Why do people do this immediately reversed denial? 'I staunchly oppose this, as all right-thinking people must, buuut here's how I use it.'

I don't play these games. I have no problem with the next-word-guesser that can code in assembly, or the image denoiser that can render live-action video. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the software, or how it was made. The part where these companies spy on everyone can fuck right off, but it's obviously not a requisite component. Nor are the infinite-growth-forever datacenter plans.

Last year some guy recreated ChatGPT 2 for twenty bucks of AWS time. The original cost more like a million dollars. The drop isn't because computers got a thousand times faster. Immense effort has been spent optimizing how models are designed and trained. They still have to do a thing one trillion times, but we could've got here without the anti-competitive hyper-scaling. The obvious future is in local models, which means small models, because the big boys have fucked over the memory market. Stuff like Qwen 3.8 27B and MiniMax H3 are proof that a BluRay disc worth of linear algebra is sufficient to perform witchcraft. Goofy 4-bit and trinary encodings make that more like a DVD9.

We don't know where the floor is. Laptop-scale LLMs are closing the gap on mainframe giants, either because the whole format is plateauing, or because immense effort has revealed optimal ways to zero out superfluous noise. The inevitable result is still Fable or whatever becoming a couple gigs of system files that spin up your video card fans to help you debug your shell scripts. Or build a bomb. It's all the same to the robot.