I have avoided AI (LLMS) because it didn’t seem nearly useful enough to warrant supporting these tech assholes. Is there anyway to use it locally on a normal device (16 Gb ram, 8 year old Geforce graphics, etc?). Can I just slow it down and get it to work locally?
You can, but it’s not worth the effort. The technology itself is set up for people of power, such as governments and corporations. That’s why they steal our hardware and make it unaffordable. The only genuine use is accessibility, but it’s purely audio/text recognition. Everything else is for targeting people with drones and surveillance state.
Edit: how could I forget deepfakes? You practically can’t live without them nowadays /s
On that note:
https://terslang.github.io/LocalTranslate/
While I respect your cynicism and it’s fully justified, in fact they can do useful and interesting things for individuals too. They must be used cautiously, and with understanding of their limitations and a realistic appreciation for their capabilities. Large neural networks like this are in a fundamental sense statistical models. I have pointed out in the past that many of the large general-purpose “assistant” models that have been trained on what amounts to very close to the entire corpus of knowledge and information contained in libraries and on the internet. Regardless of why they were trained, and whether that was done ethically (it wasn’t) the fact is these models now exist, and we have access to many of them, and they contain statistical models of what I will refer to as the vast majority of human knowledge to-date.
If you can’t imagine that there are ways that statistical information could be valuable, you are either incredibly lacking in creativity or simply being ignorant and myopic as far as I’m concerned.
As an analogy, national and sociological demographics and census data is abbreviated and summarized statistics much like neural networks. It cannot in many cases correctly and confidently predict any particular outcome. But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful or meaningful. It is not a complete and accurate listing of every human’s thoughts, feelings, and preferences, and most honest people would not imagine it is. If you ask it for that, you are doing it wrong, or you are selling something. Same with generative AI models. The fact that some people (including huge companies) misuse it does not mean that such statistics are evil and we should throw it away.
Using it for intelligent, thoughtful purposes is a form of rebellion and I believe it is important that we continue to have access to these technologies. They are not intelligent, and they are not even artificial. They are loosely curated distillations of human knowledge. That is very powerful, it is a very fascinating and practically useful tool. It is not magic, it is not a real boy, it does not have feelings or purpose, it is a tool. It is being used for purposes, but you have the power to use it for purposes too, and those should be your own purposes, not what purposes companies dictate to you. Engage your brain and learn how and when to use it, don’t use it to replace your brain, it’s not what it’s being sold as, but it is a very clever and interesting technology.
Wild conclusion