Comment by rzerowan
10 days ago
As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them. So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use. In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al. Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov.
I hope that open models will dominate. The difficult part to reconcile for me is the amount of compute that's required to create and run such models. Small models are fine, I run local llms 27b param on a gpu, but it's not even close to frontier in capability. Who wants to drop $40k+ on hardware to run these things. Companies, maybe/perhapts. On the other hand, to run a DB I can get a server for $3k and handle tons of traffic on it and other things too.
Has anyone tried to run a data center as a Co-Op?
A data center or a cloud? It's not difficult to find a good data center to colo at. The problem is then you have to bring your own hardware, technicians, and sysadmins.
However, if you don't trust cloud providers or inference providers for whatever reason then you probably aren't going to be excited to enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own. There are already reasonably priced options to rent bare metal from a cloud provider.
The only way I see it working is if it's a bunch of medium to large sized businesses getting together to be able to rent out the spare capacity on hardware that they physically control. So an AWS equivalent where each rack is owned by a different company and retail VMs migrate between them transparently. But I question the overall economics of such an arrangement.
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I was thinking that would be great, too. What would be the equivalent for the property developer: one gpu server is 450k.
Would actually be a good biz model for the Colo facilities that keep shutting down as everyone moves to the big cloud providers.Now if they can get their hands on enough GPUs and RAM.
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coopcloud.tech ?
I believe until the hardware designs catch up to be more commodized ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos. Designs (like Google TPUs equivalent) would also need to evolve to be more memory dense to be able to handle them. Untill then it seems will be system time shares for the larger models , probably with a bring your own model and pay as you go.
> ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos
I don't see it happening. A current gen GPU with a huge and fast block of memory isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close. With cryptocurrency, mass small sha256 hashing was a totally different kind of computation.
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There might be a community effort at some point. This happened in chess where the community recreated and then improved on Alpha Zero. You could run small training chunks on your machine. Some people donated thousands of hours of server time.
They never will. The only reason China releases open weights is because they can't compete on frontier models. Whoever has the frontier model has no incentive to give it away for free.
They have signed a non-binding agreement to potentially cooperate on AI supply chains. It's hardly a declaration of fealty, nor does it have any practical impact on the use of Chinese models in the near term. I'd view this more as hedging their bets for the future.
> It's hardly a declaration of fealty
As a European, the way I see it, Europe declared fealty to the US and relinquished its sovereignty a long time ago, sadly.
Also, the way these agreements tend to work is that you agree that you won't source from the 'enemy side' i.e. China. It works this way for NATO and it will work the same way here.
>As a European, the way I see it, Europe declared fealty to the US and relinquished its sovereignty a long time ago, sadly.
No such declaration was ever made. Europe has just failed to compete.
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This is beyond ridiculous.
At the same historical turning point when Europeans are finally waking up to the need to become less dependent on their so called US ally for weapons production and security, they are immediately choosing to become dependent on the next layer of critical infrastructure.
Instead of learning the obvious lesson, Europe seems ready to purchase the future from whoever Washington allows it to purchase from. It used to be the guns, now it's the AI.
It is so idiotic and short sighted that you can barely even blame anyone who keeps exploiting this over and over again. It is always the same story.
Europe has been burning furniture to keep the house warm for so long that an entire generation now thinks that chopping wood is for suckers.
Chopping wood is for suckers. Half your woodpile will get redistributed to strangers who just moved in down the road.
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EU is very lucky USA still has very strict immigration policy. If USA made it easy for highly skilled professionals to emigrate there then there would be almost no one capable left here.
EU countries are in many cases far stricter.
I honestly think this is not true.
big misconception
open source != open weights
open weights model is like... Winamp for example. it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR. They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market. they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.
It doesn’t look like "the EU" has signed anything, just that a couple EU countries independently accepted to join the summit.
europe2031.ai
Was looking for this. It’s a great short story (it starts with real events and then predicts the future) leading to European fealty to US . Seems increasingly plausible.
European fealty to the US has existed for decades.
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> [Washington] piles pressure on The Hague to halt ASML’s remaining exports and servicing of its DUVi machines.
> The Commission backs the Dutch [...]. The European position fragments before it has properly formed.
That the EU would, after recognizing AI's value, freely give up control of its few advantages to the US, despite of this being a conventional trade issue which the EU has experience with, seems like a very pessimistic assumption.
(I stopped reading after that part.)
Germany and Netherlands signed alone, not as EU block.
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