[CamperBob2]

Ultimately, LLMs serve only the continued one-way transfer of wealth in favor of an insatiably greedy minority

Including the ones I can run on my own PC at home? I couldn't do that before. Maybe I'm the greedy minority, but I'm stronger and (at least intellectually) wealthier than I was before any of this started happening.

Qwen 3.5, which dropped yesterday, is a genuine GPT 5-class model. Even the ones released by US labs such as OpenAI and Allen AI are legitimate popular resources in their own right. You seem to feel disempowered, while I feel the opposite.

[goku12]

Yes, even the ones you can run on your system. They're no different from proprietary OS and software you used to run on your system, whose design in which you had no say whatsoever. These 'free to run' models are hardly open source. You don't have the data that was used to train them. It's not just about the legality of those data. The dataset chosen may have extreme bias that you can never eliminate satisfactorily from a trained model.

As if that wasn't bad enough, these models cannot be trained on your regular home computer. But instead of striving to improve the energy efficiency of these models, those big corporations build and run massive gas guzzling data centers to train them. They ruin the quality of life for the neighbors through pollution, water depletion and electricity price rise. It also disproportionately affects the poor in the world by reducing supply of essential computing components like RAM (which are needed for medical devices, utility and manufacturing installations and every other aspect of modern life), and by aggravating the climate crisis, whose victims are the poorest.

They don't give you those models out of the goodness of their hearts. Those are just advertisements and trial pieces for their premium services. They also peddle the agenda of its creators. So yes, those models are empowering only in a very narrow sense without any foresight. They are still the money making engines for the rich that subject you to their benevolence, whims and fancies.

[atomic128]

    Once men turned their thinking over to machines
    in the hope that this would set them free.

    But that only permitted other men with machines
    to enslave them.

    ...

    Thou shalt not make a machine in the
    likeness of a human mind.

    -- Frank Herbert, Dune

[CamperBob2]

Eh, we already have a name for the concept of living by plausible-sounding works of fiction: religion.

Yet another post who misses (or chooses to overlook) my point: this stuff is running on my machine. "Seizing the means of production" means going into my back room and pulling a computer out of a rack.

[atomic128]

Alibaba (China) thinks for you. They control you, to some extent.

Wikipedia: "Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. Many Qwen variants are distributed as open‑weight models under the Apache‑2.0 license, while others are served through Alibaba Cloud. Their models are sometimes described as open source, but the training code has not been released nor has the training data been documented, and they do not meet the terms of either the Open Source AI Definition or the Model Openness Framework from the Linux Foundation."

[CamperBob2]

Oh, no

The Linux Foundation is coming for me

Well, anyway, where were we

[goku12]

This isn't a hypothetical or fictional problem. This is a well-known and well-warned problem that we already see in action. How many pro-China biases have the Chinese models show? How often does Groq do whatever it wants? (Including calling itself Mecha-Hitler and undressing people, including minors for fun!) How many times have nearly every model taken pro-oligarch stances (eg: refusing to draw Mickey Mouse even after its copyright expired.) How many people, including kids were driven to suicide by some of the models?

There is no end to the examples of how it harms ordinary people. And yet, you decide to just hand wave away those concerns as if those don't exist for you or the others. There is no debate when all you do is ignore the counter arguments. It's like those science deniers who stick to their beliefs, no matter how much evidence is presented.

[CamperBob2]

Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in the Chinese models only to the extent that their weights are available. I hope DeepSeek 4 sees the light of day on HuggingFace, but a lot of wealthy peoples' oxen are being gored and I suspect that it'll be the last we get if it is released at all.

If I want to see Mickey Mouse or any number of copyrighted Hollywood figures, Z-Image Turbo and HunyuanImage-3 will gladly oblige. The Chinese models may be biased to deny Taiwanese self-rule, and they may change the subject when you ask about the Tiananmen Square massacre... but they do work, and as of the Qwen 3.5 release they work well enough to be used by people at home who don't have a rack of H200s in the basement.

The most important thing about the Chinese models is that they will still be there on my hard drive 20 years from now. No additional censorship beyond what they shipped with, which (being a Westerner) is largely in areas I don't care about. No rug pulls, unwanted updates, usage limits, or price increases. No ablation of whatever subjects are deemed politically incorrect in the future. No ads. No spying. No realignment with the sayings of Chairman Musk.

As for suicide, that is a silly mediagenic exercise in blaming inanimate tools for the actions of mentally-ill people and the inaction of negligent parents. I don't consider it a valid or relevant counterargument, so yes, I'm going to hand-wave away your concerns in that area.