How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?

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BugsJustFindMe 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Library funding is a political stance that has only imaginary connection to whether people pay to ask things of ChatGPT. People can pay to talk to an AI and also government can fund libraries.

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bakugo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you believe it makes sense for the government to fund libraries that almost nobody uses because they'd rather ask ChatGPT?

	▲	indigo945 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		People are already not using libraries because they'd rather rot their brains on TikTok than read a book. (Also, for information lookup, the internet and search engines exist, and have for a while now.) This has no actual causal relation.

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TFNA 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some people might have to pay a large amount of money to ask a commercial LLM, but advances in this space mean that if I have the data myself on my own computer, or can download it from a shadow library, I might eventually be able to ask everything locally for free.

> while the library itself has lost funding

Libraries are inherent parts of universities. While their precise role evolves, do you think that they will just be done away with? Already a substantial amount of scholarship in disciplines other than my own has moved online (legally), and the library is still there.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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spoaceman7777 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Free, downloadable AI models have consistently caught up to ChatGPT within 3 months, for almost a year now.

I highly encourage you to go and update your priors.

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roygbiv2 an hour ago | parent [-]

And how much does the hardware cost to run said models?

	▲	fragmede 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		How good do you want it to be? For a close to ChatGPT today (April, 2026), you're still looking at a system with 7xH200+chassis, which will run you $300, or a GB200 NV72, which is $2-3 million. OTOH, a Qwen3.6 quantized model can be run on $10,000 (high end Mac) or $1,000 (Mac mini) worth of hardware. Even a Pixel 10 Pro cellphone ($1,000) can run useful models locally.
	▲	dboreham 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can run them slowly on any machine that has enough memory.

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woctordho 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A digital library needs almost no funding. With today's decentralized networking infrastructure such as BitTorrent and IPFS I bet it just exists forever.

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x-complexity 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> A digital library needs almost no funding.

Clarification:

To maintain the library still requires resources & effort to do so. It only appears to need no funding because the donators of said (disk space / bandwidth / dev effort) are subsidizing it in aid of a goal they believe in (i.e. the church model).

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tardedmeme 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How much of Anna's Archive are you seeding?

	▲	woctordho 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		About 4 TB at hand

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protocolture 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How about the idea that one day you might be paying a subscription to use a service while non sequitur.

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locknitpicker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?

There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?