ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure

gross use of public infrastructure

I literally cant fault this, even steelmanning anti AI positions. What makes you say that?

Sometimes ago there was a Tom Scott video about the fasted accelerating car in the world, developed by a team with a vast majority of student. One remark stayed with me: "the goal is not to build a car, but to build engineer".

In that regard it's absolutely not a waste of public infra just like this car was not a waste.

It even used green power. Literally zero complains or outcry from the public yet. Guess we like progress, especially if it helps independence.

University and research clusters are built to run research code. I can guarantee this project is 10x as impactful and interesting as what usually runs on these machines. This coming from someone in the area that usually hogs these machines (numerical simulation). I'm very excited to see academic actors tackle LLMs.