His argument was literally that
- artists, writers, and programmers are “labor aristocracy” and deserve no respect because they’re sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
- genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”) that “helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
- it’s hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because “only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up”.
Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.
I’m particularly incensed because I’m as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.
The open models in good inference engines can be dirt cheap, but that’s not a good argument because (among other reasons) it’s not the bulk of what is used.
Honestly any company that uses AI as part of their business model should be running open-weight models locally. They can be fine-tuned to their specific use case, it’s not as compute-intensive as the initial pre-training.
And overall it’ll save the business money because they don’t have to shell out for these flagship APIs that are only going to crank up their rates as they become more desperate to prove to investors that they can turn a profit.
Individuals who use it should be running something between 7 to 24 billion parameters depending on how many resources they can allot to it. And even if you don’t use it, it can’t hurt to keep local copies of a few.