related ideas and patterns found in the training data, in a way that will always approximate it, depending on the depth of training data. While “overfitting” might be considered a negative in the industry, it’s still a possibility, and until there is some sort of regulations establishing the fitness of commercially available LLMs, I can envision situations in which management would cut training short once it’s “good enough”, leaving overfitting issues in place.
Lastly, with respect, I’d like to push back on both the notion that I’d like to ban AI or LLMs, as well as the notion that I’m not educated enough on the subject to adequately debate regulations on it. Both are untrue. I’m very much in favor of developing the technology, and exploring all it’s applications. It’s revolutionary, and worthy of the research attention it’s getting. I work on a variety of models across the AI and LLM space professionally, and I’ve seen how versatile it is; That said, I have also seen how over publicized it is. We’re clearly (from my perspective) in a bubble that will eventually pop. We’re claiming products use AI to do this and that across nearly every industry, and while LLMs in particular are amazing, and can be used in a ton of applications, it’s certainly not all of them— and I’m particularly cautious of putting new models in charge of dangerous or risky processes where they shouldn’t be before we develop adequate metrics, regulation, and guardrails. To summarize my position, I’m very excited to work towards developing them further, but I want to publicly express the notion that it’s not a silver bullet, and we need to develop legal frameworks for protecting people now, rather than later.
The law is (in an ideal world), the reflection of our collective morality. It is supposed to dictate what is “right” and “wrong”. That said— I see too many folks believing that it works the other way too, that what is illegal must be wrong, and what is legal must be ok. This is (decisively) not the case.
In AI terms, I do believe some of the things that LLMs and the companies behind them are doing now may turn out to be illegal under certain interpretations of the law. But further, I think a lot of the things companies are doing to train these models are seen as “immoral” (me included), and that the law should be changed to reflect that.
Sure that may mean that “stuff these companies are doing now is legal”, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the right to be upset about it. Tons of stuff large corporations have done was fully legal until public outcry forced the government to legislate against it. The first step in many laws being passed is the public demonstrating a vested interest in it. I believe the same is happening here.
Indexing and lookups on datasets as big as companies like Google and Amazon are running also take trillions of operations to complete, especially when you take into account the constant reindexing that needs to be done. In some cases, encoding data into a neural network is actually cheaper than storing the data itself. You can see this in practice with gaussian splatting point cloud capture, where they are training networks to guide points in the cloud at runtime, rather than storing the position of trillions of points over time.