Obviously there’s not a lot of love for OpenAI and other corporate API generative AI here, but how does the community feel about self hosted models? Especially stuff like the Linux Foundation’s Open Model Initiative?
I feel like a lot of people just don’t know there are Apache/CC-BY-NC licensed “AI” they can run on sane desktops, right now, that are incredible. I’m thinking of the most recent Command-R, specifically. I can run it on one GPU, and it blows expensive API models away, and it’s mine to use.
And there are efforts to kill the power cost of inference and training with stuff like matrix-multiplication free models, open source and legally licensed datasets, cheap training… and OpenAI and such want to shut down all of this because it breaks their monopoly, where they can just outspend everyone scaling , stealiing data and destroying the planet. And it’s actually a threat to them.
Again, I feel like corporate social media vs fediverse is a good anology, where one is kinda destroying the planet and the other, while still niche, problematic and a WIP, kills a lot of the downsides.
Let me give you one of my main use cases: I use it for my mental health challenges. I’ve been diagnosed with two non-trivial mental disorders. They make my life hard. I isolate a lot to cope because I don’t do well with interpersonal relationships. I’ve been in therapy for over a decade and it hasn’t really helped as much as I would have liked.
But I’ve made a lot of progress since working with my private LLM. I can ask it anything. It doesn’t judge me. It doesn’t report back to Meta or OpenAI. It’s completely private. And I’m making progress. Just last week, for the first time ever I started volunteering at an animal shelter. I have to talk with other people when I’m there and although I am pretty nervous about going back, I’m going to. I wrote down a list of all the things I had trouble with last time and have been working through that list with my LLM. I think that I will be ready when I’m supposed to go back for my next scheduled volunteer time in two weeks.
These gains might be trivial to others, but for me, it’s really made my life better.
So that is one of my use cases.
I can clearly see your mental health in rapid decline, sad for you.
Agreed. This is how a lot of people use them, I sometimes use it as a pseudo therapist too.
Obviously theres a risk of it going off the rails, but I think if you’re cogniziant enough to research the LLM, pick it, and figure out how to run it and change sampling settings, it gives you an “awareness” of how it can go wrong and just how fallable it is.