This is a big part of why I’m not worried about this wave of AI.
It was all trained on consumer hardware. Lots of it, yes, at great expense… but brute force keeps ceding ground to smaller models built on that experience. Google went from a monolithic Go bot trained on historical games, to a much smaller Go bot trained by playing that bot and itself, to an even smaller bot that plays a wide variety of games. It’s just matrix math and we know we’re doing it badly. The endgame is running Not Hotdog on a Game Boy Camera.
On the other side, the fact you can run these on anything means we’re never going to stop it. This fight is over. Fantasies about Bing and OpenAI preventing anyone from rendering Bad Things™ only push people toward local models. Higher adoption creates a virtuous circle of streamlining and empowerment for anyone getting into the technology. And since porn was the first thing all these billion-dollar companies tried stopping, well, guess what any rando with a high-end GPU can crank out.
Oh right, forgot to mention: democratization will destroy most markets for what these programs crank out. You can’t sell ice to people with refrigerators.
This is a big part of why I’m not worried about this wave of AI.
It was all trained on consumer hardware. Lots of it, yes, at great expense… but brute force keeps ceding ground to smaller models built on that experience. Google went from a monolithic Go bot trained on historical games, to a much smaller Go bot trained by playing that bot and itself, to an even smaller bot that plays a wide variety of games. It’s just matrix math and we know we’re doing it badly. The endgame is running Not Hotdog on a Game Boy Camera.
On the other side, the fact you can run these on anything means we’re never going to stop it. This fight is over. Fantasies about Bing and OpenAI preventing anyone from rendering Bad Things™ only push people toward local models. Higher adoption creates a virtuous circle of streamlining and empowerment for anyone getting into the technology. And since porn was the first thing all these billion-dollar companies tried stopping, well, guess what any rando with a high-end GPU can crank out.
… phrasing.
Oh right, forgot to mention: democratization will destroy most markets for what these programs crank out. You can’t sell ice to people with refrigerators.