A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
It's designed to be scalable. You can already run basic models on home hardware, but available resources determine speed and power.
If you could get today's results on 1/10 the RAM/electricity, that would be good, but the big companies would just scale up to use the same resources anyway.
If it wasn't terrible for the environment and the data it was trained on were ethically sourced, is hate it less. I still would use it or trust it, but at least I could live in a world with it.
It wouldn't be hated as much if it wasn't forced upon us; if we had the chance to decide whether or not we actually wanted to use it.
If my grandmother had wheels, would she be a bike?
I know I shouldn't be so snarky here, but your question is basically "would AI still be hated if AI wasn't AI?" Or "what if we had magic?"
My opinion: honestly, no. People hate LLMs because of the slop they produce on the internet and their use as a tool for surveillance, not even for the outrageous cost it takes to produce it and the financial criminality to keep it going.
Ed Zitron is the biggest voice in "our sane fringe" and yet he really doesn't focus on these immediate consumer-side effects because in the grand scheme they're inconsequential and actually (as in: mechanicistically) temporary.
There are some (uninformed) peopke who think the data centers are the only bad thing about the LLM Bubble, but anyone who's actually put the thought in knows that making less hurdles to proliferation is a bad thing.
I read the first few sentences, but already I disagree before your thought train had a chance to leave the station.
Think of your phone. Your phone might have AI, but mostly thats just connecting to the data center.
But imagine if it didn't. Imagine if the AI ran directly from your cell phone. Suddenly you have no need for data centers.
But it's not magic. In 1985 Nintendo released the NES to America. Previously released in Japan as the Famicom.
In 1985 if I asked you "what if there was a device like on star trek, wheere you could call someone, and it's a calander, and a camera, and a calculator, and a step counter, and a source of news, information, and a flashlight??? Oh, plus it can play NES games right on the device!"
You would say in 1985 thats magic. Except it's not magic. It's just tech that didn't exist YET.
Today it's called literally any cheap cell phone.
Now we know time will always move forward. I'm fairly confident that within 10 years AI run locally CAN exist. It probably can exist right now. The reason it doesn't and won't is because 5 years ago the tech just wasn't there yet.
So they bought a lot of land. They bought a lot of ram. They spent a lot of long term money on this early model of AI from 5 years ago.
So in 10 years, you'd expect there to be more fully functional local run AI. But here's why that won't happen.
When these rich assholes buy land, and all the buildings to be built and paid for by them, they feel obligated to use it. Even if NOT using it weilds better results.
Studies have shown that workers working from home result in more productivity, more work done, and more profit. Yet employers keep the big 12 story office with outdated windows xp computers running legacy software. Why? Because they already paid for it. So, "Come back to work dickhead!" says the boss.
Otherwise he'd have a big office, thats already paid for, but its empty.
So every data center that gets built should be considered permanent, even though from a tech standpoint it doesn't need to be.
So what they're simply asking is, what if the AI didn't drain towns of water and electricity? What if it just ran on your phone?