alt Hacker News> To not bury your head in the sand hoping this will go away, because it won't.
Eh? As Greg K-H mentioned in that video from a few days back about how very disappointing Fable was when compared to its astronomical hype, LLMs that one can run locally are quite good enough for a great many tasks... including bug hunting in the Linux kernel. And -as LLM boosters keep saying- they're only keep getting better, right?
We absolutely should be telling people to stop using the LLMs from the major LLM manufacturers. Those manufacturers have spent so many billions of dollars on this project, made so many promises that they're going to have no way to keep, and now that they're running into resistance, [0] they're holding all of humanity hostage unless they're permitted to get intimately involved in the creation of new laws and regulations especially for them. [2]
Even if one only considers their recent threats to humanity, it's clear that these are not companies that deserve any of our hard-earned money.
[0] Some of that resistance comes from their ever-more-sharply-increasing cost to produce the next performance increment, some from folks asking the probing questions about their promises, claims, and business practices that should have been asked years ago, some from ongoing State AG's court cases in regards to their illegal conduct, and some from folks who -unsurprisingly- don't want enormous warehouses that suck up quite notable amounts of power [1] but provide dreadfully little revenue to the areas that house them in their communities, and still others who are starting to realize that benefits of cloud LLMs aren't worth the tradeoff of being unable to afford a new personal computer.
[1] Note carefully that I made no reference to water usage. The only counterargument you can make here is that 500MW -> 2GW is not a quite notable amount of power.
I am afraid that ship has already sailed, and we will have to live with the consequences.
At this point; I see no other scenario than having LLM doctors, LLM judges, etc. No matter the quality. We will get replaced. And if they do a worse job, nobody cares. If they do a better job, also nobody cares. Maybe you can pay more and get high effort model as your doctor.
These companies might not be the ones, my expectation is that they will be scrapped for their pieces, the losses distributed to the bagholders/taxpayers. But some version of them will.
This might be pure cyncisism with no positive value, but really I think we have no mechanisms left to stop going down on this trajectory.