this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
354 points (98.4% liked)
Not The Onion
17004 readers
903 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There are plenty of people and organisations doing stuff like this, there are plenty of examples on HuggingFace, though typically it's to get an LLM to communicate in a specific manner (e.g. this one trained on Lovecraft's works). People drastically overestimate the amount of compute time/resources training and running an LLM takes; do you think Microsoft could force their AI on every single Windows computer if it was as challenging as you imply? Also, you do not need to start from scratch. Get a model that's already robust and developed and fine tune it with additional training data, or for a hack job, just merge a LoRA into the base model.
The intent, by the way, isn't for the LLM to respond for you, it's just to interpret a message and offer suggestions on what a message means or rewrite it to be clear (while still displaying the original).
Huggingface isn't customer-facing, it's developer-facing. Letting customers retrain your LLM sounds like a bad idea for a company like Meta or Microsoft, it's too risky and could make them look bad. Retraining an LLM for Lovecraft is a totally different scale than retraining an LLM for hundreds of millions of individual customers.
It's a cloned image, not unique per computer
Hugging Face being developer-facing is completely irrelevant considering the question you asked was whether I was aware of any companies doing anything like this.
Your concern that companies like Meta and Microsoft are too scared to let users retrain their models is also irrelevant considering both of these companies have already released models so that anyone can retrain or checkpoint merge them i.e. Llama by Meta and Phi by Microsoft.
Microsoft's Copilot works off a base model, yes, but just an example that LLMs aren't as CPU intensive as made out to be. Further automated finetuning isn't out of the realm of possibility either and I fully expect Microsoft to do this in the future.
they release them to developers, not automatically retrain them unsupervised in their actual products and put them in the faces of customers to share screenshots of the AI's failures on social media and give it a bad name
They release them under permissive licences so that anyone can do that.
yea someone could take the model and make their own product with their own PR and public perception
that's very different from directly spoonfeeding it as a product to the general public consumers inside of WhatsApp or something
it's like saying someone can mod Skyrim to put nude characters in it, that's very different from Bethesda selling the game with nude characters