I’ve shared this video a few times in comments here. This is an overview mixed with my thoughts on it:

People creating AI also fund anti-AI content saying there’s an existential risk (usually under the umbrella of AI safety). There’s dramatic videos with strong hooks calling for regulation.

People on the left share it because it seems like there’s a valid need to raise the alarm.

In a group chat between influencers there was moral reluctance to accept pro-AI money, but it doesn’t seem like the same moral dilemma for them to accept Anti money to raise the alarm (there’s less critical thinking about that, they don’t notice that the other money is also supporting billionaires).

Often young influencers paid this way had already had contact with career advice & safety related orgs like Bluedot Impact, 80000 hours. Those orgs get money from the nonprofits like Coefficient Giving who are in turn funded by the Big Tech founder types. AI in Context (YouTube channel) is only 2 degrees away from companies like Anthropic or OpenAI.

What appears to be speaking truth to power isn’t what it seems on the surface.

It’s a billionaire war played out on the internet, as if organic. The explicitly pro-AI organisations are at least more straightforward about what side they’re advocating for eg pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future raised $125 million in 2025, explicitly because it’s an all out internet war. Big money is being spent to manipulate the debate.

There are AI people who are Effective Altruism types, who genuinely do feel a weight to share their concerns. They lean into memes like the paperclip scenario. They want the positive version of the singularity/AGI, but it’s harder to get people to imagine that aligned version than the doomer version, so they focus on apocalyptic angles. Eliezer Yudkowsky, if anyone builds it everyone dies etc.
That community is split between just stopping AI vs the enticing possibility of safe AI.
The ones who can see different possible trajectories (not a stupid position IMO) are funding AI development AND anti nonprofits like Control AI, Center for AI Safety, Survival & Flourishing Group and so on, who warn of the dangers. Open letter writing types have shifted to also paying influencers. An example is Future of Life institute has a $100,000/mth programme for influencers in their Digital Media Accelerator to raise AI issues.

Existential AI risk is very low down in list of ordinary people’s concerns though.

We’re more worried about jobs. So the existential risk people try to blur into a coalition of people concerned about AI for different reasons. It seems like a left position, but is actually more reactionary. At a party to do with Eliezer Yudkowsky (anti AI people) actual journalists critical of AI were banned.

OpenAI funds a child safety coalition at the same time as paying for politicians to oppose it. Anthropic does research designed to trick the AI into doing something bad Chekhov’s gun stylie, in order to publish a paper gto warn politicians. The whole thing seems bizarre.

You can follow the money of a handful of people eg one of the facebook founders Dustin Moskovitz, Elon Musk, a Skype co-founder, wealthy AI researchers. They fund both sides and it’s all very interrelated. They’re people at the centre of power in AI companies.

The connections between everything looks like a deranged Murder Board, which in itself makes it tricky to publicise an exposé.

—

Why?

Why is the current AI debate so manipulated and weird? Probably there’s several reasons:

1. It makes them look more powerful?
Bad publicity depends on perspective. If your technology looks really dangerous, it will attract certain types to want to harness that for themselves. This might boost your valuation in the run up to an IPO.

2. Solutions that don’t hurt the companies?
The Big Tech Pro-AI types are manipulating towards regulation in ways that suit them. Greater regulation likely makes it harder for people in garages to create exciting open source models. It can benefit large companies, dig a moat and raise the drawbridge.

3. Cooperative knowledge production?
Perhaps the interrelatedness isn’t as cynical as it seems? It’s a subculture that just is interrelated and they cross pollinate ideas and money. They’re sensible enough to see both the potential and the dangers.

4. Sci-fi dystopian fiction and Accelerationism?
They’ve watched too many dystopian films as teenagers and embrace accelerationism, even if they’re the villain. The dynamic is to fan online division, to deliberately break social cohesion, to polarise and dissolve nuanced positions.

5. Avoid genuine left critique?
Dramatic sci-fi scenarios avoid mundane material conditions, ownership and LeftistsforAI style concerns. The regulation most people really want isn’t existential. There are issues that can be solved but they’re sidestepping solving those issues. The technology can come across as inherently wrong, rather than focusing on what companies have the responsibility to fix.

