Alt Text
Alt Text by @thorhop@sopuli.xyz
A vertical comic panel page. On top of the page a large text reads «THE MYTH OF “CONSENSUAL” PC BUILDING».
Underneath are two photos. To the left a photo of a man building a PC on top of a table and to the right a photo of ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman.
There are three text bubbles above the photos. One over the man and the PC he’s building, both stating «I CONSENT» and one over Sam Altman, stating “I DON’T”.
On the bottom of the panel, another large text reads «ISN’T THERE SOMEBODY YOU FORGOT TO ASK?”
This is the classic consent meme applied to the topical subject of Sam Altman being disappointed that us peasants have access to computer memory since he needs it all to feed his glutinous data centres.
Because typically the resources for a particular AI job need to be centralized in order to obtain usable speeds. Even a machine with a decent 16GB GPU is going to lose speed swapping in and out of system RAM - though it does allow for larger models - so machines in a LAN can’t currently split the workloads without significant efficiency losses. It’s also why AI boards are typically using soldered LPDDR rather than swappable DIMM’s (can’t get an AI CPU with a non-soldered board).
Peers over the Internet would be abysmally slow or untenable for many workloads, at least with the way a lot of stuff is built currently.
HOWEVER, that’s assuming monolithic non-specialized/optimized models. In the future as we see models built and trained for more specific jobs, it should be possible to have individual students run more as specialists and swap data. There are models that are specialized currently but not really an ecosystem for them:
If we think of something like creating an MMO (and assuming we didn’t include the moral issues of AI generation), then a pipeline could have different assets building a soundtrack, 3d models, scenes/animation per a script, character voicing, various dialog, 3d world space mechanics, etc all running from different clustered machines