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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

So you are contending that individuals cannot run advanced models? What brought you to that conclusion?

Secondly, are you contending that progress in model efficiency and hardware just stops at whatever level you think is sufficient to prevent individuals or organizations from acquiring sufficient resources to run advanced models?

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No. And that’s not necessary for my position. I have 4 Mac studios. I run large models and am building propelcompute.com to let people self manage clusters of their own hardware or combine hardware to run models. It’s not the models that are the problem. It’s that the people building them are shielded from the consequences of what they are building. I would say if you self host a model and it takes down a power grid you are personally liable for the consequences. I believe in broad distribution of AI and advancing its capabilities but not in a manner that socializes the harms and privatizes the gains which is what we have now.

Ok but this response has nothing to do with your other comment. What exactly were you trying to say?

Just because I can run near frontier level open weight models doesn’t mean I can continue to train models of equal or superior performance, doing that requires massively more hardware. And even if I did, that doesn’t mean I can serve those models to millions or billions of users.

My point is that I would rather have 1000 labs training and serving inference than 2 because that would distribute the wealth creation more broadly rather than allowing OpenAI and anthropic to capture all the value, it would drive more innovation as a broader set of experiments are pursued in parallel.

Again you're shifting your arguments and not addressing your initial response.

How am I shifting my argument. They are corollary arguments. Massive data processing is necessary for frontier model training and inference. If OpenAI and anthropic are behaving irresponsibly they we can limit their access the level of compute to train and serve models. That doesn’t imply individuals can’t run frontier level models or should be prohibited from doing so. That’s a coherent position across a spectrum of possible scenarios: I look at the behavior of the people running the model and would limit their ability to train and run models if they act in unsafe ways.

Absolutely. Any AI could have a "legal team" (or conscience) that checks if any output and performed actions are permitted according to local (server location and client location) laws, so not violate human rights, Asimovs laws etc.

It's just that so far nobody cares about explicit checks because they cost resources or slow down the models.

I think it's more the noise, power consumption, local water consumption, and wholesale theft of creative works.

..."government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." -Lincoln, Gettysburg Adress

Unfortunately for AI, it still is. People still get to decide things at the city, town, village level.

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