Owners, not renters: Mozilla's open source AI strategy  | The Mozilla Blog
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The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads somewhere I don’t want to go. We’re drifting toward a worl

In my view, this is the exact right approach. LLMs aren’t going anywhere, these tools are here to stay. The only question is how they will be developed going forward, and who controls them. Boycotting AI is a really naive idea that’s just a way for people to signal group membership.

Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.

  • dat_math [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Think of it like seti@HOME or bittorrent but for compute. Most computers are not working at 100% capacity at all times. So, if you had a network where people would run a background service that shared a bit of their computing power you could have a huge distributed computing network.

    Yeah, I skimmed the petals repo. Again, I don’t think there’s a significant mechanical barrier to overcome, but I do see an economic one. Letting my gpu sit idly when I’m not actively using it is essentially free, but to convince me to run it for a project like petals I’d have to earn something valuable enough to offset my cost for power for the gpu and cooling my house. Is the only value returned by joining the petals network the capacity to run my own distributed training/inference on the same network? Would usage be balanced by some kind of ratio system similar to private tracker groups or have others proposed a kind of cryptocurrency? Aside: how does the network verify that the results of distributed computation are genuine and that a user isn’t taking advantage of the network (or is this not possible because it would corrupt a user’s own results as well?)?

    Sorry I have a lot of questions and not enough time to read the petals paper linked on the repo until tomorrow. If the answers are “read the damn paper”: bean

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I mean we already do this for stuff like torrents, I don’t think it would be that different. The whole thing with scale, you amortize the work across many machines, so there’s not a big cost for any individual. And getting something valuable would be having some app that does useful things presumably. So, you use the app and while you use it, you’re also contributing some resources. From my reading, that’s what Mozilla is proposing. They want to add features to the browser that would improve experience, and maybe when you use the browser you can do a bit of computing right through it to help the training network.

      There are plenty of algorithms for doing things like load balancing, there’s even stuff like homomorphic encryption which allows doing computing on encrypted data. So, you could be sending out something to be processed without people even knowing what it is they’re processing. The way to verify something is genuine is usually by giving it to at least two nodes to compute and comparing. These are all solved problems with existing implementations in wide use.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          We’ll see what they actually do, of course, I’m just showing that there is absolutely a viable path towards something like this. Actually starting a discussion going about this is the first step, and I think it’s a very good thing that Mozilla is doing something constructive in this space. This is far more productive than people just whinging about how much they hate AI.

          • chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            You are defending Mozilla’s widely unpopular plans and changes based on ideas Mozilla isn’t even working on.

            If you want to share your ideas, make an effort post, don’t use them legitimize whatever Mozilla is doing.

            • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              I wholeheartedly agree with everything in the Mozilla’s statement and if you’re upset about that then that’s en entirely a you problem. They’re proposing doing community driven development of open models, and I don’t see anybody else talking about it. Shitting on what they’re doing without providing any tangible alternatives is not productive. What they’re doing might be unpopular in your bubble, but it doesn’t detract from the value of what’s being proposed in any way.

              If you actually have any constructive criticisms of what Mozilla is proposing then by all means share them.