I sit somewhere in the middle on this. I see a strong use case for LLMs but I don't fully trust them. Both in terms of output quality, and more critically, who controls the input.

The input side worries me more. LLMs have a potential for data farming on a scale beyond anything we've previously seen. Everything you share is in most cases logged, retained, and used. The T&Cs are long; almost no one reads them.

Several years ago I wrote a fairly detailed analysis predicting that LLMs would eventually "break free" of the monopoly held by a small number of well-capitalised organisations. In the early days, the compute and CapEx required to train and serve these models was enormous. Only the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google backed by billions in VC could afford it. [1]

But hardware improves. Algorithmic efficiency improves. What required a data centre in 2021 requires an enthusiast's desk in 2025.

The only guardrails that currently exist are those imposed by gatekeepers who have the capital. As open-source compute catches up, those guardrails become increasingly meaningless.

This matters for two reasons. The first is access, ordinary people can now use genuinely powerful AI without surrendering their data to a corporation. Tools like LM Studio let you run models comparable to GPT-4 locally, on consumer hardware, with no data leaving your machine and no corporate filters applied.

The second is more unsettling. Those guardrails only exist because the companies control more compute than anyone else. Once equivalent capability is available open-source - and we're clearly there now, with models like Llama and Mistral reaching near-parity with first-gen frontier models [2] [3] - they simply don't apply. Anyone can remove or ignore them.

The time delay between a frontier model dropping and an open-source equivalent reaching normies has gone from years to months, and it's still shrinking. [4]

I highly suspect within the next year or two, Open Source compute capacity will maybe even outnumber what the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic can attain, even with hundreds of billions of CapEx.

Anthropic's decision not to release the weights of their most capable model, reportedly because it's considered too powerful to release openly [5] shows the bind perfectly. Release it and lose control entirely. Withhold it and the open-source community replicates it within a year regardless.

Neither path leads somewhere obviously safe. The genie is out of the bottle.

@MentORPHEUS That is simply hilarious. What a fool!

There is no honour in whores these days! poor bloke pays $25K to indulge his perversion and the whore sells him out.

My take is that people really need to watch what they get into. No one is born wanting to do that. He is obviously attracted to women, he just got into kinky forbidden stuff, got off on it and just supersized.

As a right wing pretty traditional guy I think "Oh dear what a pity to do that to yourself" I think that when people get too puritan, you increase the risk of people craving to dip their noses in dirt. To me its self evident that being a bender is to be discouraged. If you make it utterly forbidden you just cause misery. It should simply be forbidden to promote being a bender and it should be regarded as unmanly and ridiculous. That is enough to reduce the risk of this sort of thing.

You will still get it in preachers' and politicians' families because these guys are fake holier than thou con artists who act a role and fear seeing it crumble. This makes smut amazingly forbidden and attractive to them but everyone else will be OK.

Oh I do love to see the holier than thou turn out to be benders or whore addicts or whatever!