So OpenAI strategy was to become too big to fail and live off government bailouts. Nothing says free market like a public safety net for private billion-dollar bets. A beautiful capitalist fairy tale. : us

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I find the tech itself is both interesting and useful, but the way it's applied under capitalism is unethical. I think it's important to avoid conflating the two things and focus on what the actual problem is.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

deepseek cloud tbh. 5$ on the API gets you around 9 million words (input tokens are half the price). I have no idea what I'm gonna do with that amount of tokens but I'm probably going to be riding that 5$ for years to come lol. I also like that they don't have auto billing and you have to top up your credit balance manually.

deepseek also has a 128,000 tokens context window which is just huge, that's like 100k words. You could basically send deepseek a whole novel (60k words) and it will still have 30k words with which to write an output. But due to how context currently works in llms it will probably get confused or completely forget some parts of it, so I wouldn't recommend doing that. But compare to chatGPT which gets lost and automatically cuts off your prompt after 3 paragraphs.

However don't think deepseek is secure. Your data is still stored on your account and has to transit over the open web even if it ends up in servers in China. With local LLMs you can set it to delete chat history as soon as you close the program, so once it's generated, it's gone.

As for some uses,

translation of theory that was previously not available in X language. With a script and API access you could just automate this and pump out translations to 10 languages as quickly as you find the books. Now that I have some deepseek API access I might actually work on a pipeline for this.
producing agitprop, incl for example images you can quickly print on flyers prior to a protest or event, or stickers. These are flyers that will often be discarded anyway so the image doesn't need to be great. But I'm thinking for example of the Samuel L. Jackson edit (the L stands for Lenin), people loved it when it came out. It's one of the top-rated post on r/AIart which is just wild to think about, it's also the only political post there. We just need to find the right idea and then AI can execute.
coding, of course. any stuff that you need to automate for your org or project, deepseek can probably code
generating questions to chapter you are reading in book club (then go through a process of perfecting them every time you run the book club and eventually you'll have a standard set of questions that you serve every time you run the book. In fact I kinda want to do that for ProleWiki and make them accessible so orgs don't have to make their own individually)
submit drafts to steelman them prior to release, though we might want a fine-tuned model for that. Can also make sure language works and will speak to people but again I'm not sure llms are quite there yet. Maybe if you give it a persona whom you want the draft to speak to. But marxism being so specific and developed I don't think llms can quite grasp it at the level veteran comrades do.
Create content cascade for your online agitation work. Submit your argument about a topical issue to the LLM and ask it to derive it into a tweet, an instagram story, a bullet-point list for a flyer etc. imo this is something we don't do enough of, there's no need to reinvent the wheel each time and we need automated tech stacks to handle this work.
deepseek gave me a surprising observation considering it comes from an LLM, "Problem: The right-wing dominates online meme culture, which shapes common sense." even it is aware of this lol. It also offered this example solution "Generate an image in a photorealistic style of a billionaire like Jeff Bezos as a giant, bloated king sitting on a throne made of Amazon warehouses, while tiny workers struggle to hold him up". I really liked the Angela Rayner rap someone in the UK made, if you didn't see it a link is in one of my recent comments just ctrl f her name. With AI we can produce this content very, very quickly, the potential is unmatched. Open the floodgates of social media and let the communists out. We just need to do it correctly and for that you need to have a vision and guide the AI.
automated minutes taking, though I'm aware at this time it's not perfect bc LLMs are still prone to hallucinating. speech-to-text models are pretty good at it though, it's the summarizing part that needs work. But then an LLM could automatically create the cascade for members and with code (which the llm writes) post the bullet-points to your Signal or Telegram automatically. This simplifies admin work which I have done with my party and it sucks esp as so many orgs don't have a tech stack whatsoever and do everything manually.
research! I use perplexity for this as it cites sources. When people ask me something and I don't have an answer I ask perplexity to learn about it. You preferably guide it with keywords over giving it direct instructions. It has definitely helped me find sources that I knew existed but didn't save and has also helped me research and write arguments for a LOT of my writing, more than people might think.
I think it can also help in analytics because it can do Python but you need data for that in the first place, which a lot of orgs don't have because they're not interested in getting it. With mixture-of-experts it can probably get very good results as a data analyst.
In the same vein, automated reports on stuff that you might want to keep an eye on. This doesn't necessarily need AI but AI can more finely decide what to send you over 'old-school' regex filters. Send it an RSS feed periodically, it opens and analyzes the stories, then can send you an email that says "hey there might be potential here, check this out".
Okay this is more 'black hat' but you can also scour the web with AI and find people that post publicly on social media complaining about their rent, wage etc. Then either it puts them in a pipeline for you to reach out to manually or the llm does it automatically within the boundaries you set. Either way you kinda need an llm there to analyze sentiment. And yes reaching out individually on social media works and it's very underrated, people think the only thing you can do on those platforms is broadcast to your followers.

