I was interested to see some AI providers support crypto as their payment. I think we are entering a future where AI regulation puts more people on the darknet.
I was interested to see some AI providers support crypto as their payment. I think we are entering a future where AI regulation puts more people on the darknet.
Very cyberpunk and all, but how are AI regulations driving people to the darknet? You think those highly centralized billion dollar compute operations will secretly offer hidden services so people can ... what? Generate fucked up shit without restrictions? Lol, you could probably do traffic analysis with thermal imaging from a satellite.
> Generate fucked up shit without restrictions? No, that already exists and is not relevant IMO. My comment has nothing to do with what kind of content you generate.
The USA in specific has had a similar problem before with encryption being classified as a munition making very problematic to import or export encryption. That's actually pretty well documented in various pieces of Java code from Sun if you're curious, because different algorithms could not be part of the JRE/JDK that was distributed publicly.
Your mention of "highly centralized billion dollar compute operations" is actually related to the training of the models not the inference. Doing inference for many of these models is readily available at modest consumer hardware availability. There are many different ways to break up models (MoE) etc. The notion that you need a large super computer to do inference is unfounded.
Also, as a reminder, cryptocurrency mining has already proven this to be a thing. Some stay above ground, some go to geopolitical areas for shelter and some stay underground entirely.
For your entertainment I will also include a more simplified play-by-play of how this can play out in the near future:
1. OpenAI or some other USA based AI company continues to get outplayed by foreign models (Qwen, Deepseek)
2. Company cries to government
3. Government does a similar munitions or tariff to what we saw with encryption. Requires at the least anyone wanting to use AI gets one from the good boy list etc.
Now you either (a) use only AI from the good boy list and get outplayed in the global marketplace where our main export is global technology or (b) start acting like a Chinese citizen and using a VPN to access AI services not available only on the approved good boy list.
I will stop here because the rest is already very well documented with how this progresses and you get the same result as the darknet marketplaces (DNM). DNS censorship for AI services not on the good boy list. DNS censorship and legal pressure for VPNs that allow non-good-boy-list services, etc.
Why wouldn't someone change a few .com endpoints to .onion and keep it moving while you send some coin to a wallet?
There is no point in hosting Ai endpoint on a .onion domain. The point of Tor is privacy so if you want private Ai prompts just run a local model.
The philosophy behind Tor is maximum privacy, the most private way to do AI is locally.
There is a large market for people who need/use AI inference that have no interest in maintaining any of the infrastructure associated with it.
I thought Tor was already a honeypot?
Good times, when you were able to restrict information export through airport security... Don't forget Paypal and Wikileaks! Oh my bad, that was Bitcoin talk. That's not a currency anymore, but an asset. Like gold.
> Doing inference for many of these models is readily available at modest consumer hardware availability.
Then why exactly do I need a darknet service for that, instead of running it locally?
> Now you either (a) use only AI from the good boy list and get outplayed in the global marketplace where our main export is global technology or (b) start acting like a Chinese citizen and using a VPN to access AI services not available only on the approved good boy list.
Yeah, businesses are totally gonna buy tons of crypto to pay for outlawed services from China to stay competitive. Instead of running models locally as you suggested above. And of course the government will just fold in face of this crypto enabled libertarian hell.. I mean utopia. Can't beat math, amirite? There will be no more taxes, everyone will be free, armed and get as much fentanyl as they want, and we will just build a Dyson sphere around the sun to power this awesome new financial behemoth. It will be so worth it.
Better invest now!
> Good times, when you were able to restrict information export through airport security... Don't forget Paypal and Wikileaks! Oh my bad, that was Bitcoin talk. That's not a currency anymore, but an asset. Like gold.
All of that is irrelevant to the context at hand. How good, trade-worthy, or the value of a cryptocurrency is not directly tied to the amount of computation work done to mine the coin. All different combinations exist.
> Then why exactly do I need a darknet service for that, instead of running it locally?
For the same reason most people are completely capable of running a modest PostgreSQL server with Nginx or a few docker containers on their hardware, yet they pay for the service of other people doing it. The same is true for backup, storage, and a plethora of other services they gladly fork over a few dollars for.
It being over the darknet is not a techncial requirement, it's an economic / market requirement.
> Yeah, businesses are totally gonna buy tons of crypto to pay for outlawed services from China to stay competitive
They already gladly look the other way and do shady things to procure data.
> Instead of running models locally as you suggested above.
Weird, when they tried to do that the DNS resolution for the domain name failed. Guess they'll fire up their VPN to start grabbing the model, etc. Maybe just by AICoin and move on?
> And of course the government will just fold in face of this crypto enabled libertarian hell.
For about 15 years you have been able to go into a .onion and grab whatever you what on a DNM. Many have been taken down. You can currently go on a .onion domain and grab whatever you want.
> I mean utopia. Can't beat math, amirite?
They seem able to catch a DNM every once in a while, but there are always a dozen or so viable and active alternatives.
> There will be no more taxes, everyone will be free, armed and get as much fentanyl as they want
I'm fairly certain the United States is getting as much fentanyl as it wants already. You can walk to some place in any city and get it in pill form quickly and cheaply. How much involvement the DNMs have in that right now I don't know. In the past some DNMs have policed that and some provided "quality testing" to verify the lack of presence of fentanyl in other substances.