Furores are fermenting in the forums

Both Ubuntu and Fedora have made it official: support is coming soon for running local generative AI instances.

An epic and still-growing thread in the Fedora forums states one of the goals for the next version: the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Objective. It is causing some discontent, and at least one Fedora contributor, SUSE’s Fernando Mancera, has resigned.

  • JoeKrogan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    443·
    2 months ago

    I think it is good to have optional support for local models that lets people use them in an offline and private and easy way. There is a lot of non technical folks using linux nowadays and many chose it for privacy and greater control over their data.

    Depending on the implementation it could hook into certain os contexts and events to actually be helpful.

    Either way I don’t see the cat going back in the bag with regards to LLMs. That being said I run Debian everywhere except my work machine which is ubuntu.

      • CheerfulPassionFruit@lemmy.worldEnglish
        91·
        2 months ago

        Using an llm mondel that isn’t super advanced is actually quite freeing in my opinion, the generated output is always mediocre at best, but it’s usually good enough for boilerplate and can be decent if you need to unstuck yourself. It also isn’t good enough to lull you into just letting the llm do all the work for you since it makes obvious mistakes.

          • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            I mean, it sounds like a tool they occasionally find useful and don’t use otherwise. I’m not sure how “occasionally use a tool good enough for my purposes” is a waste. Whether it’s the most efficient application of that electricity is a different question, but without knowing their particular scenarios I can’t really compare whether other tools use less electricity for the same purpose.

            (Yes, of course, “just do it all in your brain” is even more efficient, but if that’s an argument against utilities, you probably shouldn’t waste electricity on Lemmy either)

              • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
                3·
                2 months ago

                If I have a tool that consumes resources whether I use it or not

                They were talking about a locally hosted LLM, weren’t they? In that case, I’d be pretty confident in saying it eats resources if and when you use it, not all the time.

                  • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
                    1·
                    2 months ago

                    Mind: I’m not the person running the local model.

                    but if there are dramatically more efficient tools that cover the same needs, you could be way more efficient (less wasteful) than you are

                    I did say that the efficiency would be a different question neither of us can answer in this case, but I fully agree with you. I merely pointed out that a local model wouldn’t be a permanent waste of electricity.

                    occupying (wasting) space

                    That’s relative to how much space you have. I also have games on my disk that I haven’t played in a while, so they’re more or less wasted space. But they’re not particularly large, so I can spare a few GB for them, and if I do want to play them, I can jump in spontaneously.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I hope it will be that way. in the end it could be the incentive to improve accessibility and UI automation tools for wayland.