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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:
the local models discourse is always laughable to me. pre-ai piracy culture wasn't free of vice but by and large the community of people that stuck around and the prestige rewarded prosocial archive building. the early waves of what that look like for local models is... not great. the cost is much higher, not just grabbing a couple flash drives from walmart, and the endgame for the most prosocial groups are that we basically share finetunes of whatever comes our way from the information giants. old style piracy worked despite the intervention of capital - the configuration of power was such that anyone could rip a cd if they wanted to. the independent information communities that would be called 'piracy' for local models can only exist with the support of capital with the unimaginable costs of training, finetuning, and hosting the models.
the simplest answer to "what about local models" is that "it stops being a marginally profitable thing for the information giants to do to undercut each other and becomes a permanent underclass pressure-release valve that is just far enough behind the frontier models to not pose a threat to potential profitability but reduces the appearance of monopoly." there could be some kind of pirate local model independence sect that cluster computes smaller domain-specific models, that could be rad, but so far i'm not seeing anything like that emerging, local model communities are gross and minimally generative.