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The difference between generative AI and math is that math gives everybody the same answer every time.
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The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
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This was clarifying? It reads like a sleepy undergrad's first attempt, complete with the constant meandering to satisfy some word count. The irony is a SOTA AI could make this person's case far more succinctly and convincingly. You really need to hold yourself (and the people you read) to a higher standard.

This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.

I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?

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To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?

I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.

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> If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?

No. Obviously, what you do on your PC is inconsequential to the rest of society. But despite this, AI and its consequences in big tech have become so thoroughly linked because the entities that develop and profit off of AI use are so big and influential over the rest of us. The hobbyist space isn't what people even think about.

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Seems more like a materialist religious project to me.
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It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.
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It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models.

I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)

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Everything is fundamentally energy. If you hate something you're just hating energy.
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"AI" is a marketing term, LLMs and Difusion Models are math.
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