The best succinct description of llm that I’ve read was “plagiarism machine”, because that’s basically what they are: automated plagiarism. At best they create a collage of other works, at worst they copy one work verbatim, but they never create something original because they can’t.
Copying something is a lot easier and thus cheaper than creating an original work from scratch, so genuine creators cannot hope to compete on cost. Which leads to less people being able to afford to earn a living from creating works, which leads to less original works being created.
Short term that’s great for the neoliberal company executives: fire the expensive artists, create cheap slop with the plagiarism machine, and thus maximize profits now. That the plagiarism machine becomes stagnant because not enough new original works are being created is a future problem, by which time the current executives will have already jumped ship.
But while it’s great for the neoliberal business model, for the rest of society it will suck. So now that we have confirmation that the AI executives know how bad their products are, and that they were just publicly lying about it in the style of tobacco executives, will anything be done about this “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”? Personally I doubt it, there’s too much regulatory capture.
There’s going to be some fuzzy math hidden behind that article, I’d only expect a 9x difference when comparing lemons with melons, new small electric cars vs older non-hybrid SUVs for example. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they also ignored less favourable conditions like highway driving or colder temperatures. How they came by their numbers is mostly opaque, but I suspect that this source is pretty biased.
I do believe that if you need a new car and if you can charge at home, that EVs should now be a no brainer for most people. I just don’t believe this article.