[Davidzheng]

Is the total compute capacity outside of meta, google, amazon, anthropic, oai and x is higher than even the capacity of any of them? In any case, there's no chance a public collaboration gets to anthropic levels of compute even if communication were no issue.

[kelnos]

Is the issue that training with less compute takes more time? Or is it just not possible? I think a collective using distributed training could tolerate the idea that it takes 10x as long as Anthropic to train a model, or whatever.

[mike_hearn]

It's possible but it's not linear. A modern AI training cluster is a supercomputer that uses very different architectures and hardware to a bunch of small PCs connected via normal networking. The networking advantage alone kills any chance of decentralized training.