NVIDIA is consuming a lifetime of YouTube per day and they probably aren’t even paying for Premium!

yt-dlp is a great tool that lets you download personal copies of videos from many sites on the internet. It’s a wonderful tool with good use cases, but it also made it possible for NVIDIA to acquire YouTube data in a way they simply could not have without it. I bring this up because one of the arguments I hear from Team “LLMs Should Not Exist” is that because LLMs can be used to do bad things, they should not be used at all.

I personally feel the same about yt-dlp as I do about LLMs in this regard: they can be used to do things that aren’t okay, but they are also benevolently used to do things that are useful. See also torrents, emulators, file sharing sites, Photoshop, social media, and just like…the internet itself. I’m not saying LLMs are perfect by any means, but this angle of attack doesn’t do much for me, personally.

They’re all exceptionally powerful tools.