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Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

Are they even using it to compete with us? There's plenty of people talking here about how it doesn't make any economic sense to run a local LLM. Like, they're providing inference so cheap that even when you have models that are just as good, it still doesn't make sense for you to run it.

Anyway, my point is keep your focus on the actual injustice. The problem is that individuals get punished, not that AI companies don't. Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP. This is an important moment to say it's clearly insane to keep this going.

You don't say that it's unfair that Snoop Dogg didn't end up in prison forever for his marijuana use, and that we ought to lock him up too; you say it's unfair that other people did.

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> Are they even using it to compete with us?

Yes. They are literally pitching to investors and businesses that they can fire all of us.

And how's that going to work when they're already today commodified and you can already buy your own personal AI machines to run near SOTA models for a couple thousand dollars? Or buy SOTA from an inference provider for pennies.

If employers fire everyone because AI can just do it, why would somebody pay for their services when AI can just do it? Shouldn't the capital class be even more concerned that now anyone can start a competing knowledge business with no required investment?

We can debate this all day but I’m just telling you what is literally happening right now

It is also what the executives said according to this very submission, but you are still downvoted because people deliberately ignore any anti-AI information.

It is rather frustrating

> Are they even using it to compete with us?

Ask anyone who has ever lost a job in a layoff that cites AI.

The (often stated) goal of AI is to be able to perform any and all human work, and cheaper than any human.

> Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP.

We are otherwise very likely to end up in a world in which AI companies can do it and individuals can't.

You can already do it yourself now though. The Qwen 32B models are quite capable and can be run on a ~$1400 GPU. I haven't gone through the trouble to set it up myself, but my understanding is image generation workflows are actually state-of-the-art local. i.e. local workflows are much better than the big cloud providers. My family's first computer in the 90s costed more than a modern AI machine nominally. I don't remember people screaming then about how computers were creating a moat that would lock individuals out of the economy despite actually be less affordable in real and nominal terms.

I want you to grab 100 people and tell them to set up LM studio and run a qwen model for anything productive. The average person won’t/can’t do this, especially when a better, faster model is a browser window away and (currently the case) is cheap or even free.

I consider myself pretty tech savvy as a non-engineer and I have to spend a lot of time making a local model actually useful. This feels like how everyone acts like it’s so easy for everyone to just adopt Linux.

If they’re lucky they’ll actually get it running, but good luck doing anything useful with it if you don’t know how to set up tool calls for web search and such. Their eyes will glaze over the moment you talk about MCP servers and api keys.

Models have been useful for actual work for about 10 months now. Do you think no one will come up with the idea of selling an appliance with software preloaded? Like Synology or QNAP, except if it's this disruptive of a market, you can expect Dell, HP, etc. to join in as well.

I did not say the models weren’t useful. I am saying running local models is not turnkey like browser experiences with the big companies and introduces significant friction - and they generally aren’t as fast as good, which is true. Plus it’s a whole skill set to optimize them.

This sounds like a variation of the same problem. Just another form of vendor lock in and exploitation. This is not the same as “running a local model yourself.”

Like you mention synology - they’ve gone the wrong direction the last few years. My employer won’t buy from themfor a reason.

My point is there's apparently a big market here, but it's also new. You didn't have Compaq, Gateway, Dell, Asus, HP, Vaio, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Samsung, Beelink, AOOSTAR, etc. competing in the PC clone market in 1993 yet either. Give it maybe more than a year to develop.

If it's important, I can't see why today's (and tomorrow's) computer vendors wouldn't move into the market. If it's not important, then it's not.

The NAS market is probably small because for most consumers, a single SSD already suffices. But even with that, you can already apparently buy from vendors that sell vanilla TrueNAS preloaded. Just like you can buy OpenWRT routers. Or even open Linux-based retro gaming handhelds designed to mimic a Gameboy Advanced SP. And soon GrapheneOS phones. I assume your employer buys from someone else?

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