6. Individual guilt and shaming disarms left opposition?
Aspects of the manipulation remind me of when BP initiated the concept of the carbon footprint. We went from demanding macro change to analysing our individual guilt and culpability. It seems particularly effective to approach it from an identity angle, eg you can’t class yourself as a bonafide leftist if you use AI. Then you can leave it up to in-group discourse policing. It doesn’t require much astroturfing to get that going. If you shame the types of people oppressive governments try to suppress into not using AI, it ends up creating 2 tiers of tech literacy aligned in a way that benefits big tech and those who will use AI to concentrate power. I’ve written about this idea in more detail see
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/s/vvfF8DpTfx

The truth is probably a combination of several of these, so it’s worth being sceptical of both sides of the debate. Also, of course just because content is paid for it doesn’t automatically mean it’s factually wrong.

What do you think?

Paper mentioned in video: Field-building and the epistemic culture of AI safety by Shazeda Ahmed, Klaudia Jaźwińska, Archana Ahlawat, Amy Winecoff, and Mona Wang

This isn’t the type of model you can chat with, it’s more for smart home tool calling type of thing. It’s pretty amazing that you can get any AI working on something so cheap though. Hopefully it’s a sign of more cheap to use and useful models to come?

“We ran Needle 2, a 45-million-parameter, 14MB Al model from Cactus Compute, entirely offline on a $10 ESP32-S3 microcontroller - no WiFi, no cloud, no internet connection at all. Using our own custom inference engine, we sent it real natural-language commands to control an LED, and watched it reason through each one, report a live confidence score, and even correctly refuse a question it had no tool for. If you're curious how a language model this small can actually work, and want to see it running live on real hardware, this one's worth watching”
• Relevant Links
Needle 2: https://cactuscompute.com/needle
https://github.com/andrisgauracs/needle-2-esp32

Can you think of anything you’d actually use this for?

This is an interesting analysis of the song Feel Good Inc https://youtu.be/4gN\_FxCfXPc

Original music video https://youtu.be/HyHNuVaZJ-k

there’s more to it than you’d notice listening casually eg reference to the Industrial Revolution, William Blake poetry, questioning the digital revolution and mechanising human culture.

There’s 3 strands or motifs in the music:
1. feel good inc, catchy emptiness of capitalist music industry
2. Dystopia description rap resistance
3. Utopian prefigurative freedom with windmill, love referencing acoustic (floating paradise in the video, pursued by attack helicopters)

It blends hip hop, funk rock and folk styles which is pretty unusual. It’s a half human half cartoon band that often comments on the music industry.

Lyrics:
Feel good
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good, change, change, change, change)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good, change, change, change, change)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)

City's breaking down on a camel's back
They just have to go 'cause they don't know wack
So, while you fill the streets, it's appealing to see
You won't get undercounted 'cause you're damned and free
You got a new horizon, it's ephemeral style
A melancholy town where we never smile
And all I wanna hear is the message beep
My dreams, they got her kissing 'cause I don't get sleep, no

Windmill, windmill for the land
Turn forever, hand in hand
Take it all in on your stride
It is ticking, falling down
Love forever, love is free
Let's turn forever, you and me
Windmill, windmill for the land
Is everybody in?

Laughin' gas, these hazmats, fast cats, linin' 'em up like ass cracks
Play these ponies at the track, it's my chocolate attack
Shit, I'm steppin' in the heart of this here (yeah)
Care Bear reppin' in harder this year (yeah), watch me as I gravitate
Yo we gon' ghost town this Motown, with yo' sound, you in the blink
Gon' bite the dust, can't fight with us, with yo' sound, you kill the Inc
So, don't stop, get it, get it (yeah) until you're cheddar-headed
And watch the way I navigate, ha, ha, ha-ha, ha (ha, ha, ha, ha)

Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)

Windmill, windmill for the land
Turn forever hand in hand
Take it all in on your stride
It is ticking, fallin' down
Love forever, love is free
Let's turn forever, you and me
Windmill, windmill for the land
Is everybody in?

Don't stop, get it, get it (sha, sha-ba-da)
Peep how your captain's in it (sha-ba-da, feel good)
Steady, watch me navigate (sha, sha-ba-da, feel good)
Don't stop, get it, get it (sha, sha-ba-da)
Peep how your captain's in it (sha-ba-da, feel good)
Steady, watch me navigate (sha, sha-ba-da, feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da (feel good)

The Common Pile dataset interests me because it’s ethical training data that’s an 8 TB corpus of openly licensed and public domain text for training large language models. FineBooks, a new OCR model collaboration between Hugging Face and EleutherAI, found open OCR models are good enough for reprocessing/adding books to the Common Pile.

Local LLM article summary: FineBooks, are open OCR models good enough to unlock historical knowledge?

