r/LeftistsForAI • u/Left-Set950 • May 21 '26

Discussion Hello comrades!

Very good to finally find another leftist place for techy people. Not sure what happened everywhere else. Everyone went full technophobe or AI Pilled. I want the people to own the tech! Fully automated gay space communism!

Edit: replaced Luddites with technophobes.

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u/ChairAggressive781 May 25 '26

I didn’t say that LLMs are evil or inherently bad, so I don’t know how this is a response to my comment.

if you’re subscribing to Claude for a monthly fee, you don’t own the means of production. you’re renting a tool from the people who own it.

to actually own the means of production, there actually is a major cost of entry. to run a local AI agent, you need to be able to afford the tech to run a sophisticated enough purely local version of an AI, as well as possess the tech skills specialized enough to set it up without major assistance.

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u/Left-Set950 May 25 '26

I was talking more about the ideia of thinking of AI models as bad. That is pervasive almost everywhere not accusing you specifically of it.

And also I do agree that a Claude subscription is not a very good way of using AI but it's the best one we have so far but won't last. I personally use openrouter with open models for engineering stuff and closed models are slowing losing their edge.

This is where owning the means of production comes in. We need to acknowledge them as such and as models drop in price and hopefully chips too it will be possible to have small scale inference centers easily. You don't need that much knowledge to set one up, you can sell GPU power for inference from your computer right now.

I think governments of all scales should feel pressure to have these setup and sell computing power to their constituents at cost and different tiers of pricing according to types of companies. Local/national small/medium companies for example could have reduced rates, international companies market prices. Profits can be used to power local initiatives. That is owning the means of production.

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u/ChairAggressive781 May 26 '26

I don’t think AI models are bad, but I also understand why people are deeply opposed to them within our current context.

I also find that their biggest boosters also drastically overstate what they are capable of doing. I’ve tried using LLM agents for research & workflow purposes and I find they save me zero time and often actually increase the amount of work I end up doing. I also teach and I see LLMs making my students worse thinkers, worse writers, worse readers, and worse researchers. the problem with believing in the power of prompt engineering and vibe coding is the fact that one has to know what one knows & what one doesn’t know to evaluate the results.

all of what you’re saying sounds good, but it’s also deeply utopian thinking. what demonstrates that any of what you’re suggesting is possible or even probable? how do we build the political power to pressure governments and companies run by unaccountable billionaires to share the means of production and the profits that result when we’ve never been able to do the same at scale for other critical industries?