Affidavit

They release them under permissive licences so that anyone can do that.

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.

It’s a cloned image, not unique per computer

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.

The intent 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).

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).

I don't use WhatsApp, but this immediately made me think of my dad who doesn't use any punctuation and frequently skips and misspells words. His messages are often very difficult to interpret, through no fault of his own (dyslexia).

Having an LLM do this for me would help both him and me.

He won't feel self conscious when I send a, "What you talkin' about Willis?" message, and I won't have to waste a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what he was trying to say.

But... Then how will I get the poowater on my balls?

Oh. Is that how protests work? I am a non-driver who supports initiatives like making cities car-free, increasing public transport, improving cyclist/pedestrian infrastructure. Yet, I am now blocking this community because it's clearly full of attention-seekers craving a power-trip.

This 'protest' makes me support the drivers, not the cyclists. I don't understand how this silly idea came about that making people hate you somehow builds support for a cause.

'Fire shoe' encompasses both meanings satisfactorily.

Tree wool.

Okay, that is really cool. I think German wins here.