Post

How do you empower everyone when the cost of building an LLM is in the billions? There's no way currently to use an LLM built by someone not a billionaire

Who cares who built it?

Because the people who build it control the biases in the training data

It's similar to what I wrote about a few months ago regarding "learned helplessness. The point should be empowering everyone, not whining to oligarchs and overlords about how bad stuff is. www.techdirt.com/2025/01/27/e...

The constant screaming and yelling at people on Bluesky who even dare to mention the ways they use tools in an empowering way is getting pretty ridiculous and it doesn't help. There are ways to use tech well. Figure those out. Make the world better rather than just screaming at people.

Can you just say one of the way LLMs are useful in your opinion? I haven’t heard one yet and I’m curious.

True. But it's as I've always felt about technology: it's fine - it's good and it will continue to advance. But the biggest challenges we face are not technological. They are about moral leadership. We need to moral leadership to enable us to use technology in ways that truly advance society. /1

It sounds like your boss isn’t currently forcing this technology on you

Having said that - and it occurs to me that you in particular are worth discussing this with - I feel like the screechers have half a point, in that the way AI/LLM is currently being developed, provisioned and commercialized/imposed neither can nor should be sustainable.

Oh yeah, I just had to block a whole bunch of people who decided that because I find ChatGPT occasionally useful for search, I must be a frothing at the mouth AI evangelist. The group-nothink is powerful.

I hope commenting negatively on AI doesn't get me blocked because I think this discussion is good. I'm comfortable that you use a little hallucination machine to bounce ideas off. I sit and think up ideas by stewing up my own thoughts and seeing what cooks up. A tool that does that is pretty cool!