I usually don’t even understand the lingo they use. “Open-weighted” is the most recent one, then it usually goes down to specific “models” that everybody is supposed to know about.

These are my thoughts (I will stick to the vague “it” for now, but of course therein lies another question: “and how does all this apply to various specialised AIs”):

  • Is it really feasible to run it 100% locally? I know there’s plenty of people with very powerful rigs indeed, but still. Or are 99% of these people really saying “it would, in theory, be possible to run that locally, therefore your concerns are invalid”?
  • If yes to the previous: the software doesn’t come from nowhere and ultimately still relies on gas-turbine-powered datacenters and stolen IP and stolen personal data, no?

If what I wrote above is true, what exactly are people arguing when they say it’s still possible to use LLMs ethically or true to FOSS philosophy, because … ???

edit

Thanks to all who answered.

I guess it’s my fault for asking several questions in one, but this thread has attracted exactly the type of people I’m writing about; several even used the term “open-weighted models” without explaining it.

Asking to get arguments explained, I got more arguments instead.

  • sumsinj@lemmy.world
    4·
    6 days ago

    To answer a lesser answered sub question of a question: what is a weight?

    Imagine you have an output, its either a or b. You have an input, whatever it is. And then there is a weight in the middle. The weight determines wether the output will be a or b.

    In math it would be a function input*weight=output.

    ANN (Artificial Neural Networks, just afancy name) is a chain of a whole bunch of weights. There are layers and each layer generates an output from a bunch of weights and the next layer uses it as inputs. The name comes from the visualization, which looks like neurons firing to other neurons (from biology, things that make your brain work).