I had an unsettling experience a few days back where I was booping along, writing some code, asking ChatGPT 4.0 some questions, when I got the follow message: “You’ve reached the current usage cap for GPT-4, please try again after 4:15 pm.” I clicked on the “Learn More” link and basically got a message saying “we actually can’t afford to give you unlimited access to ChatGPT 4.0 at the price you are paying for your membership ($20/mo), would you like to pay more???”
https://www.peterkrupa.lol/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/image-4.pngIt dawned on me that OpenAI is trying to speedrun enshitification. The classic enshitification model is as follows: 1) hook users on your product to the point that it is a utility they cannot live without, 2) slowly choke off features and raise prices because they are captured, 3) profit. I say it’s a speedrun because OpenAI hasn’t quite accomplished (1) and (2). I am not hooked on its product, and it is not slowly choking off features and raising prices– rather, it appears set to do that right away.
While I like having a coding assistant, I do not want to depend on an outside service charging a subscription to provide me with one, so I immediately cancelled my subscription. Bye, bitch.
But then I got to thinking: people are running LLMs locally now. Why not try that? So I procured an Nvidia RTX 3060 with 12gb of VRAM (from what I understand, the entry-level hardware you need to run AI-type stuff) and plopped it into my Ubuntu machine running on a Ryzen 5 5600 and 48gb of RAM. I figured from poking around on Reddit that running an LLM locally was doable but eccentric and would take some fiddling.
Reader, it did not.
I installed Ollama and had codellama running locally within minutes.
https://www.peterkrupa.lol/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/image-6.pngIt was honestly a little shocking. It was very fast, and with Ollama, I was able to try out a number of different models. There are a few clear downsides. First, I don’t think these “quantized” (I think??) local models are as good as ChatGPT 3.5, which makes sense because they are quite a bit smaller and running on weaker hardware. There have been a couple of moments where the model just obviously misunderstands my query.
But codellama gave me a pretty useful critique of this section of code:
https://www.peterkrupa.lol/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/image-7.png… which is really what I need from a coding assistant at this point. I later asked it to add some basic error handling for my “with” statement and it did a good job. I will also be doing more research on context managers to see how I can add one.
Another downside is that the console is not a great UI, so I’m hoping I can find a solution for that. The open-source, locally-run LLM scene is heaving with activity right now, and I’ve seen a number of people indicate they are working on a GUI for Ollama, so I’m sure we’ll have one soon.
Anyway, this experience has taught me that an important thing to watch now is that anyone can run an LLM locally on a newer Mac or by spending a few hundred bucks on a GPU. While OpenAI and Google brawl over the future of AI, in the present, you can use Llama 2.0 or Mistral now, tuned in any number of ways, to do basically anything you want. Coding assistant? Short story generator? Fake therapist? AI girlfriend? Malware? Revenge porn??? The activity around open-source LLMs is chaotic and fascinating and I think it will be the main AI story of 2024. As more and more normies get access to this technology with guardrails removed, things are going to get spicy.
If you want to know why people don't trust #OpenAI or Microsoft or Google to fix a broken faux-#AGI#chatbot#LLM, consider that using suicidal teens for A/B testing was regarded as perfectly fine by a Silicon Valley "health" startup developing "#AI"-based suicide prevention tools.
(Aside: This is also where we get when techbros start doing faux-utilitarian moral calculus instead of just not doing obviously unethical shit.)
How much you want to bet that these moves to close down APIs because of generative AI are being pushed by OpenAI and their ilk, or at least not actively opposed by them? Most of GPT was clearly sourced on reddit. Now, reddit wants to make the API outrageously expensive. With the funding OpenAI has it could pay those rates, but anyone wanting to develop an open-source alternative will not, thus never being able to achieve parity with the commercial models due to having a fair bit of that vast treasure trove of data inaccessible to them which GPT has already used. #AI#GPT#LLM#Reddit#openai#capitalism
When college administrator Lance Eaton created a working spreadsheet about the generative AI policies adopted by universities last spring, it was mostly filled with entries about how to ban tools like ChatGPT.
Kevin Roose so desperately wants to live in the futures tech companies are selling that he’ll eagerly do their PR for them and buy into whatever illusions of intelligence they put in front of him so he can trick himself into believing they’ll actually be realized this time.
Whenever I see OpenAI's Sam Altman with his pseudo-innocent glance, he always reminds me of Carter Burke from Aliens (1986), who deceived the entire spaceship crew in favor of his corporation, with the aim of getting rich by weaponizing a newly discovered intelligent lifeform.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the two companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with its content as a result....
This week in the Disconnect Roundup: The EU AI Act has been finalized, but it has some big holes including those put there by OpenAI lobbyists. Plus, plenty of recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you might have missed!
You’ve probably heard about The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. But the details are impressive: The NY Times provided 100 exhibits of ChatGPT completing articles almost word for word, and the suit seeks the deletion of all GPT models.
Could it succeed, and what would be the consequences? I spoke with general counsel Cecilia Ziniti and Techdirt editor @mmasnick about its chances.
After a weekend of boardroom drama, Microsoft won by hiring Sam Altman to spin up a new AI division.
But we shouldn’t let that distract us from the company’s grander ambitions: to use AI to pave the way for a massive expansion of its cloud business. Do we really need all those data centers and their additional computer power to make people’s lives better?
ChatGPT can now answer voice queries and use image recognition—arguably its biggest updates since it was launched last year! However, OpenAI is being relativey coy about how it will use this new data
Happy birthday to ChatGPT - for the past year I've been sampling five news articles each week, to track the evolution of the technology and its critiques as represented by media coverage. So here is my narrative of these events, a sort of "ChatGPT Wrapped," the highs and lows of the past year. (And seriously, what a season finale!) #chatgpt#openaihttps://cfiesler.medium.com/chatgpt-wrapped-an-ais-year-in-review-dc37252c494f
I do not recall an open letter with thousands of prominent signatories, a hastily-assembled White House Task Force and a big Senate hearing for automated driving systems.
You know... #SafetyCritical systems that are masquerading as #AI that have killed people and have the capacity to readily cause immediate injury and death.
We have an unregulated Wild West out there on that.
Control your home with an AI-powered Assist, conditional sections and cards for your dashboards, Matter 1.3, amazing new media player commands, tag entities, and so much more! 🚀
»The fact that they reached out to her to collaborate is another stunning demonstration of the profound lack of cultural literacy and like social intuition these AI people have. The film is this very moving and complex but crucially UNSETTLING and SAD story and the fact that those associations would sail completely over their head and they’d just go “yooo we got #Her from Her” is so on brand for these AI dorks«
Schools are teaching ChatGPT, so students aren't left behind | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)
When college administrator Lance Eaton created a working spreadsheet about the generative AI policies adopted by universities last spring, it was mostly filled with entries about how to ban tools like ChatGPT.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement (www.theverge.com)
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the two companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with its content as a result....