chill, this is extracting text embeddings from a local model, not generating feature-length films

that's like saying "no jet use is benign" meant for comparing a private jet to a jet-ski

the generative aspect is not even used here

Saw it was already commented about CO2, so I thought I'd counter-point your environment claim regarding water usage (since that is something I've seen a lot of too).

The ISSA had a call to action due to the AI water use "crisis": https://www.issa.com/industry-news/ai-data-center-water-consumption-is-creating-an-unprecedented-crisis-in-the-united-states/

68 billion gallons of water by 2028! That's a lot....right? Well, what I found is that this is somewhat of a bad faith argument. 68 billion gallons annually is a lot for one town, but those are numbers from a national level and it isn't compared to usage from anything else. So, lets look at US agriculture (that's something that's tracked very well by the USDA): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Irrigation_4.pdf

That's 26.4 trillion gallons of water annually. So, AI datacenter represents 0.26% of agriculture consumption. If AI datacenter consumption is a crisis, why is agriculture consumption not a crisis? You could argue that agriculture produces "something useful", but usefulness doesn't factor into the scarcity of a resource. So, either its not a crisis, or you are cherry picking something that has no meaningful outcome to solving the problem.

The effects on the environment

Didn't down vote you. I hear this line of complaint in conjunction with AI, especially if the person saying it is anti-AI. Without even calculating in AI, some 25 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually from streaming and content consumption. Computers, smartphones, and tablets can emit around 200 million metric tons CO2 per year in electrical consumption. Take data centers for instance. If they are powered by fossil fuels, this can add about 100 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. Infrastructure contributes around 50 million metric tons of CO2 per year.

Now.....who wants to turn off their servers and computers? Volunteers? While it is true that AI does contribute, we're already pumping out some significant CO2 without it. Until we start switching to renewable energy globally, this will continue to climb with or without AI. It seems tho, that we will have to deplete the fossil fuel supply globally before renewables become the de facto standard.

So running a local model is unforgivable, but "scientific research" running on hyperscalers, can be justified?

Do You drive a car? Eat meat? Fly for holidays?

Nothing is black and white.

The local LLM here is, if I'm not mistaken @nikodindon@lemmy.world , just used as a feature extraction tool. It's not like asking ChatGPT what to watch next but rather asking it to sumarise the movie as an excel file, that you then process to compute which movie(s) is(are) similar.

no one is saying everyone has to ask an LLM for movie recommendations

Yes. I think determinism a misunderstood concept. In computing, it means exact same input leads to always the same output. Could be a correct result or entirely wrong, though. As long as it stays the same, it's deterministic. There's some benefit in introducing randomness to AI. But it can be run in an entirely deterministic way as well. Just depends on the settings. (It's called "temperature".)

Yes, LLMs are different from human beings, what kind of question is this?

FWIW, I’m not against using AI as an assistant for coding (I do it too, using Claude and Vercel as assistants) just as long as the code is reviewed and understood in full* by the dev before publishing. *my emphasis

A very sane take. I do wish devs would fully disclose this on their github or other. That way, if the project is seasoned, well starred, et al, and the dev used AI as an assistant, then the user gets to decide. Given all the criteria are met, I would deploy it.

I will say that I have observed what seems like a pretty decent up tick in selfhosted apps, and I would be willing to bet a goodly amount of them have at the very least, used AI in some capacity, if not most/all code. I don't have any solid evidence to back that up but it just seems that way to me.