• SmokeyDope@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Theres more than just chatgpt and American data center/llm companies. Theres openAI, google and meta (american), mistral (French), alibaba and deepseek (china). Many more smaller companies that either make their own models or further finetune specialized models from the big ones. Its global competition, all of them occasionally releasing open weights models of different sizes for you to run your own on home consumer computer hardware. Dont like big models from American megacorps that were trained on stolen copyright infringed information? Use ones trained completely on open public domain information.

    Your phone can run a 1-4b model, your laptop 4-8b, your desktop with a GPU 12-32b. No data is sent to servers when you self-host. This is also relevant for companies that data kept in house.

    Like it or not machine learning models are here to stay. Two big points. One, you can self host open weights models trained on completely public domain knowledge or your own private datasets already. Two, It actually does provide useful functions to home users beyond being a chatbot. People have used machine learning models to make music, generate images/video, integrate home automation like lighting control with tool calling, see images for details including document scanning, boilerplate basic code logic, check for semantic mistakes that regular spell check wont pick up on. In business ‘agenic tool calling’ to integrate models as secretaries is popular. Nft and crypto are truly worthless in practice for anything but grifting with pump n dump and baseless speculative asset gambling. AI can at least make an attempt at a task you give it and either generally succeed or fail at it.

    Models around 24-32b range in high quant are reasonably capable of basic information processing task and generally accurate domain knowledge. You can’t treat it like a fact source because theres always a small statistical chance of it being wrong but its OK starting point for researching like Wikipedia.

    My local colleges are researching multimodal llms recognizing the subtle patterns in billions of cancer cell photos to possibly help doctors better screen patients. I would love a vision model trained on public domain botany pictures that helps recognize poisonous or invasive plants.

    The problem is that theres too much energy being spent training them. It takes a lot of energy in compute power to cook a model and further refine it. Its important for researchers to find more efficent ways to make them. Deepseek did this, they found a way to cook their models with way less energy and compute which is part of why that was exciting. Hopefully this energy can also come more from renewable instead of burning fuel.