Both Ubuntu and Fedora have made it official: support is coming soon for running local generative AI instances.
An epic and still-growing thread in the Fedora forums states one of the goals for the next version: the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Objective. It is causing some discontent, and at least one Fedora contributor, SUSE’s Fernando Mancera, has resigned.
I mean, it sounds like a tool they occasionally find useful and don’t use otherwise. I’m not sure how “occasionally use a tool good enough for my purposes” is a waste. Whether it’s the most efficient application of that electricity is a different question, but without knowing their particular scenarios I can’t really compare whether other tools use less electricity for the same purpose.
(Yes, of course, “just do it all in your brain” is even more efficient, but if that’s an argument against utilities, you probably shouldn’t waste electricity on Lemmy either)
If I have a tool that consumes resources whether I use it or not, and I rarely, if ever, use it, that can be a net waste. Nothing in this world exists in a vacuum. You mentioned wasting electricity yourself, then failed to count it, for example.
Using resources does not equal wasting them. I find that tool uses an exceptional amount of resources, electrical, cognitive, and others, to achieve a goal that can typically already be achieved with tools that are older, better, more well established, and that use dramatically less resources.
Burning lumber in an abandoned alley would be a more efficient resource use than some of these AI applications.