Cory Doctorow

Like Uber, the massive investor subsidies for AI have produced a sugar high of temporarily satisfied users. 

Fooling around feeding prompts to an image genera­tor or a large language model can be fun, and playful communities have sprung up around these subsidized, free-to-use tools (less savory communities have also come together to produce nonconsensual pornography, fraud materials, and hoaxes).

The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They’re expensive to make, with billions spent acquir­ing training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models.

Even more important, these models are expensive to run. Even if a bankrupt AI company’s model and servers could be acquired for pennies on the dollar, even if the new owners could be shorn of any overhanging legal liability from looming copyright cases, even if the eye-watering salaries commanded by AI engineers collapsed, the electricity bill for each query – to power the servers and their chillers – would still make running these giant models very expensive.

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