Imo the biggest problems with LLMs is that they’re being sold as something that can replace humans. The people peddling the tech are trying to hide the fact that it should never be used without HIL (human in the loop). Not for anything important.
Absolutely agree, there is a big disconnect between how these tools can actually be helpful in service of a human using them, and the narrative AI companies sell to CEOs about replacing human labor with them. This was a good write up from Doctorow incidentally on the topic. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/
How separable are the two when scale is needed to run llms effectively? If you’ve used ollama on your own computer you know the limitations of alternatives. When you use big tech’s offerings you are helping to train their models further. Adding to their control. My suggestion isn’t necessarily abstention, but here tech and capitalism seem to be inseparably intertwined.
We’re basically in the mainframe era of this tech, but if you have used local models then you know that progress has been absolutely breathtaking in the past year. Qwen 3.6 27b that you can run on a laptop is straight up better than frontier models that were available just a couple of years ago and required a data centre to run. Also, you don’t have to use American models. You can use open models from China, they’re very capable.
Socialism takes advanced, industrial production beyond the profit motive and into a consciously planned and pro-social direction. You can have industrial scale without having capitalism.
exactly, pretty much every serious argument against this tech boils down to capitalist relations rather than the tech itself
Imo the biggest problems with LLMs is that they’re being sold as something that can replace humans. The people peddling the tech are trying to hide the fact that it should never be used without HIL (human in the loop). Not for anything important.
Absolutely agree, there is a big disconnect between how these tools can actually be helpful in service of a human using them, and the narrative AI companies sell to CEOs about replacing human labor with them. This was a good write up from Doctorow incidentally on the topic. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/
How separable are the two when scale is needed to run llms effectively? If you’ve used ollama on your own computer you know the limitations of alternatives. When you use big tech’s offerings you are helping to train their models further. Adding to their control. My suggestion isn’t necessarily abstention, but here tech and capitalism seem to be inseparably intertwined.
We’re basically in the mainframe era of this tech, but if you have used local models then you know that progress has been absolutely breathtaking in the past year. Qwen 3.6 27b that you can run on a laptop is straight up better than frontier models that were available just a couple of years ago and required a data centre to run. Also, you don’t have to use American models. You can use open models from China, they’re very capable.
Socialism takes advanced, industrial production beyond the profit motive and into a consciously planned and pro-social direction. You can have industrial scale without having capitalism.