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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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So apparently Mozilla has decided to jump on the bandwagon and add a roided Clippy to Firefox.
I’m conflicted about this. On the one hand, the way they present it, accessibility does seem to be one of the very few non-shitty uses of LLMs I can think of, plus it’s not cloud-based. On the other hand, it’s still throwing resources onto a problem that can and should be solved elsewhere.
At least they acknowledge the resource issue and claim that their small model is more environmentally friendly and carbon-efficient, but I can’t verify this and remain skeptical by default until someone can independently confirm it.
As a rough rule of thumb, if it's running locally on a CPU with acceptable performance, the environmental impact is going to be minimal, or at least within socially acceptable bounds.
This elides whatever resources were used in training/development. Which in the cases of ML models is quite often not minimal. Even the diy things you can train yourself make a significant dent. And there’s likely to be an ongoing cost of this too, because of updates