this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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Uh... What exactly do you think LLMs are? Christ, people will jump through any hoop to delineate "thing I hate" from "thing I hate but is too useful so I must find a way that it's different so I can like it".
Machine learning, including LLMs, are a technology. They are a tool, and can be used for good or ill. All this hatred towards the technology, instead of the salesmen burning our world over it, baffles me.
Do you know what I used AI for the other day? I wanted to try a new store so I booted up my local AI and I had it search for whether the owners have donated to anyone or anything I'd consider a problem. It looked through news stories, the website and wayback machine, public FEC filings, and on and on. In a matter of minutes I had a pretty comprehensive report and was good to go about my day, decision on relatively sound data in hand. Without AI, I'd have spent several times as long and not found half as much... Or, I just wouldn't have checked at all.
It's a technology, and its useful. It saved a man's sight, here, and it's researching new compounds to save more lives. It's also being used for war, and crime, and a lot of research was done unethically. But it's okay to like the good things it's used for, because a lot of people are using it to help.
The point is, they are using the functional specialized machine learning systems, as a way to justify building thousand of data centers to build LLMs.
I don't disagree with this as a statement of the strategy the broligarchs are employing (that's the "burning our world" bit), but my point is purely about the technology itself, and how batshit insane it is to try and maintain one kind of ML is not really ML because icky. All the "AI" that people hate on so blindly is a lot more than image and text generation, but it's all Machine Learning.
What exactly do YOU think LLMs are?
Machine Learning is a kind of AI. LLMs are but one kind of Machine Learning Model. All LLMs are Machine Learning models, but not all Machine Learning models are LLMs. LLMs are one kind of AI, but not all AI is an LLM.
They're different words for a reason. If they were all the same thing, we wouldn't give them different names. It's completely possible and understandable that someone would find one acceptable but not the other.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
There's nothing quite so uniquely irritating as someone who holds a strong opinion on something about which they know very little.
I believe you'll find I said
Because LLMs are a subset of ML models. I never said all ML is LLMs, but the person I'm responding to doesn't seem to understand that LLMs are trained via Machine Learning. Thanks for the misplaced condescension though, looks real good on you.
LLM is
So... not related to the kind of AI mentioned in the article. You're the one who talked about LLMs and I don't know why.
Because it's machine learning. That's the premise of the very first sentence I wrote. Are you sure you haven't surrendered all your thinking to the machine?
LLM and ML are very different.
I don't use AI because it sucks.
No, they're not. Any line you try to draw between them is a lie you've convinced yourself of. There's no arguing with a take this detached from reality, though.