this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
22 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1205 readers
292 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So apparently Mozilla has decided to jump on the bandwagon and add a roided Clippy to Firefox.
I’m conflicted about this. On the one hand, the way they present it, accessibility does seem to be one of the very few non-shitty uses of LLMs I can think of, plus it’s not cloud-based. On the other hand, it’s still throwing resources onto a problem that can and should be solved elsewhere.
At least they acknowledge the resource issue and claim that their small model is more environmentally friendly and carbon-efficient, but I can’t verify this and remain skeptical by default until someone can independently confirm it.
As a rough rule of thumb, if it's running locally on a CPU with acceptable performance, the environmental impact is going to be minimal, or at least within socially acceptable bounds.
This elides whatever resources were used in training/development. Which in the cases of ML models is quite often not minimal. Even the diy things you can train yourself make a significant dent. And there’s likely to be an ongoing cost of this too, because of updates