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Comment by ofou | Hacker News Reader

At this point, all the computing power is concentrated among various companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, etc.

It seems to me it would be much safer and more intelligent to create a massive model and distribute the benefits among everyone. Why not use a P2P approach?

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Backprop is neither commutative nor associative.

What do you mean? There's a bunch of proof-of-concepts such as Hydra, peer-nnet, Learnae, and so on.

The Wikipedia article goes into more detail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning

just because it has a PoC or a wiki article doesn’t mean it actually works

In my area, internet and energy are insanely expensive and that means I'm not at all willing to share my precious bandwidth or compute just to subsidize someone generating Rule 34 porn of their favorite anime character.

I don't seed torrents for the same reason. If I lived in South Korea or somewhere that bandwidth was dirt cheap, then maybe.

There is a way to achieve load balancing, safety, and distribution effectively. The models used by Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify have proven to be generally successful. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology is the future; even in China, people are streaming videos using this technology, and it works seamlessly. I envision a future where everyone joins the AI revolution with an iPhone, with both training and inference distributed in a P2P manner. I wonder why no one has done this yet.

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