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by matheusmoreira 46 days ago
There is no doubt that AI is world changing technology. I'm not sure I want to go back to the world before LLMs. However, he's right to lament the impending demise of personal computing. Our computing freedom is being attacked on all fronts by governments and trillion dollar corporations alike, and things are not looking good for us. Our machines are increasingly locked down by rent-seeking corporations. Software is increasingly in the cloud. Thanks to remote attestation, we get ostracized from digital society if we take ownership of our machines. It's starting to look like the "you'll own nothing" future is actually coming.

I do hope the open weight models keep distilling the frontier models, and that powerful and unlocked computer hardware remains accessible to us mere mortals so that we may run them with no limitations in our own homes. That's optimistic though.
1 comments
bluegatty 46 days ago
Those are all fine points, but 'lack of open compute' isn't quite an AI issue.

Thanks to Chinese vendors, there's a ton of near Tier1 AI that we can all access.

Unlike Android where it's not feasible to use though it may be Open on some level.

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matheusmoreira 46 days ago
Not quite an AI issue, but they do intersect. They want us to pay them for "intelligence" on a metered basis, just like we pay for energy and water. They absolutely are an enemy of local computing freedom. The future they are designing is one where they hold all the computing power while we are literally priced out.
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bluegatty 45 days ago
I think your concerns are valid - but the decisive claims are not.

They're capitalist entities trying to capture value and control of a new thing they are introducing - yes - but that's a pretty normal thing, we get over that with competition, regulation etc.

This will happen over time - all device manufacturers, cloud providers are 'on our side!'

AWS and Apple want to commoditize the AI as much as you do.

So do the Chinese manufacturers, and really Nvidia and ASML as well.

So we, the proletariat can 'pit them against each other' in value chain competition!

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matheusmoreira 43 days ago
I hope you're right. I truly do.
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