I genuinely think we're only 2 years away from full custom local voice to voice llm assistants that grow with you like JOI in BR2049 and it's going to change how we think about being human and being social, and how we grow up.
I've been experimenting with running local LLMs for nearly two years now, ever since the first LLaMA release back in March 2023.
About six months ago I had mostly lost interest in them. They were fun to play around with but the quality difference between the ones I could run on my MacBook and the ones I could access via an online API felt insurmountable.
This has completely changed in the second half of 2024. The models I can run locally had a leap in quality - they feel genuinely GPT-4 class now.
They're not as good as the best hosted models (GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet) but they're definitely good enough to be extremely useful.
This started with the Qwen 2 and 2.5 series, but I also rate Llama 3.3 70B and now Phi-4 as GPT-4 class models that run on my laptop.
I wrote more about this here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#some-of-...
A 'word calculator' this effective is the best substitute that we have for a logic calculator. And the fact that it's enough in 90% of situations is terrifying as it is transformative, as is the fact no one is awake to it.
Exponential power scaling in an unstable world feels like it only makes it exponentially more unstable though.
Human beings have agency, and we are very good at rolling with the punches. We've survived waves of automation for hundreds of years. I'm much more confident that we will continue to find ways to use these things as tools that elevate us, not replace us.
I really hope the dystopian version doesn't come to pass!
I think there’s a less than 5% chance that this goes well, and that’s only if we get a series of things to go extremely well. And frankly, we’re tracking along the extremely bad path so far.
The difference with past technological breakthroughs is that they augmented what humans could do, but didn't have the potential to replace human labor altogether as AI does. They were disruptive, but humans were able to adapt to new career paths as they became available. Lamplighters were replaced by electrical lighting, but that created jobs for electrical engineers. Carriage drivers were replaced by car drivers; human computers by programmers, and so on.
The invention of AI is a tipping point for technology. The only jobs where human labor will be valued over machine labor are those that machines are not good at yet, and those where human creativity is a key component. And the doors are quickly closing on both of those as well.
Realistically, the only jobs that will have some form of longevity (~20 years?) are those of humans that build and program AI machines. But eventually even those will be better accomplished by other AI machines.
So, I'm really curious why you see AI as the same kind of technology we've invented before, and why you're so confident that humanity will be able to overcome the key existential problems AI introduces, which we haven't even begun to address. I don't see myself as a pessimist, but can't help noticing that we're careening towards a future we're not prepared to handle.
But my main argument is against the notion that this technology is the same as the ones that came before it, and that it will undoubtedly lead to a net better future. I think that is far from certain, and the way things are developing only leads me to believe that we're not ready for what we're building.
The cost/benefit for the labor/middle/low classes is at best low right now. I define that as someone who needs to trade time to continue surviving as an ongoing concern even if they have some wealth behind them.
I think the outcome where any form of meritocratic society gives way to old fashioned resource acquisition based societies is definitely one believable outcome. Warfare, land and resource ownership - the old will become the new again.
That being said, I can't see any world where there isn't mass ontological shock/hysteria, mass unemployment, and unrest at least for a few years, and I feel like it is definitely the kind of event you take active measures and preparations for beforehand.
And so do I, but like the golden rule of camping you should prepare for the worst and hope for the best!
BTW, a few days ago I published a book on using Ollama. Here is a link to read it online https://leanpub.com/ollama/read
For coding: qwen2.5-coder:14b (9G file)
Misc. experiments, runs fast: llama3.2:latest )2 G file)
Infact during the onboarding process they ask the user to choose which AI companion movie they related to the most: Her, BR2049 or Ex-Machina. The experience is then tailored to align closer to the movie chosen.
It's quite a terrible app from a product design perspective: filled with dark patterns (like sending the user blurred images to "unlock*) and upsells, but it's become successful amongst the masses that have adopted it, which I find fascinating. 30m+ users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replika#:~:text=Replika%20beca....
She appears to be a local model runnable on a small device without cloud.
I don’t see anything in the tech that indicates a singular pattern that will be “good” or “bad”.
Hunyuan (open source video) has been remarkable. Flux dev makes some incredible images.
The fact that it's still only going to get better from here is hard to imagine.