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2 months agoAnything that reduces the footprint of LLM’s is welcome, however…
- making LLM compute cheaper in datacentres won’t mean lower total power/cooling/space/water consumption, like adding lanes and traffic, it will just mean more usage as it gets cheaper (and a short-term bump in margins for the LLM owners)
- these are still highly dedicated chips that are always going to be bound up in the mega-scale datacentre deployments
- what happens if there is a paradigm shift in the exact compute architecture? Loads of junk servers and no applications able to make use of such a glut
- these do nothing to push LLMs out of the datacenter and into non-corporate hands, which is the only spot where we might see fewer privacy concerns, less corporate control etc
If we’re stuck with the current compute/corporate paradigms, at least alternatives nibling at the unhealthy dominance of nVidia and the cloud giants is some small benefit.
I think theres two aspects to it
The first feeds into the second, once your competitor moves against consumer interests, C suites are/perceive they are then under pressure to match peers, else fall behind.
Screwing over customers is baked into Capitalism, even more so with the current scale and concentration of a handful of business operating in a weak regulatory environment.