this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I don't make a lot of predictions about artificial intelligence, but I will go out on a limb on this one and make one: this will never happen.
The human brain runs on 20 watts of power. Right now I have an AI running on an Intel NUC (Qwen 2.5 9B) that can do most home automation tasks I run through it (setting timers, setting reminders, making to-do lists, turning things off and on), as well as answer general questions ("who were the members of The Beatles?") and be (mostly) correct. It uses about 65 watts of power to do so.
It's nowhere near as smart as I am and it uses 3x the electricity I do. But I couldn't do this even last year. Efficiency gains to this technology have a ceiling so high that I don't think most people believe it because they see all these data centers being built and people like Sam Altman talking dumb shit like this. The future of AI will be local. It will run on your phone and be smarter than you, and in fairly short order.
We are already able to run models locally (Qwen 3.8 27B) that blow last-gen frontier models away (and give current frontier models a run for their money), but you need a high-end setup like an RTX 5090 24G and 64G system RAM.
LLMs and the surrounding code that drives them ("harnesses") are so far from AGI that it will be decades before we see your prediction come true. We need not just one, but many more leaps forward in AI progress to achieve a level of AI that is capable of performing human-level reasoning and planning that will be "smarter than you" or me. If you have studied AI in the pre-LLM times you will have an understanding of the problems that need to be solved for general reasoning intelligence. We haven't solved any of those problems.
LLMs are a large step forward in the field of NLP, but that's it.
I'm not here to argue that point. But my crappy NUC based LLM can answer the Beatles question. What it can't answer is "what was the name of the guy who famously rolled his eyes while Yoko Ono screwed up his performance?" Right off the top of my head, neither can I. But OpenAI's model would have no problem with that question.
So when I say "smarter than you or I" I don't mean AGI and I'm not trying to get into an AGI conversation. I mean something that runs locally, doesn't rely on the Internet and can answer almost any general trivia question accurately. And LLMs are already there, but not yet on your phone. When they are on your phone, people won't need OpenAI or Sam Altman's models anymore. That's all I'm trying to say. I'm refuting Altman's claim that we will pay for intelligence like a utility.
I run a Qwen 3.8 27b at home on gaming hardware. Got it scraping and posting news articles and general stupid questions. Takes 5 minutes instead of seconds because it has a gemma model doing RAG in the back end.
Other than some coding, I really don't have a reason to use a big model.