Furores are fermenting in the forums

Both Ubuntu and Fedora have made it official: support is coming soon for running local generative AI instances.

An epic and still-growing thread in the Fedora forums states one of the goals for the next version: the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Objective. It is causing some discontent, and at least one Fedora contributor, SUSE’s Fernando Mancera, has resigned.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    I mean, it sounds like a tool they occasionally find useful and don’t use otherwise. I’m not sure how “occasionally use a tool good enough for my purposes” is a waste. Whether it’s the most efficient application of that electricity is a different question, but without knowing their particular scenarios I can’t really compare whether other tools use less electricity for the same purpose.

    (Yes, of course, “just do it all in your brain” is even more efficient, but if that’s an argument against utilities, you probably shouldn’t waste electricity on Lemmy either)

      • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        If I have a tool that consumes resources whether I use it or not

        They were talking about a locally hosted LLM, weren’t they? In that case, I’d be pretty confident in saying it eats resources if and when you use it, not all the time.

          • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Mind: I’m not the person running the local model.

            but if there are dramatically more efficient tools that cover the same needs, you could be way more efficient (less wasteful) than you are

            I did say that the efficiency would be a different question neither of us can answer in this case, but I fully agree with you. I merely pointed out that a local model wouldn’t be a permanent waste of electricity.

            occupying (wasting) space

            That’s relative to how much space you have. I also have games on my disk that I haven’t played in a while, so they’re more or less wasted space. But they’re not particularly large, so I can spare a few GB for them, and if I do want to play them, I can jump in spontaneously.

            • CheerfulPassionFruit@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              Well I’m usually using these models to prettify matlab figures, it’s something that I can do but would take me a while, using an llm it takes a minute or two and gives a good enough result. The llms regression to the mean is also exactly what I want. I want a legible figure. I’d say that the electricity that the llm uses is less than the beefy consumed by me burning food to actually write the thing myself.