I guess… I am still very skeptical the profit margin even if some people do end up paying for the storage. We’re talking about petabytes on petabytes of data… How many people need to pay a cloud subscription fee to pay for the overhead of the servers?

Idk. This is super suss to me but again, I am clearly not the target market for this service so maybe I don’t have a firm grasp of the landscape.

It cannot be that profitable to have just a bunch of random data on their servers. I have so much junk and random bullshit on my drives, it would take a week of labor just to clean my shit well enough to use it for AI training and as soon as I got any notification about cloud space being full i’d turn syncing off - i sure as hell wouldn’t fork over any money for a subscription. This is such a big bridge to burn, and the server overhead must be massive… I just don’t understand how they could possibly think this is a good business decision.

Idk, maybe i’m just too deep into privacy/FOSS/selfhosting headspace to see things clearly from the normal-consumer standpoint but I just do not understand this. I really wish someone would leek an internal conversation at one of these companies that explains the big-picture strategy with this move.

Lmao

Yup, I ended up frankensteining a nas from various craigslist parts (i actually found a low-power business-class server motherboard that has worked out well for the purpose). Had to get a SAS HBA card and a couple SFF-8087 cables to do the job right, and I grabbed an old gaming case from the 2010’s to hold it all, but it was relatively seamless. I had one of the drives go out already, but luckily I had it in a raid configuration with parity so it was just a matter of swapping out the drives and rebuilding.

It’s been fun and rewarding, for sure! I’m glad I didn’t sell them like these other dweebs told me to lol

I’m biased but I think everyone should do this. You can basically find the hardware you’d need out of a dumpster, and then you can slowly build your library from there.

If you find torrenting to be distasteful, you can get a cheap USB DVD reader and rip dvds instead.

It’s still technically considered infringement, but at least it’s completely private.

I honestly don’t know why you wouldn’t just do jellyfin, unless you’re limited by your hardware and kodi somehow has less overhead?

They’re both free I guess. You can try them on and see how well they serve tour use case

Maybe in a particular light, but I’m personally of the opinion that intellectual property and patent law is antithetical to good social policy… so idk. Ideally we’d all benefit from the knowledge and ingenuity of all mankind but in a capitalist economic world-view there’s no place for egalitarianism so…

If they can take the same tech and make it better/produce it cheaper then I think that’s great, go nuts.

But that’s obviously just me.

People shit on China all the goddamn time here but they’ve done a prolific job becoming the tech and manufacturing leader in a handful of decades.

Blame it on tech espionage if you want but there’s a reason the US is deadset on targeting Chinese imports, and it’s hardly for any of the security reasons they might be tempted to claim it to be. The US is about to be left behind and it’s noones fault but our own.

This has to be a copypasta

Is mockery not an insult? I’m learning so much today

“i feel like you’re being combative, you’re not engaging with what I’m saying. Makes me think you’re just here to be an asshole”

[Doesn’t engage the content, lobs insults, ‘he did it first’]

“I can see why you might have been banned”

“What do you mean I’m being totally reasonable?!”

There’s something about this format that just feels good, ya know? Like I’m invisible to criticism. I wonder why more people don’t use it

“I get banned for no reason”

Lol yea I can see that

Reminds me of this scene in the big short:

Rabbi Scene

Yea, I’m with ya. Some people interpreted this as marketing hype, and while I agree with them that mysticism around AI is driven by this kind of reporting I think there’s very much legitimacy to the uncertainty of the field at present.

If everyone understood it as experimental I think it would be a lot more bearable.

Knowing what you’ve made is different to understanding what it does.

Agree, but also - understanding what it does is different to understanding how it does it.

It is not a misrepresentation to say ‘we have no way of observing how this particular arrangement of ML nodes respond to a specific input that is different to another arrangement’ - the best we can do is probe the network like we do with neuron clusters and see what each part does under different stimuli. That uncertainty is meaningful, because without having a way to understand how small changes to the structure result in apparently very large differences in output we’re basically just groping around in the dark. We can observe differences in the outputs of two different models but we can’t meaningfully see the node activity in any way that makes sense or is helpful. The things we don’t know about LLM’s are some of the same things we don’t know about neuro-biology, and just as significant to remedying dysfunctions and limits to both.

The fear is that even if we believe what we’ve made thus far is an inert but elaborate rube goldberg machine (that’s prone to abuse and outright fabrication) that looks like ‘intelligence’, we still don’t know if:

• what we think intelligence looks like is what it would look like in an artificial recreation
• changes we make to its makeup might accidentally stumble into something more significant than we intend

It’s frustrating that this field is getting so much more attention and resources than I think it warrants, and the reason it’s getting so much attention in a capitalist system is honestly enraging. But it doesn’t make the field any less intriguing, and I wish all discussions of it didn’t immediately get dismissed as overhyped techbro garbage.

Maybe a less challenging way of looking at it would be:

We are surprised at how much of subjective human intuition can be replicated using simple predictive algorithms

instead of

We don’t know how this model learned to code

Either way, the technique is yielding much better results than what could have been reasonably expected at the outset.

an acknowledgement of how relatively uncomplicated their structure is compared to the complexity of its output.

The interesting part is that this dated tech is producing such good results now that we throw our modern hardware at it.

That’s exactly what I mean.

Look, I get that we all are very skeptical and cynical about the usefulness and ethics of AI, but can we stop with the reactive headlines?

Saying we know how AI works because it’s ‘just predicting the next word’ is like saying I know how nuclear energy works because it’s ‘just a hot stick of metal in a boiler’

Researchers who work on transformer models understand how the algorithm works, but they don’t yet know how their simple programs can generalize as much as they do. That’s not marketing hype, that’s just an acknowledgement of how relatively uncomplicated their structure is compared to the complexity of its output.

I hate that we can’t just be mildly curious about ai, rather than either extremely excited or extremely cynical.

Hey if you find value in paying a subscription go nuts, I won’t throw shade

but i used spotify for almost 15 years. Averaged out to $8 a month that’s more than $1400, and how much of that music do you think I own?

You can do what you want with your money but I’m not paying another dime to subscription streamers. For discovery there’s still radio and youtube and ad-supported streamers, and I still find new artists at music festivals and local venue concerts all the time.

Spotify is a solution in search of a problem.