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Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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But that's completely not true! Like, not a single thing you said is even slightly correct!
LLMs are relatively cheap to run - at small scales. You can run an LLM on your own computer right now. It won't be super fast, it won't have super skills, but you can run it, and you can train it yourself.
Massive LLMs like ChatGPT require tremendous resources precisely because they are not just tools available only to big players. Everybody on the planet has access to them - for free. The only actual difference there is between running an LLM locally and through a provider is that you get better speed and (sometimes, depending on context) better training through a provider.
As for "there's a lot to milk from its growing adoption" - maybe? Probably? Who knows? That's the "magic" of the AI bubble we're experiencing right now - the big players keep saying that it will "make work and money obsolete", that "anyone will be able to do anything", that "a time of post-scarcity approaches", and a billion other bullshit marketing slogans like that. But the reality is that nobody has yet figured out how to make money on that thing.
Right now, the only reason it's "growing", is because of the weird and probably illegal circular financing that's going on at the very top - Nvidia invests in OpenAI, which invests in Oracle, which invests in Nvidia - and so on. No money is actually being made or (often) even changing hands, but everyone can now show they've received a lot of investment which pumps up their stock prices. The only reason this hasn't popped yet is probably because the main investing parties are using tonnes of cash they had stored.
Growing adoption means nothing. It's a marketing tool for them to keep shareholders happy while they keep a literal investing circlejerk going, every now and again inviting another player into the fold.
I view AI to be like the internet: Most corporate players won't survive the bubble, but the ones that do, will be incredibly influential. Ordinary people made great use of the internet - but failed to make it really decentralized. Thus the enshittification of Reddit, Youtube, social media, and so forth.
We can choose to embrace local LLM that is fully under our control, or cede ownership to the 1% forevermore.
I don't think one is related to the other.
Decentralisation doesn't affect enshittification that much. Look at Lemmy and Fediverse in general - it's federated... so what? The .world instance is by far the largest in the Fediverse. If the mods there go insane, like they did on Reddit, or if the admins decide to add monetisation to it... it just happens. There being other servers changes nothing for the users stuck on the .world server. Sure, they can create new accounts elsewhere, but that's - in principle - no different than switching from Reddit to Lemmy.
On the other hand, look at Steam. Valve, the creators of Steam, has no "decentralisation" of their product, they're the god emperor of everything in terms of how Steam operates. At face value, it's the same exact product as, I don't know, the Epic Store, and yet Steam is loved by gamers, while Epic is hated.
No, you can have centralised and not enshittified services just fine - as long as the goal is to provide the service, instead of "creating value for the shareholders". As soon as that element comes in, there's no stopping enshittification.
Agreed.
Your private LLM will have nothing to compete against the big guys though. A cute hobby project but nothing of economic value.
You're not training it from scratch, though. There are people, enthusiasts, doing it for you. I can fire up LM Studio and browse through thousands of models to then have a conversation with, or have them write stories, etc., etc.
As for "nothing of economic value" - that's, again, just plain misunderstanding what AI can be used for. Corridor Crew - a VFX team publishing on YouTube - used self-trained AI to boost their film making options. For example, to copy the "bullet time" effect from The Matrix, they were able to use around a dozen cameras instead of hundreds, and then used AI to create the "in between" frames.
How does that have "no economic value", mate?