Would be nice if people published the prompts, thoughts and responses of the LLMs together with the code, in order to fight against these restrictions... Instead of just publishing the final result and talking vaguely about how they prompted the LLM in a Hacker news comment or Twitter thread

If LLMs are the new compilers those are the actual source code

Agreed with the need for transparency, but LLMs are anything but compilers. Compilers, by definition, produce semantically equivalent code from one language to another. If a tool's output lacks any defined semantics, it isn’t a compiler. Because how good is a "compiler" whose outputs are entirely undefined behavior?

> If a tool's output lacks any defined semantics, it isn’t a compiler.

Are you claiming that the natural language of the LLM output (e.g., English, Chinese) does not have semantics?? Someone should tell all the people cited at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_semantics_(natural_lang...

If you have to conflate programming language theory with linguistics to make an argument, it's not a good argument.

Because you can strawman all you want, but you can't change the fact that there's no well defined behavior regarding what happens when you instruct LLMs to make a program that calculates 2 + 2. What's stopping it from creating index.html with 5 in it as a response?

Yeah I'd love to see a cookie cutter project with all of the best practices of the boilerplate files

I think the issue is about our not believing what religious people themselves tell us about their reasoning

Hegseth reasons? I don’t see it.

At least the compiler was free

The point of doing local inference with huge models stored on an SSD is to do it free, even if slow.

You are just trading opex for capex. Local GPUs aren't free.

True, but this is not only a trade-off between opex and capex.

Local inference using open weight models provides guaranteed performance which will remain stable over time, and be available at any moment.

As many current HN threads show, depending on external AI inference providers is extremely risky, as their performance can be degraded unpredictably at any time or their prices can be raised at any time, equally unpredictably.

Being dependent on a subscription for your programming workflow is a huge bet, that you will gain more from a slightly higher quality of the proprietary models than you will lose if the service will be degraded in the future.

As the recent history has shown, many have already lost this bet.

I am not a gambler, so I have made my choice, which is local AI inference, using a variety of models depending on the task, i.e. both small models completely executable on relatively cheap GPUs (like the new Intel GPUs), medium models that need e.g. 128 GB on a CPU, and huge models that must be stored on fast SSDs (e.g. interleaved on multiple PCIe 5.0 SSDs).

Such a strategy is achievable with a modest capex, in the lower half of the 4-digit range.

I agree in principle that more democratic compute = better and third parties introduce additional risk that is outside of your control. That said I just don't see it working economically - either you have an underpowered GPU (4-digit range) at which point you have weak model, or slow model, probably both weak and slow. Or you have expensive GPU cluster, but at that point you also need to consider utilization as you are probably not streaming tokens out 24/7 and at that point TCO is just drastically more expensive for self hosting.

Personally I hope we see a third way - strong open weight models hosted by variety of companies actually competing on price and 9s of availability. That way capex expensive GPUs are fully utilized and users can rent intelligence as a commodity.

There is a very apt analogy to virtual server hosting - hosting vps/shared web is a commodity, it does not make financial sense for most users to host their website on their own physical servers in their basements.

Yeah, as soon as you don't need children to help with your work, they don't make much sense in the capitalist individualistic society. That women still choose to do it, honestly... I see as a triumph of the human spirit

It's worth pointing out that pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies also had low birth rates. They spaced their children out more, nursed longer, and didn't have as many kids overall.

Their population densities in pre-agricultural Europe were far lower than the agricultural societies that displaced them,

People compare themselves to their perceived neighborhood in time and space, not to peasants from 5 thousand years ago.

Who knows? Maybe they are. I’m not from Chad myself (and sounds like you aren’t either), so we’re really not in a position to speculate on that. I do know that it’s quite common for one culture to have values or think in ways that are unintuitive to another culture.

Yeah, I grew up poor in the 3rd world (not quite Chad level though) and even the upper class culture of my own country was almost alien for us and vice versa... Imagine the 1st world.

Those who have little also have little to lose, which reshapes dynamics.

Pretty sure the poor women in Chad with no access to healthcare and quality nutrition have quite a bit to lose, and they don't have a choice not to risk it.

Who do you think is their perceived neighborhood in time and space?

(edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly

Funny how you don't realize you fit perfectly into the description of one of the groups that know exactly what is going on.

What do you mean?

That's not how it works. Two bodies are in thermal equilibrium if there's no heat transfer between them: that's the zeroth law of thermodynamics. If you're colder than 2.73K in deep space, you will absorb the heat from the Cosmic Microwave Background. If you're hotter, you will irradiate heat away. So it does have a temperature.

Does this mean that if Earth stays a fixed distance from the sun then its equilibrium temperature is fixed? I remember people saying things like that the albedo of the ice caps affected the Earth's temperature.

Honestly back when I was still in college one and a half decade ago, it was quite clear the whole Nvidia-only ML and AI libraries weren't a good idea

You still need to compile when those libraries are not pre compiled.