> AI seems to be the ultimate example of "shoot first, ask questions later". We have no idea how AI will effect society
You know, you say this, but we had massive changes after personal computers and the Internet and the iPhone became a thing, and no studies to my knowledge were produced before any of these things were introduced. All of the predicted effects were only positive, because only good actors were involved in creating them, but as we now know, a lot of downsides also resulted, mainly because of bad actors and perverse incentives and simple human psychology.
The progress of the last 40 years seems to be a validation of "Be careful what you wish for"
I used to bike 5 miles to a library in the 80's (as a teen) in order to learn anything. Now it's all on a device in my pocket that I might have killed for were it available then. But of course, it's not just the phone, it's the ubiquitous cell network, the (wired) Internet, display/memory/cpu tech and everything else that all makes it possible. Can I spend "too much time" on my phone? Sure, but I'm also hyper-aware of that tendency now. I've learned to cope with the downsides, while gaining the advantages.
I tend to believe that tech becomes available when we're ready for it, and that the positives always outweigh the negatives. (I'm still on the fence here regarding arms.)
The obvious difference, though, is that you knowingly use all of these tools; you get to choose whether and how you use them. AI, like the weapons you point out, can invade your life without you knowing it even exists.
It's actually the other way around with AI. If you want to do web-search, you got to disclose your keywords to a search engine. If you want to post on social networks, you are in plain sight. If you use a mobile phone, you broadcast your location.
But if you use your local models, it's more like running a linux box, it is private, customizable and unfiltered. LLMs will reverse the centralization trend we have seen with search and social. They can create a "safe space", "a room of one's own" where we can be creative and unrestricted.
LLMs promise the privacy internet never gave us, anyone, remember how we felt private online 20 years ago? You can't download a Google or FB but you can download a Mistral and even run it on a normal laptop.
> But if you use your local models, it's more like running a linux box, it is private, customizable and unfiltered. LLMs will reverse the centralization trend we have seen with search and social. They can create a "safe space", "a room of one's own" where we can be creative and unrestricted.
i really like this idea too. Running LLMs locally reminds me of running Linux locally, it wasn't full on UNIX but it as close to a real operating system regular people could get. Maybe the LLMs you can run at home aren't the bleeding edge but they're as close as you can get. Notice how the technology companies are already lobbying authorities hard to try and keep LLMs only under their control. ..hosted in their 'cloud' and accessible only by paying their subscription. The generation that created the OSS movement and the best success stories, GNU and Linux, are doing their best to make sure it never happens again.
The amount of people that will run their own models is negligible at the scale of the society. You also can't choose to cut yourself off from the bad outcomes, no matter how much you try. Propaganda 3.0 might not affect you directly, but the political outcomes it produces will.
> The amount of people that will run their own models is negligible at the scale of the society
Let me transpose your sentence back to 1980:
"The amount of people that will run their own computers is negligible at the scale of the society"
(I was 8 in 1980. People literally said this.)
All someone needs to do is to productize a whole-house LLM that does voice to text, runs the LLM, does text back to voice (possibly mimicking whatever voice you want), and you'd have an Alexa replacement that is far smarter. I'd buy it in a heartbeat just so that I wouldn't have to do maintenance on it.
But people don't run their own computers anymore. A phone on their own is nothing without email maps messenger apps browser cloud storage etc... So yes, nobody runs their own computer anymore. It'll be the same for llms. Can they run on commodity hardware? Yes. Will people go to lengths (including buying better hardware) to run gpt-lite instead of the much better internet-aware cloud llm gpt8?
It will become mainstream in a few years when every laptop, cellphone, web browser or operating system will sport local LLMs. For now it is a bit hard, but only a bit.
The same AI that invades my life to do harm can "invade" my life and be (extremely) helpful.
And the latter is more likely. Because the willpower of an AI is just the mimicked willpower of the people who made it, and there will always be more good people than bad people.
You know, you say this, but we had massive changes after personal computers and the Internet and the iPhone became a thing, and no studies to my knowledge were produced before any of these things were introduced. All of the predicted effects were only positive, because only good actors were involved in creating them, but as we now know, a lot of downsides also resulted, mainly because of bad actors and perverse incentives and simple human psychology.
The progress of the last 40 years seems to be a validation of "Be careful what you wish for"
I used to bike 5 miles to a library in the 80's (as a teen) in order to learn anything. Now it's all on a device in my pocket that I might have killed for were it available then. But of course, it's not just the phone, it's the ubiquitous cell network, the (wired) Internet, display/memory/cpu tech and everything else that all makes it possible. Can I spend "too much time" on my phone? Sure, but I'm also hyper-aware of that tendency now. I've learned to cope with the downsides, while gaining the advantages.
I tend to believe that tech becomes available when we're ready for it, and that the positives always outweigh the negatives. (I'm still on the fence here regarding arms.)