2ndorderthought

Tarrifs wiped out a lot of farmers. Fertilizer shortages absolutely are a result of the Iran war.

Population growth can occur if billionaires lobby Republicans and make birth control illegal. Which is happening right now. Last week we were seeing some scary news about that.

There is a big difference between what we could be doing and what is happening. It's more profitable for the ultra wealthy that we can barely survive. I know it sounds abrasive, but it's a fact and there is a lot of evidence pointing to this. Googling Elon musk wants people to have more children is scary how many hits there are from different conversations. Bezos as well.

When is the last time you checked the statement you just made for truthfulness? All sources I've seen for years is decreased carbon emissions and stabilized output.

Check in with /r/localllama. There's 100gb vram set ups from complete ewaste to single 8gb GPU inference machines.depends on what you want and can afford

You can buy a used GPU for under 400 dollars if you already have a desktop and run qwen 3.6 a3b and for a majority of frontier tasks get by just fine. Why do you need to spend 10k on a laptop, we are swimming in ewaste.

I think the conclusion is flawed here? Sure qwen3.5 9b is nowhere near the sota models. It's 9b and was made a year ago? Everyone taking about local models is pumped about the models released in April this year. Qwen 3.6 27b and qwen 35b a3b if you have a sad GPU. Those are comparable to sota models, seriously.

So the cofounder of hugging face made a post about qwen 3.6 being atclaude level of performance for the lols?

When were you trying local models? The model releases from April 2026 are a serious change in performance.

The models op is using are from a year ago. The big breakthroughs happened in April this past month

The guy is running potato models!

Try qwen3.6.35 a3b not qwen3.5 9b. It's completely different.

Not in mine. I see a lot of people talking about Gemma on here but in my circles pretty much everyone else is running qwen.

Out of curiosity have you tried other small models? The e2b for me was unusable. Llama3.2 3b was better and that thing is a year old and I rarely use it now too.

The fun part is, they are making money and have way less to pay off despite 100s of billions in donations than the US companies do.

Time will tell. Depends on small model architecture trends and hardware availability. I wouldn't be surprised if something came slightly out of left field. Considering Taiwan is trapped into producing the same chips for the next 2 years, I wouldn't be surprised if a new player emerged.

I believe it. The us intentionally lacks accountability to prop up the already wealthy in almost all of its ventures. Which socializes losses and capitalizes gains. It's an economic model that guarantees deterioration and stagnation.

Dodging politics, the power structures in us industry need serious revamping.

They have already shown that their models match or excel over American ones in different cases. For cheaper too.

I disagree on the second point. I think most Americans don't prefer fewer competition, that's a bit antithetical to the free market.

I doubt the Chinese government cares as much about controlling a few companies as you think they do.

China has a few things going for it beyond research. They are mission driven, they actually have needs for this technology, their needs will forward their entire economy as they are the world's largest manufacturers. They are also huge exporters and have buckets of customer support for various languages.

China also has considerably stronger infrastructure for electricity, etc. even with an nividia embargo they are doing more than showing up.

I don't think it's a matter of who "wins". There is no winning. I think China stands to gain far more from LLMs than the US does, and they have proven they don't need the us to do it, even with he us trying to sabotage it's every move into the space. The game is already more or less over in my mind.

If anything I see LLMs as having a huge market in China, and now the US can't even sell it to them.

All I care about is, if I have to use this technology, let me run it locally to avoid the surveillance capitalism aspect. That seems to be the real reason the us has propped up it economy in anticipation for this technology. Yet it doesn't long term benefit the us nor me.

Wait you mean the open ai nonprofit company that doesn't offer open models and is now for profit isn't a good example of a trustworthy company? What?

I disagree. I think deepseek, qwen, and kimi earn a lot of trust open sourcing their models. While still profiting.

