Post
There are a *ton* of these open source Chinese models, and they all perform like crazy. China does a lot of AI optimization because US embargoes prevent Chinese AI companies from accessing the most powerful GPUs, so Chinese coders tighten up their code and outperform US companies even though they're using far less powerful computers.
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After the crash, everyone will be in a similar position to those Chinese AI optimizers: Chinese companies can't buy advanced GPUs because of the embargo; and everyone else won't be able to buy advanced GPUs because the AI crash will have cratered the economy for a generation.
But there is *so* much room at the bottom. Optimized models do really impressive things on *really* cheap hardware.
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How cheap? Well, here's hardware hacker Pete Warden demoing a chatbot that you talk to and that talks back to you - and it's running on Synaptics System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that costs "low single digit dollars":
This is basically a little special-purpose Alexa, except it doesn't connect to the internet at all (and therefore doesn't leak any of your data). In Warden's demo,
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the gadget is a button-sized voice assistant that is meant to be integrated into a dishwasher, which can interpret the dishwasher's manual for you. If your dishes come out dirty or if the drain gets clogged, you press the button, describe your issue in pretty vague terms, and it instantly speaks aloud all the troubleshooting steps to deal with it.
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This privacy-preserving, cheap-like-borscht component adds a voice-activated, conversational assistant to a device, sipping power like the clock on your microwave, running on a processor that costs less than a pack of AA batteries. It's *seriously* fucking cool.
There's going to be a lot of this AI, after the AI goes away - just like there was a lot of the web after the dotcom crash, when, overnight, San Francisco had infinity office-space, servers, and techies going begging.
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@pluralistic
The thing that I wonder about is this: What's going to happen to the buildings that housed the pointless data centers? Can any of those be repurposed, and how?
One thought I had was wondering if it could house an infrastructure-level megabattery site. My roommate, who once worked for a company that made such a site, figures that a data center far enough out in the middle of nowhere could theoretically be the controlling station for such a site.
I'm on a tour with my new book *Enshittification*!
Catch me next in #LosAngeles, #Calgary and #SanFrancisco!
Full schedule with dates and links at:
https://pluralistic.net/tour
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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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