Comment by matheusmoreira
16 hours ago
Pointless. Silicon fabs currently cost billions of dollars. They are single points of failure. Even if the market starts trending towards openness, governments can just regulate a backdoor into these fabs. They have every incentive in the world to do it. Democratized access to cryptography is subversive.
We need some kind of 3D printer that can print computer chips. We need the ability to make our own hardware at home, just like we can make our own software at home. Democratized electronics fabrication. That's the only way we'll be saved.
While I, for the most part, agree to this in principle, at the moment, general compute hardware production is relatively safe (or so it seems).
But when it comes to humongous costs, the fact that even "open source AI models" don't have their training data available (the actual "source") is one thing, but even if it was, it'd be impossible to retrain a model "at home". But if data was available, I am sure any of the existing free software foundations, or a new one, could rally users around sponsoring one DC.
We are back in the "mainframe" days where top-end compute is accessible only to few (with lots of money).