Open source doesnt matter if you still need to make 100k year to have your own mediocre model.
There is no magic compression. There is no magic post training. Your phone or laptop will never do what you think its going to be able to.
There are limits to what consumer hardware will ever be able to run, in its current form. Open source isn't going to save us if they gatekeep access to hardware, which idk if you've been paying attention. They dont plan on making consumer grade hardware more powerful, they want to rent that power to you.
Technological serfdom is coming if they get their way.
You don't need to be able to self-host it. It's fine to pay someone else for it. If it's open-source, competition will ensure inference providers support it well enough, and if an open-source provider is dumb enough to nerf their model for (useful) coding tasks, there's plenty of incentive for inference companies to do some lightweight finetuning to restore the capability.
I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent is very important.
Personal computing democratized the means of (software) production and enabled real upward class mobility for a lot of people.
The efforts happening now are threatening to completely lock up the ability to compute locally, seizing the means of production from us. That must not happen.
your parent said "You don't need to be able to self-host it", you countered with "I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent"
Bro, I don't know what you're disagreeing with, the two statements can and should be true at the same time. It's not only unnecessary but also impossible for everyone to self-host, for the vast majority this isn't a necessity and it shouldn't be. Actually being stuck on self-hosting for all is mighty silly from economics standpoint, pushing on it can ruin the entire enterprise.
But being able to self host? Sure why not, if you insist and are ready to suffer... knock yourself out, but that's a socially insignificant act which doesn't scale, good only as a backup option.
Because "you don't need to be able to self-host it" is a constraint, I'm arguing that you DO need to be able to self host it, not that difficult. Every thing being rented out instead of available for ownership is nothing but neofeudalism, which we are rapidly spiraling into.
> pushing on it can ruin the entire enterprise.
I'm supposed to feel sorry for the trillion dollar corporations that hoovered up all of human knowledge, for profit, and are now the direct reason why 32GB of RAM is now $500 instead of $90, all while renting compute back out to us, making it more and more expensive to actually own hardware, a fundamental privilege that enabled all of this technology in the first place?
Let the "enterprise" be ruined. It'll be for the better.
> Let the "enterprise" be ruined. It'll be for the better.
Maybe my choice of words was a bit confusing, I actually had in mind the "enterprise" of making sure people have access to capable and uncensored models. As far as the enterprises you dislike, I don't use them, I do use hosted models but not theirs.
> I'm supposed to feel sorry for the trillion dollar corporations that hoovered up all of human knowledge, for profit, and are now the direct reason why 32GB of RAM is now $500 instead of $90, all while renting compute back out to us, making it more and more expensive to actually own hardware, a fundamental privilege that enabled all of this technology in the first place?
No disagreement here, I've been writing about it for months now. There's a lot to say about it but it's a long discussion that will have to be focused on economics and politics, something HN isn't fond of.
All I can say, is that you're right, the goal is to have abundant and cheap hardware and a lot of other things too. But in order to get there we will have to learn to pick, choose and support hosted models that care about our freedom to know things.
Ah, that makes sense now thank you. I had assumed by enterprise you were referring to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc.
> Technological serfdom is coming if they get their way.
I'm deeply concerned about this. We're seeing all these moves towards remote attestation, identity verification. Now we're being literally priced out of hardware...