Effectively they are saying "yea don't crowd our data centers with small queries, go ahead and send your frontier questions to our frontier models. Oh btw those us models? You can run something about as good for free from us if you want hah." It's a power and marketing move. It's also insanely smart to keep up with it to remain sustainable as a brand. Especially given how small their investments into this are.

Look at anthropics growing pains. Deepseek has other hosts spreading their brand for free while they grow. Brilliant honestly. In my opinion it makes anthropic and openai look clueless on a lot of levels.

China is playing a different game here. To them this is commoditizing their compliment and building good will. The Chinese economy doesn't teter on the brink of collapse to deliver frontier grade LLMs. Nope, Alibaba just made qwen because it needs it. It needs efficient models. Similarly, in China they manufacture and automate so much more than the US ever could. LLMs to them are a topping not the whole meal like they are in the us.

Yea I do not recommend treating chromes prompt API as a good example of local LLMs. It's fine and stuff but it's really weak. 8b models from a year ago are better in some ways. And a lot of the recent model drops are meaningfully better.

That and it's lucrative for Android/chrome to have a text summarizer model embedded on your phone probably for government contracts and data exfil but we won't go through there.

Why would you want to try to support all users simple queries on your ai data center if they could run it on their own computer?

It builds good will also. it also shows research prowess.

For China it's different. They need to show Americans who don't trust them at all because of propaganda that they have no tricks up their sleeve. It also doesn't hurt when Chinese companies drop models for free people can run at home that are about as good as sonnet. Serious mic drop.

I mean if you read the op and the reply it's pretty funny how poorly thought out the reply is.

Steve bannon figured this out a while back. I was reading about it in the Epstein files in a discussion between the two of them. If they can keep the average person dizzy with bad news they can do more bad things easily. Cute trick

China has made huge efforts toward sustainable power. Google it.

The us on the other hand is well you know blowing up oil all over the world with military conflicts that are wars but aren't wars but are wars that are over but evolving and over and evolving. They are also rolling back green energy projects , fueling data centers with gas, etc.

John Deere is way ahead of ya

Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product

There isn't though. Our infrastructure cannot sustain the AI race. Food supplies are weakening. An ever increasing population is being encouraged by billionaires.

There could be! But there currently is not. Nor is there any plan for that to change.

Good luck farming. Even the people with the newest farming technology and multigenerational experience in their land are going bankrupt.

I would encourage you to re read the post you replied too and your own. Maybe 2 times. Both a little slowly.

I don't have anger against AI. I am a disgusted by the companies rolling it out.

UBI also won't fix things. A post ai world that the us tech ceos want us to imagine is not a utopia. The us manufacturers almost nothing on the world scale. Our biggest contributors to the world economy were things like farm goods(which are in peril), fuel (which most countries are trying to phase out for environmental and recent geopolitical issues), software which will be commoditized through AI. Anything the us can manufacture China can do better, cheaper, and faster. It's not been in our culture for decades, and our infrastructure is shoddy.and will be shoddier once data centers spin up and more wealth is concentrated to people who do not pay any taxes.

GenZ and those coming after have no chance at a sustainable life if the billionaires get what they are asking for. Also in a capitalist society asking them to sacrifice their lives for the good of others is hilarious. Especially if there is no foreseeable good to come after.

Out of curiosity. How can you explain to a Gen z fresh graduate with 50k in student loans, 5 dollar gasoline (and rising), no healthcare, housing prices at an all time high, and competing with their entire age group for the honor of holding multiple minimum wage jobs that are below the survivability wage that they should feel a collective sense of achievement? UBI isn't coming and we have multiple individuals who own measurable percentages of all of the worlds wealth. Those same people are investing heavily in automating all work these young people could hope to provide while waxing poetic about changing laws and owning media companies with cold hard cash.

It's not an anomalous sense of cynicism, hundreds of thousands of people are looking at their options and feeling hopeless. I'm glad I am not in that camp. The reason I'm not is because I was born sooner than they were. I don't blame them at all, it's looking a lot like the generation after them is cannon fodder if things trend the way they are now.