Egregoros

@david_chisnall

Of course they're useful. You don't need to retrain LLMs so that they have internalized knowledge for them to be useful. The point of the LLMs is that they're able to go outside their training data and look up API descriptions etc and then perform work.

Even the existing open weight models we have today are enough for people to get good usage out of purely local AI on regular graphics cards for many years to come.

New foundation models can then be trained by companies who sell local datacenter deployment subscriptions. When you don't need to satisfy VCs and a quarterly market you can take much longer (=cheaper) to train them.

@hfalcke

Did you know that Microsoft applied for a permit for a warehouse in southern Sweden - and once they had built the "warehouse" they declared they were going to host a datacenter there with diesel backup generators?

I mean, we hear this happening all the time and so let's hate on data centers, right?

The difference is that this is Sweden, and we don't accept that shit. They were not allowed to run their diesel generators, had to purchase battery power instead and in the end they closed the data center down since they couldn't win this fight.

That's how you deal with it.

(They are now using other datacenters in other locations in Sweden, fully compliant with the laws, with renewable energy and not using water for cooling as far as I can see)

Library story from the late 80's:

Swedish libraries were connected to a system where they ordered in which books each library should have*. They made some decisions themselves of course, but otherwise you could just ask them for a specific book and they would then order it so that you could lend it a few weeks later.

Me being a computer geek with a modem, I immediately recognized the dialup tones when they ordered one for me one time, and I chatted with the somewhat tech-illiterate librarian who was pleasantly surprised by my interest in their system and gladly showed it to me.

I also saw the dialup number and the passcode for my local library.

From then on all books I wanted to read just magically appeared in the library just in time for when I came in to lend them.

*) I _think_ this was "Libris", that still exists in some form today, but I'm not 100% sure