^ to ask deepseek I asked it to "First take the time to remember all that you can about party-building in the leninist tradition so that you can tailor your answer to solve actual usecases and real-world problems communist organizations face" (and yes I wrote leninist on purpose so as not to trigger the potential censor and make sure it accessed the right knowledge, I found you kinda have to speak to them in their language). I didn't just ask it "how can communist organizations use AI to help their work", in fact I actually tried that prompt just now and the quality is definitely lower. It tries to answer as best it can but with less input data to work with it doesn't understand what you're actually looking for, you have to communicate that.

And I think there are still lots of emergent uses to be discovered. Also with open-source models and interfaces orgs can already, today, host their own server and provide access to the web interface you can access from your browser at home. That way they can host an LLM for everyone in their org instead of everyone having to host their own.

[–] Kultronx@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Deepseek cites sources if you turn on the 'search' button, no?

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 month ago

it's not any better than perplexity if you want to use it as a search engine in my experience. but to do tech stuff like debugging it works

[–] ProudCascadian@lemmygrad.ml -4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Eh, not a fan really. It relies on massive datacenters to be usable. This also seems like it could erode trust in Communist organizations. At least in this case, it isn't trying to perpetuate a surveillance state.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I understand where you're coming from, but I think there might be some misconceptions about the resource requirements. You can actually host LLMs on a local computer without needing a $10,000 GPU. For example, it's possible to self-host the full Deepseek model on a $2000 setup and open it to your organization for browser-based use, or smaller models on a 400$ GPU.

I also find it compelling that LLMs like Deepseek are designed to be very efficient in their cloud versions, especially when compared to Western tech that isn't incentivized to prioritize environmental concerns because there are no mechanisms in place to force them to care about the environment. This (the fact that capitalism won't save the environment) is a much stronger argument than a blanket "no datacenters," since a datacenter is powering Lemmygrad as we speak. To put it in perspective, China has about 450 datacenters while the US has over 4000, yet their tech sector is just as advanced. It shows there are different, more efficient ways of doing things that we (the state) can tap into if we only wanted to.

This also seems like it could erode trust in Communist organizations

To be perfectly honest, I think you overestimate the existing level of trust the general masses have in communist organizations.

I'm coming from a place of wanting our movements to succeed globally, it's just that it worries me when I see us hesitating to adopt tools that could give us a real edge. We already use technology, including the internet and automated stuff in our organizational work. I believe we need to move past a certain hesitation toward new tech (a sort of "return to Pravda" mindset) and embrace whatever makes our praxis more effective. We don't have the luxury of refusing efficient tools. Looking at how China integrates technology provides a practical, existing blueprint for this.

I've often seen proposals to automate tasks or improve efficiency in orgs get shut down with responses like, "Oh, that sounds complicated," or "I like the way we do things already." But we have to try new things if we want to close the gap. I'd be happy to help build out a tech stack if given the chance! And yet many still prefer to rely on manual email lists when a simple Telegram channel could coordinate communication.

It's a bit like how the MIA gained its foothold in the 90s while other communists were still debating whether the internet was a fad. We got shown up by trots!

Just recently, we launched a Telegram broadcast channel with ProleWiki to share news. It's only the first week, and we already have 80 subscribers. That's 80 people we can reach directly, without being subject to algorithmic filters. The bot for the channel was coded by our dev with some LLM assistance, it uses RSS feeds and custom filters to select the headlines we want and posts them automatically on a schedule. Eventually, we might use something like Deepseek to scrape sites that no longer offer RSS, and maybe even analyze the articles for relevance before posting. At this moment the channel runs automatically, it requires literally 0 labor to sustain. I'm not aware of any org that have a low-stakes, public-facing point of entry like this. They seem to assume that the more labor they put into something the greater its impact and this results in a lot of wasted effort. This automated approach lets us maintain a presence with 0 effort while freeing up energy for other things we want to work on. It's essentially self-sustaining, I mean, how cool is that!

perpetuate a surveillance state

I mean by many metrics China would be considered a surveillance state (and not just liberal metrics). They have a different cultural and legal approach to online privacy and device security, in fact researchers that work in China like that accessing data, even medical data, is more straightforward there. Our distrust should be directed at capitalism, not the 'surveillance' itself.

[–] PoY@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

there is no way you're running the full deepseek model on a $2000 gpu much less computer

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

https://digitalspaceport.com/how-to-run-deepseek-r1-671b-fully-locally-on-2000-epyc-rig/ it's even better, this rig doesn't even have a GPU.

[–] PoY@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

that is mind blowing! without a gpu at all and getting even 3 t/s? just... wow

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And it's only going to get faster...

(Note that this is the Q4 model, but otherwise still the full 671b params and thinking mode enabled)

[–] PoY@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 month ago

oh i missed that... yeah Q4 makes way more sense

[–] Pieplup@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 month ago

i mostly use ai for detecting ai generated images, if i'm being honest.

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