This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's like people are starting to realize what the "luddites" were saying from the beginning.
This tech is not from the people to the people like the web, it's from big corpos to fuck you.
You won't have that tech, you will rent a highly modified one at best, built with the purpose to manipulate you.
Remember: there is a club out there, and you are not part of it.
Yeah, that's what I really don't get.
Why would any serious company think it's a great idea to outsource all your intelligence work to a handfull of US companies, making yourself wholely dependant on their goodwill and the goodwill of the US government?
It's the same delusion and corruption from a neoliberal corporate-whore political class that led to every country growing dependent on US tech companies, and Chinese manufacturing. They represent corporations; not their constituents.
If they'd all committed to open source and domestic companies for support and infra, the compounding effect of tens of thousands of engineers across governments working on linux and other FLOSS products would have made everything significantly cheaper and more efficient for all of them in a matter of years, compared to paying a foreign tech company for everything in perpetuity... and that's before you consider the multitude of other risks and vulnerabilities to national security.
As a good example look at the national police in france. They ditched windows for a custom linux distro and are now saving like 10 million or more euros a year. That's money that used to come from taxpayers to a foreign company and now that money can stay local and help improve the taxpayers lives instead of buying someone a 3rd yacht.
I wish all these European Linux projects would pool resources and create one good solution instead of each little country or even city DIYing their own solution.
So much this.
If we take a look at how the current AI behemoths got there, there’s a trail that goes straight from stolen data to proprietary models. They are charging their users for the privilege of using better aggregated public data. I hope that, when they raise prices once again and more and more users are cut off their larger models, people would understand where their place is, according to corpos.
You must be new to the IT then.
Clouds are only US, and they hold all the data and traffic for most of the world.
Before them, operating systems - everyone and their mother using Windows.
Phones? Google or Apple.
Communication? Teams. Shared documents? Exchange. Countries are balls and hair deep in the US since the 90s and nobody really cared to do anything about it. SAP, Sellsforce, Palantir, Jira, Confluence, Github, many others I'm not even aware of, all US companies holding everything that companies and countries need in the US way before any AI. Which doesn't even fucking work.
None of this is new.
Alternatives are there, but they need the money everyone sends to the US.
I just wish we could invest the time/money/resources into compressing AI and making it smaller and more efficient. I'd so much rather have a somewhat capable AI that can be run locally and offline, to outsource menial tasks to like alphabetizing spreadsheets and so basic image modification, than to have to upgrade my hardware constantly or use cloud based SaaS and/or have newer models that are more accurate in their predictions.
Of course that assumes a lot of things, like the intent to help people and not make money. Maybe someone in the Linux-sphere will make something.
There are efforts there. The new Deepseek 4 compresses a lot of its knowledge using something they call engrams. But it's unfortunately still too big for a consumer GPU.
Gemma 4 is small enough to run on your cellphone.
If your GPU has at least 8GB there are a lot of options for self hosting your own local models
Look into Bonsai Ternary models. They're "1.5" bit models that have to be trained that way (so no taking a full model and quantizing it down) but they are so efficient and they can run on CPU only, though it's a bit alpha at the moment. Really cool company and projects.
You have to create a specific environment for them though, using Bonsai's GGUF version which enables them to run properly. So unfortunately, no use in LM Studio yet.
I feel like there is a future of more targeted AI. At the moment something that does spreadsheets has to carry knowledge of programming and chemistry and lots of languages and this seems very heavy for what ultimately we need. A programming language focussed AT dedicated to Rust or Go or Java could potentially be quite a bit smaller especially if they focussed on algorithm snippet and auto complete smarts. There is definitely a market for smaller more targeted uses than these all encompassing chat bots where the goal is to move the state of the art on for existing algorithms.
I would like to see one integrated into a gnu os like linux where its only capability is to understand the os and guide you through it. No generation and no expertise outside the os exosystem. Maybe allow for it to be given the privelege to search the web. I would have it have capability to use other ais to perform other tasks so modules or whatnot could be added to give it more capability as a general computer butler type. Basically an os that acted like a start trek computer.
If I understand correctly, if we actually said "this model is great, let's put a pin in it", then it could be turned into a dedicated chip that would be much more efficient and perhaps even something that could get embedded in consumer hardware - but then you are just stuck with that model instead of "the next shiny new model" that they keep making.
This sent me for a loop.
I don't mind older stuff- my car is from the late '10s, and was a few years old when I got it, but blew my mind compared to my last car from the mid '00s. It has a back up camera! And even though my car is now nearing 10 years old, my experience hasn't changed. I'm still driving on mostly the same roads using the same method. And, when I have to get a new car, I'm sure I'll marvel at remote start or whatever.