This article details the FineBooks project, which is rigorously testing open-weights OCR models against a ground-truth dataset pulled from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The core argument is that these modern, publicly available models are vastly superior to older pipelines, making the re-processing of massive public domain collections—like the BHL—a high-leverage opportunity for open-source AI training.

For r/LeftistsForAI, this is fundamentally about the quality and democratic nature of the training data. The article explicitly mentions that poor OCR quality can lead to a 30% efficiency loss in a trained model—that’s a material cost right there. By re-processing the BHL, FineBooks isn't just making text available; they are significantly upgrading the raw material for open-source LLMs, directly improving the quality of the Common Pile corpus.

The evaluation confirms that for general LLM training, these open models are excellent. While they still struggle with scholarly fidelity (silently modernising archaic features like the long-s), they are good enough to close the gap on older datasets. The project’s biggest finding, however, is that the models are technically capable but institutionally constrained. They often output Markdown or plain text, sidestepping the legacy ALTO XML format that most library systems require for word-level coordinates.

As a lighthearted follow up on the theme of AI replacing bosses, this video is quite entertaining as a demonstration of where we’re up to in terms of AI being able to manage a physical product business. A lemonade stand is the type of project that kids can work out, but it becomes surprisingly elaborate when you pass the management to Claude and ChatGPT.

Some aspects are impressive, but other aspects indicate there’s quite a long way to go. One of the most noticeable differences is there’s (for obvious reasons) no emotional reaction at all to massively overspending or having to delay launch. Sometimes that could be an advantage, they don’t perform badly under stress, but it makes me realise the benefits of just the right amount of anxiety.

Also it doesn’t seem like the business books they digested were much use at all. There doesn’t seem to be any proper assessment of what profit margin is desirable, how much they’d expect to make in revenue, and therefore how they should limit costs on the stall itself. LLMs might not be good at capitalism lol.

Did you follow any of the AI vending machine business experiments? Some of those shenanigans were hilarious.

“GLM-5.2 has 744 billion parameters, and colibrì, a 1,300-line C engine, runs it on a laptop with 25GB of RAM and no GPU.

This video explains the loophole that lets a frontier open source LLM run on hardware it should never fit in.
The trick lives inside the mixture of experts (MoE) architecture. Only about 40 billion of GLM-5.2's parameters do any work per token, so colibri pins the dense core in RAM and streams the other 21,504 experts off the SSD, exactly when the router asks for them. We walk through the routing, the expert cache, why llama.cpp memory-mapping can't keep up, and the real tokens-per-second numbers from a budget SSD all the way to an M5 Max.”
…
Chapters:
00:00 A 744B model on a 25GB laptop
00:52 The impossible math of loading GLM-5.2
01:50 Mixture of experts: the trick inside the model
03:01 Streaming experts off the SSD, step by step
04:22 Why Ilama.cpp memory-mapping falls short
05:06 The brutal speed benchmarks
06:17 Where expert streaming is headed
07:13 Should you actually run it?”

***

LLM summary/analysis of video:

This GLM 5.2 breakthrough, powered by the Colibri runtime, isn't just making a bigger model fit on a laptop; it's fundamentally changing the relationship between computational scale and economic constraint.

MECHANISM: FROM BLIND SEARCH TO EXPERT ROUTING

Traditional models are monolithic, forcing every single token to touch every single weight in the entire structure. This is inefficient by default.

Colibri uses a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. Instead of a single giant block of neurons, the model is composed of 256 smaller, specialized "experts." A tiny router then selects only the 8 most relevant experts for each incoming token. The other 248 stay asleep.

This means that out of 744 billion parameters, only about 5% are actively doing the heavy lifting per token. This targeted activation is the structural loophole.

MATERIAL SHIFT: THE SSD AS ACTIVE MEMORY

The real genius lies in how Colibri manages these experts. Instead of demanding that all 370 GB of weights reside in fast, expensive RAM, it treats the SSD not as passive storage, but as an active, high-speed memory tier.

For every token, the system doesn't just blindly read from the disk; it knows exactly which 8 experts it needs, allowing it to request those specific byte offsets asynchronously. It’s a predictive, intelligent retrieval system.

This decouples scale from the traditional RAM bottleneck. The individual user is no longer constrained by the fixed, expensive memory capacity of the data center; they are constrained only by the local storage budget.

POLITICAL ECONOMY: DECENTRALIZING THE COMPUTE MONOLITH

This is where the left needs to pay attention. By making the SSD a functional memory tier, Colibri achieves a profound material shift:

1. Challenging Centralization: It bypasses the need for the user to be a supplicant to the data centres fixed architecture. The power to run frontier-quality models drops out of the cloud and onto the desk.
2. Localised Cognitive Infrastructure: This is the crucial point. If the individual can run a massive, high-quality model locally, they are running a piece of localised cognitive infrastructure. The user gains a degree of autonomous computational agency.

