I remain hopeful that some day someone will train an LLM which is tolerable to people who take this stance (which I respect, much like I respect food vegetarians despite not being one myself).

I've been tracking models trained entirely on out-of-copyright data, for example. I've not yet seen one of those which appears generally useful and didn't chuck in a scrape of the web or get fine-tuned on examples generated by a non-vegetarian model.

Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

Why do I care? This post is a great example. If you're a professor of computer science I really want you to be able to tinker with this fascinating class of models without violating your principles.

UPDATE: Huh, speaking of potentially vegetarian models, I just saw https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie on the HN homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927903

I've explored I different out-of-copyright trained model Mr Chatterbox before but found it to have been mildly corrupted through the help of synthetic conversation pairs from Haiku and GPT-4o-mini - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/30/mr-chatterbox/

Talkie isn't entirely pure either though: "Finally, we did another round of supervised fine-tuning, this time on rejection-sampled multi-turn synthetic chats between Claude Opus 4.6 and talkie, to smooth out persistent rough edges in its conversational abilities."

I don't get why it's so hard for you and others in this comment section to understand why people hate AI so much because it's not just the theft and environmental destruction. A college professor, especially one at a liberal arts school, is obviously not going to like something that enables you to outsource your thinking and steals your agency. I think that's a perfectly valid viewpoint; maybe talk to someone without STEM-brain who lives outside of SF for once.

> Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

I suspect that even if you reduced the cost of training or any other real world metric, the goalposts would immediately move. It seems to me that it has never been about those things, but simply about the feeling of superiority one can attain by eschewing something seen as trending.