> LLM as the main weapon

LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS.

I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation.

Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet.

There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.

Edit: I guess the conclusion I come to is that LLM's are good for 'getting things done', but the context in which they are operating is one where the balance of power is heavily tilted towards capital, and open source is perhaps less interesting to participate in if the machines are just going to slurp it up and people don't have to respect the license or even acknowledge your work.

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ordu 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source

Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. But I don't think that fighting for copyright now can bring any benefits for FOSS. GNU should bring Stallman back and see whether he can come with any new ideas and a new strategy. Alternatively they could try without Stallman. But the point is: they should stop and think again. Maybe they will find a way forward, maybe they won't but it means that either they could continue their fight for a freedom meaningfully, or they could just stop fighting and find some other things to do. Both options are better then fighting for copyright.

> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.

I want a clarify this statement a bit. The thing with LLM relying on work of others are not against GPU philosophy as I understand it: algorithms have to be free. Nothing wrong with training LLMs on them or on programs implementing them. Nothing wrong with using these LLMs to write new (free) programs. What is wrong are corporations reaping all the benefits now and locking down new algorithms later.

I think it is important, because copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical), but not for GNU.

	▲	balamatom 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. IMO the primary significant trend in AI. Doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Means the AI is working, I guess. >GNU should bring Stallman back ... Alternatively they could try without Stallman. Leave Britney alone >:( >copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical) I've busted out "intellectual property is a crime against humanity" at layfolk to see if that shortcuts through that entire little politico-philosophical minefield. They emote the requisite mild shock when such things as crimes against humanity are mentioned; as well as at someone making such a radical statement which seems to come from no familiar species of echo chamber; and then a moment later they begin to very much look like they see where I'm coming from.

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zozbot234 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones

There are near-SOTA LLM's available under permissive licenses. Even running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware unless you insist on realtime use.

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thenewnewguy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL? If some company steals your GPLed code and doesn't follow the license, you will have to sue them and somebody will have to pay the lawyers.

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davidw an hour ago | parent [-]

> Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL?

It's nowhere near the order of magnitude of the kind of spending they're sinking into LLM's. The FSF and other groups were reasonably successful at enforcing the GPL, operating on a budget 1000's of times smaller than that of AI companies.

	▲	cloverich an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Right but LLM companies are building frontier models with frontier talent while trying to sock up demand with a loss leader strategy, on top of an historic infrastructure build out. Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org (compared to an individual). IMO the proposition is little fishy, but its not totally without merit and imo deserves investigation. If we are all worried about our jobs, even via building custom for sale software, there is likely something there that may obviate the need at least for end user applications. Again, im deeply skeptical, but it is interesting.

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jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.

This was already the case and it just got worse, not better.

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davidw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

At a certain point, I think we had reached a kind of equilibrium where some corporations were decent open source citizens. They understood that they could open source things like infrastructure or libraries and keep their 'crown jewels' closed. And while Stallman types might not have been happy with that, it seemed to work out for people.

Now they've just hoovered up all the free stuff into machines that can mix it up enough to spit it out in a way that doesn't even require attribution, and you have to pay to use their machine.

	▲	jacquesm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		AI essentially gatekeeps all of open source to companies to pluck from to their hearts content. And individual contributors using these tools and freely mixing it with their own - usual minor - contributions are another step of whitewashing because they're definitely not going to own up to writing only 5% of the stuff they got paid for. Before we had RedHat and Ubuntu, who at least were contributing back, now we have Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI who are racing to lock the barn door around their new captive sheep. It's just a massive IP laundromat.