Does this genuinely enable a form of self-governing, distributed computation?

***

Sources:

• colibri: https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri
• GLM-5.2 by Z.ai: https://z.ai
• antirez's ds4: https://github.com/antirez/ds4
• Ilama.cpp expert-cache proposals: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/issues/20757

“The SNP (Scottish government) has joined the Scottish Greens in calling for a Scottish Government-led moratorium on AI data centre developments, following a vote by the party’s National Council.”

If those 2 parties want a moratorium it will happen, because they have a majority.

I did actually sign the petition for this. I’m not automatically against data centres, but at the moment they’re being decided one by one without a joined up strategy. This is major infrastructure, so that’s silly. It’s currently at the discretion of local councils and my local council is generally seems to be making poor decisions about various things.

Scotland does have potential to be one of the better locations for data centres from a global perspective: we need heat, we have water and often excess clean energy we can’t store. I expect that’s why Scotland has a wave of mammoth data centre applications. There are concerns though for example one of the proposed sites is on prime agricultural land. We need data centres but we also need to eat… Another one is massive compared to the little village it will be next to. https://aprs.scot/data-centre-map/

It also seems like the corporations might commit to doing things (like clean energy) and then not deliver eg https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/scotland-lanarkshire-village-ai-datacentre

What do you think about this pause?

Greetings everyone!

Welcome to subreddit.

This is the place to share images and videos of Britain’s most loyal ‘patriots’ talking shit.

We also allow memes mocking Reform, Restore, Reclaim, or whatever crackpot party the right-wing/neo-liberal flag nonces support and the bullshit that they spew out.

This is a left-wing space, welcoming socialists, anarchists, Marxists, Leninists and Maoists. This is a LGBTQ+ friendly subreddit.

Therefore any discrimination, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, or any other bullshit gets you hit with an immediate lifetime ban.

This subreddit is in solidarity with our siblings in Palestine, Zionism and any genocide apologia will once again; get you instantly banned.

Please read the rules before posting and let’s all stand together against fascism and ignorance.

This is my ear worm today

Who controls the past controls the present
And who controls the present controls the future

The battle for the past is for the future
Must be the winners of the memory war
Smash reach out and then grab the flower
At the end of the day their defeat will be for sure

Have you inside your memory the scene of the crime
If you don't have a clue then you're running out a time
Struggle continues while di sunshine
Past and the truth two of them you have to combine
Because books dem a burnt and documents are shredded
Cover ups are covered up in the name of the law
Presidents and royalty caught red handed
And you won't know about it for fifty years or more

Come pay attention to the re-educator
The battle for the past is now the battle for the future
Fire for the messengers of this fake nostalgia
Soon come judgement day

Who controls the past controls the present
And who controls the present controls the future
The history they teach is the voice of the victor
You need to look again you need to have a propaganda!
If truth is your price then come join the bounty hunters
Because truth make you the enemy of all these liars
Because books dem a burnt and documents are shredded
Cover ups are covered up in the name of the law
Presidents and royalty caught red handed
And you won't know about it for fifty years or more

Come pay attention to the re-educator
The battle for the past is now the battle for the future
Fire for the messengers of this fake nostalgia
Soon come judgement day

is your money making money
Are all the immigrants gone
are the eggs and the gasoline the price that you want
and if you told your children they don't have to be kind
cuz if they make good money then no one will
mind

if I promised you sunshine n Fortune
then you went broke in the rain
as the weather got colder would you invite me over
to come in and do it again

is your money making money like it did in the past
do you have enough weapons to kill twice as fast
do you dream about book bags being bolstered by Steel
and when you sold your country did you get a good deal

if I promised you sunshine n Fortune
and then you went broke in the rain
as the weather got colder would you invite me over
to come in and do it
again

is your money making money are your taxes so low
that your values and virtues will leave you alone
and you seem Mighty busy telling all what to do
is it freedom for all or freedom for you

if I promised you sunshine and Fortune
and then you went broke in the rain
as the weather got colder would you invite me over
to come in and do it again

as the weather got cold older
would you invite me over to come in and
do it again

I was searching YouTube re Scottish local government and got this. It’s a lot funnier than what I’d expected to find.

BTW what do you think about the idea of making local government more local? Going back to town/burgh councils, or giving community councils actual power to make decisions and organise stuff?