We've come full circle to the tech community deciding what's proper for our neighbors. ChatGPT is free to decide not to include adult stuff, and celebrity/CSAM should totally be illegal, but "The proper use of AI is as a tool, not as a friend, lover or therapist, and especially not as an addiction" is how we get the government regulating how adults use the tools at their disposal.

Aside from CSAM and defamatory stuff we don't have the right to decide what's proper for someone else.

Eventually peer to peer training (Petals using Hivemind, etc.) will lead the way.

At least they didn't do a Tumblr and have the feature put in, then wait for millions to be using it... and then yank the rug out from under them.

We saw how that ended.

Fortunately there are alternatives.

"Apple has never offered a product that justified a large chassis. It used to be lots of slots, hard drives and other storage that justified it. Macs have never been about that"

I see you don't remember the 68k Macs OR the PPC Macs. Apple offered machines with lots of slots ever since the Macintosh II line. HTH.

Too much latency for RAM.

You mean running them on an external GPU? That doesn't take much bandwidth unless you're constantly loading new models.

f the child mentioned didn't give you consent to share details about them, don't.

I thought it was generally accepted that children under the age of 18yrs could not give legal "consent" to anything....?

Until the age of 18, for the most part legally, can't parents speak for and act for their children....?

What are the use cases for local AI models that actually require running on macOS? Surely a commodity x86 system is more appropriate?

Is there even the software support for LLMs on macOS?

Actually yes there is...

I'm still learning about this myself, but, from what I understand the M series of chips that Apple has come out with, with it having a CPU, GPU, and shared unified memory....it makes them uniquely capable of running local models on them...decently large models depending on how much you fork over for RAM. These M chips also have a special end unit for "intelligence processing" I think they call it.

The M5 chips just coming out look to be very good at this and it is speculated the M5 Ultra will be a high performance work horse.

Apple may have missed the mark for running AI, but the appear to have hit a home run on the hardware aspect of it.

I've seen demos on YouTube of someone hooking up like 4-5 Mac Studios that were maxed out M3 ultras I think and they were running extremely LARGE LLMs locally and getting cloud level numbers on them.

Of course these were like $10K each boxes.....but the level of model they were running would have cost my MANY more times trying to match them with NVIDIA GPU cards.....

i believe there are OSX friendly tools like ollama that make downloading, and running LLMs quite easy....and of course there's the latest sensation...OpenClaw, that folks are buying up Mac Minis for....to have multiple agents running using models of your. Choice (commercial clound or local) of models and giving them persistent memory, and ability to do a lot of things for you...depending on how comfortable you are with giving said agents long leashes and capabilities....

Do look a bit on YouTube on these topics....it's actually quite interesting.

These M chips are already giving the home user the capability to use models almost as large and on the cutting edge as the big companies.....more than enough for most users.

Right now, there's nothing x86 that can really match them...at least not for the money.

Chinese law doesn't require a warrant for such access and it may be done in secrecy (i.e. without informing the user) if necessary to perform duties. The problem with Apple in China isn't that they aren't following the law, it's that they are and the law is openly fascist.

Look for a gaming monitor with no WiFi option

Do they make these in 65" or larger?

If not, that's not really useful....no one wants to have everyone in the family and/or guests huddled around a 25" monitor in the corner of the living room you know....

;)

Check his posting history and it's very clear that he is not.

If he is not a trollbot, he is so frothy as to be indistinguishable from one. Every comment is the same.

Mobile Firefox has become nearly unusable. It crashes on me at least once per day now. The memory leaks are worse than ever.

Dice isn't relevant here, it's B1zX

In order to get numbers like 5 million gallons one has to be looking at the very largest data centers, counting all water use as single use, even though water used for cooling is often reusable, and counting all the water used not by the center directly but used for power plants also as discussed earlier. Typical data center consumption is much lower. For example, see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/ which has one of the high-end estimates for what a typical data center consumes. As for the idea that there's a lot of data centers being built in the Southwest, more are being built or planned to be built in California or on the East Coast. Northern Virgina is the fastest growing region for data centers. See map here https://usdatamap.com/ (This isn't a perfect map. The situation is in flux. And admittedly, this map doesn't show size of them. My impression is that at least some of the ones being built in Arizona are very large so the map here isn't showing everything.)

Yes, building some of the largest data centers, making them all near one city, would take up a lot of water. However, that would be silly; the people building these are not idiots and aren't going to go shove all their centers in a region they know they then won't have enough water for all of them. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, one has historical water rights to contend with. In many jurisdictions for major water resources, historical users get priority over new users, so farmers and others would get priority before data centers if it came down to that. (Yes, this does mean that in parts of California, golf courses get priority over some other uses.)

This is not remotely why AI systems are being used. ChatGPT is being used daily by hundreds of millions of people https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users. Right now, ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world by some independent metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites. These systems are not being used just because some rich people want to not have to pay people or bother with civility. The regular, common people are using them. Understanding where this is going, the impacts it will have, both positive and negative, requires understanding the actual usage, not what one imagines it to be.

The water use for AI seems to be greatly exaggerated. Estimating water use complicated. Different data centers use different amounts of water. Also, systems need more water use for cooling when the weather is hot, so centers may use more water in summer. A data center will use more water when the center is at close to maximum usage, so data centers will use less water if they are handling queries when few users are using the system. Complicating things even further, some people are counting not just data cooling water but also counting the indirect water use from the needed electricity production (fossil fuel and nuclear plants use a fair bit of water for their steam turbines). There's a good article here discussing the difficulties in making water estimates https://theconversation.com/ai-has-a-hidden-water-cost-heres-how-to-calculate-yours-263252 However, all things considered. they estimate that all things considered it takes about 39 milliliters of water per a typical query. Now, for comparison, a high efficiency shower uses about 1.5 gallons of water a minute, which is about 95 ml of water a second. So making a query to an LLM AI system costs less than a second of water. If this estimate is off even by a factor of 3, this is equivalent to taking 1 second longer on a shower. The water use is just not hat high. The total water use is also not very high. If for example you use estimates for how much water is used by golf courses in the US https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf, the largest estimates of AI use put the water use as about a tenth of the water use by golf courses, and golf course water estimates put it at most about 1% of total US water use. So even if one is concerned, just getting rid of some of the gigantic water hungry golf courses in California and Arizona (seriously who the heck puts a golf course in Arizona) would largely offset this. Now, it is true that as data centers grow, more water will likely get used. But as we switch to more wind and solar power, the indirect water use will go down, and data center builders are working hard on reducing water use since it is such a hotbutton issue.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI. Water use should not be high on the list.