Not just building GPU infrastructure to serve inference at scale, but also constraining GPU infrastructure and pricing it out of reach for individuals who wish to pursue open models.

I'm not sure what entirely to do about it, but the fact that some providers still release open models is hopeful to me.

From what I could tell (Corridor Digital mentioned this as well), actual pros use local models through ComfyUI, rather than prompting these proprietary models.

Control and consistency, as well as support for specialized workflows is more important, even if it comes at the expense of model quality.

Because from what I understand, the whole premise of billionaires giving AI all their money is

1. AI succeeds and this success is defined by they will be able to raise prices really high

2. AI fails and receives a bailout

But if there are alternatives I can run locally, they can't raise prices as high because at some point I'd rather run stuff locally even if not state of the art. Like personally, USD 200 a month is already too expensive if you ask me.

And the prices can only go up, right?

There's two scenarios going forward that I can see.

Either there's a massive reduction of inference and training costs due to new discoveries and then those big hardware hoarders have no moat anymore or nothing new is discovered and they won't be able to scale forward.

Either way it doesn't sound good for them.

You are saying it needs at most minor tweaks when used for something specific like a product support channel?

For the long-term value of a horribly overpriced and debt ridden corporation it matters quite a lot if the catch up of open source to adequate is less than a decade in instead of several decades in some uses and a few more in others.

At the moment. AI company management is not so myopic and can see the risk that this could change.

FYI there are no open source models, only open weights. Open source means you get source code.

I think you are imagining a high-speed chase, and I agree with you in that case.

But what I was trying to describe is a "mild mannered" getaway driver. Not fleeing from cops, not speeding. Just calmly driving to and from crimes. Should we punish the road makers for enabling such nefarious activity?

(it's a rhetorical question; I'm just trying to clarify the point)

Then only foreign developers will be able to work with these kinds of technologies... the tools will still be made, they'll just be made by those outside jurisdiction.

Unless they released a model named "Tom Cruise-inator 3000," I don't see any way to legislate that intent that would provide any assurances to a developer that their misused model couldn't result in them facing significant legal peril. So anything in this ballpark has a huge chilling effect in my view. I think it's far too early in the AI game to even be putting pen to paper on new laws (the first AI bubble hasn't even popped, after all) but I understand that view is not universal.

Historically it's the other way around - limited liability for corporations let juries feel free to award absurdly high judgments against them.

So can image gen systems.

As a former VFX person, I know that a couple of shows are testing out how/where it can be used. (currently its still more expensive than trad VFX, unless you are using it to make base models.)

Productivity gains in the VFX industry over the last 20 years has been immense. (ie a mid budget TV show has more, and more complex VFX work than most movies that are 10 years old, and look better.)

But, does that mean we should allow any bad actor to flood the floor with fake clips of whatever agenda they want to push? no. If I as a VFX enthusiast gets fooled by GenAI videos (Picture area done deal, its super hard to stop reliably) then we are super fucked.

You do realise you are talking about a petition started seven years ago by a small diocese that got less than a thousand signatures?

Okay, so they're repeating an anti-immigrant neonazi talking point because they're "libertarian". Okay.

> are often used to make fake news, slander people, or other illegal content.

That's not how these models are used in the the vast majority of cases.

This argument is like saying "kitchen knives are often used to kill people so we need to ban the sale of kitchen knives". Do some people use kitchen knives to kill? Sure. Does it mean they should be banned because of that?

> I agree research is exempt from copyright, but people cashing in on unpaid artists works for commercial purposes is a copyright violation predating the DMCA/RIAA. We must admit these models require piracy, and can never be seen as ethical. =3

So, may I ask - where exactly do you draw the line? For the sake of argument, let's imagine something like this:

    1. I scrape the whole internet onto my disk.
    2. I go through the text, and gather every word bigram, and build a frequency table.
    3. I delete everything I scraped.
    4. I use that frequency table (which, compared to the exabytes of the source text I used to build it, is a couple hundred megabytes at most) to build a text generator.
    5. I profit from this text generator.

We can generate more energy, fabricate more computer chips and collect more water, but the impact on labor will be irreversible.