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i think tech and ai positive people are going to be in for a big shock when anti tech and anti ai sentiment becomes a major part of leftwing politics going forward especially as datacenters continue to destroy communities and raise electricity bills

Same as it ever was, tbh Not long ago Wikipedia was the leftwing devil over Assault Rifle/Armalite Rifle brigades If you're not behind solar and wind energy driven around by little AI/AI adjacent tech then you aren't actually left. Musk and Sama ruined stuff, but now they're gas/coal geezers

Given enough time we'll have open source and home made small language models that (yes, accurately, yes, without hallucinating) teach crochet and organic farming. It's far too useful-yet-horribly-boring to ignore, just like blogs, patreon, wordpress, wikis, reddit, blah blah blah

No, we will not. The problem of hallucinations is inherent and unsolvable - because LLMs do not think or reason or understand or know, they make statistical predictions of the most satisfying response, and there is no point at which truth is distinguished from falsehood in that process.

Yes, you will. The problem of hallucinations is inherent and unsolvable - and, in fact, a feature of LLMs. But that does not mean you can't get deterministic answers. If you ask for a "double puff" a specifically trained crochet model is not going to go ChatGPT on you and talk about birds.

I believe that is called "reading a book" and the tech is quite mature

I appreciate this answer :) But books don't have ctrl+f or search boxes and about the time you've screwed up hours of work because you don't know what a certain stitch is... I mean at least vector search is useful. :)

Ebooks, which predate LLMs by many years and don't require them, literally do have ctrl+f and search boxes. So the case is made here for OCR, which also existed before LLMs, and half-decent search, which existed before LLMs, and which definitionally shows its sources.

They do! But not semantic search. And OCR using an LLM now is vastly superior than any of the other approaches. So you're still using one in a roundabout way.

If I ask an LLM, what I'm going to have to do is, I'm going to have to ask it to actually cite its sources. Then, I will have to wrestle with it to provide sources, which it MIGHT do if it's a very classy model, and those sources will tell me, after I look, whether or not it gave me a line of shit.

So the LLM on its own, not as a statistical imporvement to the OCR (which, because the OCR only has to run once to scan the document, is far less resource-intensive than running a bunch of sequential queries) but on its own, will approximately be half as useful to me as google 10 years ago.

That's the bare minimum and yet it's being pitched to me as if restoring them to the functionality of a search engine is the wave of the future. If the LLM is just going to give me the same info on organic farming I would get from looking into a resource, I should just use the resource.

That's fair and very true. But this is a very boring technology that has quite a lot of advantages for things like 🥁 offline and accessible versions of the same information.

It's clear you view LLMs as a key part of a solarpunk future, to put it one way. But in the interim between here and there, LLMs as they currently are now, and not as they are in fantasy, requires me to deep fry the last surviving devil's hole pupfish in order to get one page of a google search.