Both Ubuntu and Fedora have made it official: support is coming soon for running local generative AI instances.
An epic and still-growing thread in the Fedora forums states one of the goals for the next version: the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Objective. It is causing some discontent, and at least one Fedora contributor, SUSE’s Fernando Mancera, has resigned.
Indeed, and I addressed the dramatically reduced utility if those vs. the cloud ones. So, that tool uses way less resources than its bigger siblings, but still way more than any other local software, including the OS.
If you use it a lot and it saves you a lot of time, it may not be a waste for you, but if there are dramatically more efficient tools that cover the same needs, you could be way more efficient (less wasteful) than you are. Of course, this is only true if those alternatives exist. I don’t know your specific use case, and am not talking specifically about you.
An obvious example of what I mean:
I ask a search engine to show me pictures of flowers, and a single molecule of oil is burned to power that request, giving me my results. I then ask ChatGPT to show me pictures of flowers, and it burns a tree to provide me the exact same results. Both achieved the goal, but it is hard to argue that one isn’t wasteful by comparison to the other.
ETA an example of passive waste. Imagine I own a lawnmower, but have no lawn. I never use the lawnmower, so it is not consuming resources, per se, but it is a useless tool for me and is occupying (wasting) space. A program I never run on my computer is functionally the same as this.
Mind: I’m not the person running the local model.
I did say that the efficiency would be a different question neither of us can answer in this case, but I fully agree with you. I merely pointed out that a local model wouldn’t be a permanent waste of electricity.
That’s relative to how much space you have. I also have games on my disk that I haven’t played in a while, so they’re more or less wasted space. But they’re not particularly large, so I can spare a few GB for them, and if I do want to play them, I can jump in spontaneously.