Every journey begins with a single step.

Ah but we’ll never run out of electricity. We will run out of oil.

Furthermore, adding new electric capacity is easy in comparison to adding more oil infrastructure.

Want gas to be cheaper? Get more people to buy electric cars!

…or that AI is how Jesus will be resurrected.

Bailouts only happen to companies with loads of employees. An AI company with loads of employees is an oxymoron!

It would turn into a prince! An unstable prince of undefined behavior.

Whoah there! I was talking about communism, specifically. Not socialism (which isn’t well defined).

I suspect that OpenAI is on a path to spend as much money on data centers and hardware as possible so they can go bankrupt and sell those assets to Microsoft for pennies on the dollar.

It’s a scheme to filter billions and billions of dollars around the “AI everything” hype train directly into Microsoft’s coffers.

Generally speaking, communism usually starts off great for the majority of people. Brings people out of poverty and whatnot. Very, very bad for the rich and upper middle classes but overall the public benefits.

Then authoritarianism kicks in and everything goes to shit really fast. People very quickly lose equality and equal treatment as a result.

Corruption is the biggest, inevitable problem because people naturally want to improve their position relative to their peers. Since that’s incredibly difficult under communism, you end up with lots of quid pro quo. Underground, black markets for anything and everything take hold and become just as important as the main economy.

Basically, it never works out. The end result is authoritarianism and deep corruption every time. Just like other forms of government! Except with communism, the pressures of the system force these sorts of problems to arise much faster.

You want political toilet paper?

Not at this point, no. Not unless you know how to setup/manage docker images and have a GPU with at least 16GB of VRAM.

Also, if you’re not using Linux forget it. All the AI stuff anyone would want to run is a HUGE pain in the ass to run on Windows. The folks developing these models and the tools to use them are all running Linux. Both on their servers and on their desktops and it’s obvious once you start reading the README.md for most of these projects.

Some will have instructions for Windows but they’ll either be absolutely enormous or they’ll hand wave away the actual complexity, “These instructions assume you know the basics of advanced rocket science and quantum mechanics.”

It depends on the size of the content on the page. As long as it’s small enough to be contained within the context window, it should do a good job.

But that’s all irrelevant since the point of the summary is just to give you a general idea of what’s on the page. You’ll still get the actual title and whatnot.

Using an LLM to search on your behalf is like using grep to filter out unwanted nonsense. You don’t use it like, “I’m feeling lucky” and pray for answers. You still need to go and open the pages in the results to get at what you want.

AI models aren’t trained on anything “stolen”. When you steal something, the original owner doesn’t have it anymore. That’s not being pedantic, it’s the truth.

Also, if you actually understand how AI training works, you wouldn’t even use this sort of analogy in the first place. It’s so wrong it’s like describing a Flintstones car and saying that’s how automobiles work.

Let’s say you wrote a book and I used it as part of my AI model (LLM) training set. As my code processes your novel, token-by-token (not word-by-word!), it’ll increase or decrease a floating point value by something like 0.001. That’s it. That’s all that’s happening.

To a layman, that makes no sense whatever but it’s the truth. How can a huge list of floating point values be used to generate semi-intelligent text? That’s the actually really fucking complicated part.

Before you can even use a model you need to tokenize the prompt and then perform an inference step which then gets processed a zillion ways before that .safetensors file (which is the AI model) gets used at all.

When an AI model is outputting text, it’s using a random number generator in conjunction with a word prediction algorithm that’s based on the floating point values inside the model. It doesn’t even “copy” anything. It’s literally built upon the back of an RNG!

If an LLM successfully copies something via it’s model that is just random chance. The more copies of something that went into its training, the higher the chance of it happening (and that’s considered a bug, not a feature).

There’s also a problem that can occur on the opposite end: When a single set of tokens gets associated with just one tiny bit of the training set. That’s how you can get it to output the same thing relatively consistently when given the same prompt (associated with that set of tokens). This is also considered a bug and AI researchers are always trying to find ways to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

No it can’t do that. It’s an LLM, it can only generate the next word in a sequence.

Your knowledge is out of date, friend. These days you can configure an LLM to run tools like curl, nmap, ping, or even write then execute shell scripts and Python (though, in a sandbox for security).

Some tools that help you manage the models are preconfigured to make it easy for them to search the web on your behalf. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a whole ecosystem of AI tools just for searching the web that will emerge soon.

What Mozilla is implementing in Firefox will likely start with cloud-based services but eventually it’ll just be using local models, running on your PC. Then all those specialized AI search tools will become less popular as Firefox’s built-in features end up being “good enough”.

Have you tried using an LLM configured to search the Internet for you? It’s amazing!

Normal search: Loads of useless results, ads, links that are hidden ads, scams, and maybe on like the 3rd page you’ll find what you’re looking for.

AI search: It makes calls out to Google and DDG (or any other search engines you want) simultaneously, checks the content on each page to verify relevancy, then returns a list of URLs that are precisely what you want with summaries of each that it just generated on the fly (meaning: They’re up to date).

You can even do advanced stuff like, “find me ten songs on YouTube related to breakups and use this other site to convert those URLs to .ogg files and put them in my downloads folder.”

Local, FOSS AI running on your own damned PC is fucking awesome. I seriously don’t understand all the hate. It’s the technology everyone’s always wanted and it gets better every day.

Random chance gambling. All throughout history there have been many statistical anomalies and if I joined them in such a competition, I’d have just as good a chance at winning as anyone else.

Yeah it’s a common thought: An afterlife where people gather before going on to the next.

Usually, people think that the quality of your choices for the next life will be based on whatever criteria they think was most important in life. Someone who went out of their way to be nice will believe that it will be based on how nice you were. Whereas someone who spent their life accumulating money/power will assume it’s based on that.

For all we know, though, your “afterlife score” could be based on how many different sorts of food you tried, how many buttons you pressed, how far you traveled from where you were born, etc.

I actually have a novel idea about this concept: Dude dies and gets the red carpet treatment in the afterlife. He’s very happy about it but he doesn’t understand… He never got married and spent most of his life doing data entry and courtroom steganography.

Turns out, he got the high score in “button pressing.” He’s at the top of the leaderboard and this qualifies him for all sorts of “premium” reincarnation options. Not only that, but the gods intend to put his talents to use right away on “pressing issues.”

In hell, they just use Crow Pilot for this sort of thing.

Me, at life’s exit interview…

“Sooo… In regards to my, er, contributions to the good of the world… Does open source software count? What about all those times I made witty comments that made a few people smile? 😬”

If there’s so much gold you can pave the streets with it, it’s not very valuable.

Having said that, if we’re all living in a simulation, then having our “streets” (cables) paved with gold sounds fantastic 👍

Only thing better would be fiberoptic cable but that might not be possible since you can’t carry power over fiber 🤷

Aside: You can generate power from light traveling through fiber optic cable but it’s not the same thing as carrying power efficiently over copper or (better) gold.