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Grow Your Own Services 🌱 @homegrown@social.growyourown.services
13h
I know LLMs are interesting as toys, but they are fundamentally problematic:

- Even if you self-host an LLM, its model is created unethically elsewhere so it's not really independent or ethical.

- LLM creation is extremely resource-intensive, which is burning the planet and destroying communities.

- Hardware prices are being driven so high that ordinary people cannot afford to buy computers.

- LLMs are designed to deskill people and make them dependent on corporate models.
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Grow Your Own Services 🌱 @homegrown@social.growyourown.services
13h
p.s. Because of the above, I do not think LLMs are compatible with the principles of self-hosting or community hosting.

Normalising LLMs is effectively handing over our brains and computers to massive corporations owned by amoral billionaires who just want power, and don't care if the world burns as a result of it.

LLMs are being openly promoted as a way to kill personal computing and human intellectual skills. Sam Altman openly says he wants to sell "intelligence as a service".
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mike bayer python_logo @zzzeek@hachyderm.io
12h
@homegrown I have an 11 year old and as we tutor him in math we all had to re-learn things like long division all over again. The existence of calculators "de-skilled" me such that I no longer knew long division. are calculators unethical?

or if you prefer, twenty years ago, if you didn't speak French, and had to speak to someone who only knew French, you had to either learn French or hire a human translator. But tools like Google Translate came out that could do it using software. is Google Translate unethical?
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Grow Your Own Services 🌱 @homegrown@social.growyourown.services
11h
@zzzeek

"are calculators unethical? "

They would be if you were forced to rent calculators from massive corporations, and if maintenance of calculators used up more energy than entire countries etc.

Also, by the way, calculators are reliable and predictable in a way that LLMs are not. You cannot rely on an LLM in the way that you can with a calculator.

"is Google Translate unethical?"

It would be if it was causing massive spikes in energy use, water use, population displacement etc.
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mike bayer python_logo @zzzeek@hachyderm.io
11h
@homegrown home irrigation systems use 9 billion gallons of water per day in the US. Datacenters perhaps 500M gallons per day. Going after lawns would be a way better way to save water.
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tomwsmf @tomwsmf@mastodon.social
11h
@zzzeek @homegrown lawns are a vestigial throwback to the French aristocracy proclaiming they have land and labor they do not need to grow food or resources with. The Green Lawn clan promotes water waste, pesticide proliferation, and the destruction of local ecosystems.
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mike bayer python_logo @zzzeek@hachyderm.io
11h
@tomwsmf @homegrown yes! now do McDonalds.

Compare: I use an LLM many times per day. However, the last time I ate at a McDonalds was probably 12 years ago. McDonalds is the ultimate large corporation literally making billions of people unhealthy. How much water do they use? 2250 liters per burger X 5.4M burgers sold domestically per day == 12.15B liters or 3.21B gallons

so we have:

1. ALL US datacenters (not just language model training) - 500M gallons / day
2. home irrigation - 9B gallons / day
3. McDonalds - 3.21B gallons / day

water is not the problem people have with LLMs. A Facebook datacenter build polluting local water is Facebook being assholes about how they do buildouts and a non-existent EPA doing nothing about it. But that's not intrinsic to the technology itself. I'm all for antitrust breaking up of Facebook in some awesome timeline we'll never see.
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Grow Your Own Services 🌱 @homegrown@social.growyourown.services
10h
@zzzeek @tomwsmf

1. You're ignoring all the other problems on the list in the original post

2. You're comparing current stable water use of decades-old long-established sectors with the early water use of a brand new sector that is doing everything in its power to become many times larger.
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WestFox35 @westfox35@wcgw.art
10h
@homegrown @zzzeek @tomwsmf Did anyone ever do a comparison on how much water lab-grown meat required?

Because I'd also love to see lab grown meat as a viable alternative if not outright replace meat as a whole.

So it's the same damn problem. The rich don't want that to happen because they support those industries. Same deal with LLMs. The rich don't want them banned because they are invested in them.
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