Before Stable Diffusion democratized image generation, Very Serious People across the industry claimed that unless they and their friends exercised strict control over the kinds of images people generated using AI, society would collapse, the sky would fall, and it would all be over. After that, the public gained access to diffusion models for imagine generation, and the sky did not in fact fall. These prognosticators of doom are wearing egg on their faces.
Likewise, today, the intelligentsia is predicting DOOM! DOOM I SAY! if LLMs become available outside the close supervision (and censorship control) of San Francisco trust and safety teams.
Democratizing LLMs will further delegitimize claims that some central authority needs to control this new technology. This is great! When the printing press came out, it took a hundred years to democratize it. It'll take us ten months!
The single biggest benefit of projects like llama.cpp is annihilating claims on the past of gatekeepers that for our own safety we need to let them control how we use math.
Not math. The magical sauce is not math, it's the raw text used to train the model. Language data has this property that it can take a raw initialised neural net and turn it into LLaMA and chatGPT.
The same language data turns babies into modern empowered adults instead of cave men or worse. We're not that smart without language. A single human can't rediscover it, it is a self replicating system evolving in parallel with us.
I wouldn't order figures as Elon Musk or Peter Thiel as intelligentsia. They are just greedy operators for the MIC.
Stable Diffusion kicked off a wave of interest which hasn't stopped building yet - albeit massively accelerated by ChatGPT's release in November.
What do you even mean!
It is being used right now on all sorts of creative industries for things like ui/Ux generation, concept art, vfx production etc
I myself use it for concepting and color correction on video games pipeline production
I'm not so sure this is true
I can see fake accounts, phishing and disinformation at a whole new scale, too.