this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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I believe most people’s problem with AI comes from the potentially massive financial bubble and economical damage to come from over-adoption of the technology where it should not be used.
Many people, like Torvalds, know that AI is useful for certain things when used responsibly. Low level programming is one of the best places for it. You’re not solving business problems. These are usually optimization and security problems with verifiable outcomes(ex AI finds bug, you can actually confirm bug exists).
Unfortunately the ease of which you can produce crap with AI causes big problems for everyone trying to actually improve things.
Economical, environmental, ethical. How can it be used responsibly when the Earth is burning and making it required pilfering the sum total of human knowledge and creativity for private profit?
Running an open model on your local PC to assist with programming seems pretty environmental, ethical, and economical.
Other uses, not so much.
Economic damage, environmental damage, concentration of power with multi-billionaire fascists, cultural damage due to huge quantities of slop crowding out everything else, mass unemployment and the exploitation of remaining workers, disempowerment of everyone who doesn't have the resources to control this technology, destruction of ordinary people's access to suitably powerful computing machinery so that we're all forced to either rent access to AI from its corporate gatekeepers or not use it, total surveillance by the state and its favoured corporations, profiling and predictive policing, marketing, etc. That's quite a lot to object to, and I'm sure there's more.
AI can also be run and trained locally, on hardware and data you own. The fascist-owned AI is not the only AI in existance
You first have to obtain the equipment.
As a programmer I've been doing this, but only because a friend lent me a very powerful computer that I could never afford myself. That's the problem right now: local LLM use requires a huge upfront investment in equipment that most workers can't afford. But it does feel a lot better (and cheaper, once you have the equipment) to run the LLM on a server at home than on a server owned by some nasty tech company. If everyone could run open models locally some of the main objections would fall away.
So I disagree with the poster who said anything you can run at home isn't worth it, but the catch is you need an absurdly expensive computer. The one I'm using would cost about 6 times what I used to pay for a powerful development PC. The model and agent I'm using can do some complex things and get decent results. But right now no affordable computer can run them. On regular affordable computers the models you can run are indeed limited.
Anything that you can run locally isn't worth it, unless you can't do anything by yourself at all, and I mean anything.
AI can be both a bubble and a useful tool at the same time, a crash won't make us forget about all about it instead I have a feeling a crash would help mature AI the way dotcom boom did web 2.0