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Comment by vpShane | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but we can self-host them. At this point in the span of it, it's more about infrastructure and compute power to meet demand and Google won because it has many business models, massive cashflow, TPUs, and the infrastructure to build expanding on their current, which would take new companies ~25 years to map out compute, data centers and have a viable, tangible infrastructure all while trying to figure out profits.

I'm not sure about how the regulation of things would work, but prompt injections and whatever other attacks we haven't seen yet where agents can be hijacked and made to do things sounds pretty scary.

It's a race towards AGI at this point. Not sure if that can be achieved as language != consciousness IMO

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>Yeah, but we can self-host them

Who is "we", and what are the actual capabilities of the self-hosted models? Do they do the things that people want/are willing to pay money for? Can they integrate with my documents in O365/Google Drive or my calendar/email in hosted platforms? Can most users without a CS degree and a decade of Linux experience actually get them installed or interact with them? Are they integratable with the tools they use?

Statistically close to "everyone" cannot run great models locally. GPUs are expensive and niche, especially with large amounts of VRAM.

Correct. And glad you're aware of the challenges with running them.

I'm not saying the options are favorable for everybody, I'm saying the options are there if it becomes locked in to 1-3 companies.

>It's a race towards AGI at this point. Not sure if that can be achieved as language != consciousness IMO

However it is arguable that thought is relatable with conscienceness. I’m aware non-linguistic thought exists and is vital to any definition of conscienceness, but LLMs technically dont think in words, they think in tokens, so I could imagine this getting closer.

'think' is one of those words that used to mean something but is now hopelessly vague- in discussions like these it becomes a blunt instrument. IMO LLMs don't 'think' at all - they predict what their model is most likely to say based on previously observed patterns. There is no world model or novelty. They are exceptionally useful idea adjacency lookup tools. They compress and organize data in a way that makes it shockingly easy to access, but they only 'think' in the way the Dewey decimal system thinks.

if we were having this conversation in 2023 I would agree with you, but LLM's have advanced so much that they are essentially efficient lookup tables is an oversimplification so dramatic I know you don't understand what you're talking about.

No one accuses the Dewey decimal system of thinking.

If I am so ignorant maybe you'd like to expand on exactly why I'm wrong. It should be easy since the oversimplification is dramatic enough that it made you this aggressive.

No, I don't want to waste my time trying to change the view of someone so close-minded they can't accept that LLM's do anything close to "thinking"

Sorry.

That's what I thought. Big talk, no substance.

I'm not the other poster but he's probably referring to how your comment seems to only be talking about "pure" LLMs and seems pretty out of date, whereas most tools people are using in 2025 use LLMs as glue to stitch together other powerful systems.

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