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Comment by jart | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say it but that's like a boomer saying they never felt the need to buy a computer, because they've never wished their pen and paper goes faster. Or a UNIX greybeard saying they don't need a Mac since they don't think its GUI would make their terminal go any faster. If you've hit a point in your life where you're no longer keeping up with the latest technological developments like AI, then of course you don't need to upgrade. A Macbook M1 can't run half the stuff posted on Hugging Face these days. Even my 128gb Mac Studio isn't nearly enough.

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> If you've hit a point in your life where you're no longer keeping up with the latest technological developments like AI, then of course you don't need to upgrade.

That's me, I don't give a shit about AI, video editing, modern gaming or Kubernetes. That newest and heaviest piece of software I care about is VSCode. So I think you're absolutely correct. Most things new since Docker and VSCode has not contributed massively to how I work and most of the things I do could be done just fine 8-10 years ago.

I think the difference is that AI is a very narrow niche/hobby at the moment. Of course if you're in that niche having more horsepower is critical. But your boomer/greybeard comparisons fall flat because they're generally about age or being set in your ways. I don't think "not being into AI image generation" is (currently) about being stuck in your ways.

To me it's more like 3d printing as a niche/hobby.

on ai being a niche/hobby at the moment... feels like something a unix greybeard would say about guis in the late 70s...

Or what a prokaryote would say about eukaryotes.

Seems like we've reached the "AI bro" phase...

Using the term "bro" assumes that all AI supporters are men. This erases the fact that many women and nonbinary people are also passionate about AI technology and are contributing to its development. By using "AI bro" as an insult, you are essentially saying that women and nonbinary people are not welcome in the AI community and that our contributions don't matter. https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/13zhpa7/the_misogyn...

Huh?

How old are you?

"Bro" has been gender neutral for over a decade. Males and females under the age of 25 call each other "bro" all the time.

Is there an alternative term you would prefer people to use when referring to a pattern of behavior perceived as a combination of being too excited about AI and being unaware (perhaps willfully) that other people can be reasonably be much less interested in the hype? Because that argument could definitely benefit from being immune to deflections based on accusations of sexism.

When I see that someone is excited about something, I believe in encouraging them. If you're looking for a more polite word to disparage people who love and are optimistic about something new, then you're overlooking what that says about your character. Also AI isn't just another fad like NFTs and web3. This is it. This is the big one.

> Also AI isn't just another fad like NFTs and web3. This is it. This is the big one.

That's thoroughly unconvincing. That kind of talk is exactly what so many people are tired of hearing. Especially if it's coming from technically-minded people who don't have any reason to be talking like PR drones.

What makes you think I care about convincing you? These days every shot caller on earth is scrambling to get piece of AI. Either by investing in it or fighting it. You come across as someone who wants to hate on AI. Haters aren't even players. They're NPCs.

You know, getting upset about being called an AI bro rings a lot more hollow if you go around calling people NPCs.

So people who aren't obsessed with AI to your liking are:

- boomer luddites

- primitive single-celled organisms

- NPCs

And even people who are enthusiastic about AI but aren't fanatical about running it locally get scorn from you.

I can understand and forgive some amount of confirmation bias leading you to overestimate the importance and popularity of what you work on, but the steady stream of broad insults at anyone who even slightly disagrees with you is dismaying. That kind of behavior is wildly inappropriate for this forum. Please stop.

I get that you're probably joking, but - if I use Claude / ChatGPT o1 in my editor and browser, on an M1 Pro - what exactly am I missing by not running e.g. HF models locally? Am I still the greybeard without realising?

It's like asking what you're missing by not using Linux if you're using Windows.

Privacy? Lots of companies do not allow using public chatbots for anything proprietary.

Playing with them locally? Yes, of course it's a niche hobby. The people doing stuff with them that's not either playing with them or developing not just an "AI" product, but a specific sort of AI product, are just using ChatGPT or some other prepackaged thing that either doesn't run locally, or does, but is sized to fit on ordinary hardware.

< 1% of all engagement with a category thing is niche/hobby, yes.

It's something a regular person would say to a Unix greybeard, which in and of itself was always and still is a very niche hobby.

That’s interesting because I would’ve thought having strong local compute was the old way of thinking. I run huge jobs that consume very large amounts of compute. But the machines doing the work aren’t even in the same state I’m in. Then again maybe I’m even older as I’m basically on the terminal server / mainframe compute model. :)

I work with AI models all day every day, keep up with everything, love frontier tech, I love and breathe LLMs. And I, like OP, haven't seen the need to upgrade from the M1 MBP because it runs the small 1-7B models just fine, and anything bigger I want on some GPU instance anyway, or I want a frontier model which wouldn't run on the newest and biggest MBP. So it's not just us Boomers hating on new stuff, the M series MacBooks are just really good.

I fully support using Macbooks as a thin client into a better computer. So long as it's your computer.

> A Macbook M1 can't run half the stuff posted on Hugging Face these days.

Example?

LLaMA 3.1 405B

Given that models are only going to get larger, and the sheer amount of compute required, I think the endgame here is dedicated "inference boxes" that actual user-facing devices call into. There are already a couple of home appliances like these - NAS, home automation servers - which have some intersecting requirements (e.g. storage for NAS) - so maybe we just need to resurrect the "home server" category.

I agree, and if you want to have the opportunity to build such a product, then you need a computer whose specs today are what a home server would have in four years. If you want to build the future you have to live in the future. I'm proud to make stuff most people can't even run yet, because I know they'll be able to soon. That buys me time to polish their future and work out all the bugs too.

I thought LLaMA 3.1 405B was a relatively huge model. Is the size of this model really typical of half the models you find on Hugging Face these days?

you could not say this better than this.

So every user of a computer that doesn't create their own home-grown ML models is a boomer? This can't possibly be a generational thing. Just about everyone on the planet is at a place in their life where they don't make their own AIs.

Eventually as the tools for doing it become better they'll all want to or need to. By then, most computers will be capable of running those tools too. Which means when that happens, people will come up another way to push the limits of compute.

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