But what's a bummer is the idea that someone else can decide that the hardware is no longer adequate- that "you must have the newest experience". I simply don't want that. Yes, it's annoying that my phone has to be plugged in to access carplay, while new cars have it over bluetooth, but I didn't even know it was that way until I got a rental recently.
So for AI, i'm okay with some shortcomings, because I can get to know the software and work with it, and if the shortcoming is a show stopper, then I can seek to upgrade or just not do what I was trying to do with my older gen AI.
But alas, the number must go up so the shareholders can rub their stocks or whatever
Most of us here think streaming is useful, despite the fact that streaming services are based on the idea that they own and control all access to media with you renting it from them, raising prices, shoving ads in your face, and removing media from the collection you’re renting from them. Our solution in this community is investing in the open source community around Jellyfin, the Arr stack, etc. so we can still enjoy the benefits of streaming services while owning our own content and not having to financially support companies we don’t agree with. I’d say a lot of us here who are happily using Jellyfin might otherwise have a streaming account if it didn’t exist. Admittedly, I used Netflix until I realized I had better options.
I think the same is true with local LLMs. Not all of us agree that LLMs are useful, but most of us here agree that a few tech giants tightly controlling LLMs and renting them to everyone is not going to be a good thing. Without self-hosted LLMs, many people who do find value using them will go ahead and financially support the rent-seekers who are hell bent on destroying the world for their own financial gain, as well as support them by sharing data that can be used to train their models. Even when you use the free tier of Chat GPT, for example, you’re supporting OpenAI by giving them your prompts that they can use to make their models better.
The ecosystem around running open weight models is rapidly evolving. I’m already running the Qwen 3.6 MoE model with the desktop beta of OpenCode on my gaming laptop and it’s pretty decent. Personally, I’ve found ways to use LLMs where they are actually useful and not just slop generators, though I initially thought they were useless before I spent a lot of time working with them. I’m all for supporting and contributing to this ecosystem so that people can use LLMs without giving their money and data to shithead psychopaths.
👏 This is the way to do it!
All AI should stop
It's not going to. Saying all AI should stop is like saying "all gunpowder should stop". Would everyone be better off if no one was using it? Maybe. But that's not going to happen at this point, and will give you a strategic disadvantage if you unilaterally disarm.
And to be clear I'm not talking about using AI to write a screenplay or something creative, I mean like using it to write software, to optimize industrial processes etc.
game theory, my friend. You can't stop if there's a chance someone else is building it. The only way to prevent this would be some sort of AI proliferation treaty like we have for nukes but nukes you test by making large explosions which are easy to detect. How are you going to detect some state backed group in a bunker somewhere disconnected from the internet developing a super AI? I'm fully against ai but the cat is already out of the bag.
Did anybody click the link to read the paragraph-long website text? Not only is it packed with assumptions about AI, it's simply unhinged.
The ability to... run intelligence systems without asking permission is of existential importance.
Existential?! No it's not.
This mirrors the delusion Sam Altman demonstrated when he insisted nobody could raise a child without AI.
I don't think they mean that having AI is vital. I think they mean it's vital that the rich not have a monopoly on AI.
Regardless whether AI is useful, its production would never have become this harmful if a rich person didn't think they could own it and make money with it. Making a thing publicly accessible makes it less attractive to capitalists.
"Of existential importance" literally means they think it's vital to existence.
The Chinese are doing a good job with open source ai models, especially Z. Ai, qwen and minimax, Google also got us something decent with gemma4, but yeah we need commercial AI to fail so we can get affordable access to vram...
Ollama.com
Install it and then "ollama run olmo-3:7b" gets you a local AI. If you want to run a smarter AI, then you're going to need a bigger parameter model, which is going to take more hardware to run.
Not many people can afford to run their own models.
Not the big ones, no. But I think almost everybody can run one with seven billion parameters.
The word "intelligence" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. LLMs lack any mechanism for true logical reasoning, and they always will by nature. This is why they fail at simple questions like "the car wash test". It's also why agents are expensive; They just flail around in token hungry "reasoning loops" until they happen to come across a correct solution. And it's why Claude Opus 4.8 (High) only scores 1.5% on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark at a cost of $10,000.
This kind of panic is just part of the hype. Wake me up when real intelligence arrives.
Thats why I'm actually at least for now hoping for the FOSS Chinese Frontier labs to make the breakthroughs since many of them still share research and open weight models
It depends what the game is, and I don't think the people that think they know what the game is know what the game is. They believe they are ushering in something that will set them apart from the general population but which in fact will probably not view them as anything of more value than the rest of us.
Mmm.. better that all AI fail.
Perhaps in Candyland, or maybe even the land of chocolate. But I think in the real world it's here to stay.
