I don’t understand these “That’s just how the world is. Shame on you for discussing it” comments. I think it is very much worth discussing this, even if the conclusion of the discussion is that it’s not worth changing after all.

You point out similar dynamics on Reddit, but it’s obviously not exactly the same. The design of Reddit is such that there is a much stronger tendency for main communities to arise. By contrast, lots of smaller communities on Lemmy look like ghost towns, where they would be much healthier if they combined numbers. “You’re free to do whatever” doesn’t address the systemic issue.

That said, I don’t think this is obvious either way. There are tons of benefits to the current system too. That’s why it’s worth coming back to this topic every once in a while. If these sorts of nitty gritty design discussions bore you, why are you on this community?

There are positive economic externalities to public everything availability. We don’t live in this kind of world though, someone will always try to claim a larger share due to human nature.

Saying “Things are inevitably bad because of human nature” is just very weird, since we obviously do have good policies and we try to solve other problems like crime and poverty. It sounds like you already agree that this is good policy? You’re just saying it’s not politically feasible? OK, sure, we probably don’t disagree then.

That being said, I’m not really interested in arguing about the political feasibility (or lack thereof) of having every resource being public.

I am obviously NOT arguing that every resource should be public. This discussion is about AI, which was publicly funded, trained on public data, and is backed by public research. This sleight of hand to make my position sound extreme is, frankly, intellectually dishonest.

there’s also a cost people pay to use these LLMs.

OK, keep the premium subscription going then.

What you’re missing though is that there is an extreme shortage of components.

There’s a shortage, but it’s not “extreme”. ChatGPT is running fine. I can use it anytime I want instantly. You’d be laughed out of the room if you told AI researchers that ChatGPT can’t scale because we’re running out of GPUS. You seem to be looking for reasons to be against this, but these reasons don’t make sense to me, especially since this particular problem would exist whether it’s publicly owned or privately owned.

No, I am not ignoring that. I specifically said:

Even if costs goes up to several tens of million a day for access for the whole world that’s incredibly affordable.

With how many people are already using AI, it’s frankly mind boggling that they’re only losing $700k a day.

You’re also ignoring the fact that costs don’t scale proportionally with usage. Infrastructure and labor can be amortized over a greater user base. And these services will get cheaper to run per capita as time goes on and technology improves.

Finally, there are positive economic externalities to public AI availability. Imagine the improvements to the economy, education and health if everyone in the world had free access to high quality AI in their native language, no matter how poor or how remote. Some things, like schools, roads and healthcare, are not ideally provisioned under a free market. AI is looking to be another.

Less than a million dollars a day for everyone who wants to in the whole world to use AI right now? That’s peanuts. A single city bus costs $5-800k to buy. Even if costs goes up to several tens of million a day for access for the whole world that’s incredibly affordable.

It’s crazy that something so useful and so cheap to run can’t be sustained in the current system. This seems like an argument against a market based solution to AI.

Too much is made of the shrinking user base. I’m sure they’ll come back with a vengeance come the start of the school year in the northern hemisphere.

Also, maybe a tool like this shouldn’t be privately funded? Most of the technology is based on university funded research we all paid for. mRNA vaccine research was similarly funded with public money in mostly universities, and now we have to pay some private company to sell it back to us. How is that efficient? AI should be common property.

What is “naturally”? I heard about Lemmy through reddit during the exodus. Was that unnatural?

People “all already know about Apple computers”, but they keep reminding us anyways! It seems to work. I think there are a lot of people who have been meaning to check out Lemmy, and could use a reminder. Or people who came and left before it was as worth staying.