I have been keenly watching for locally-run AIs. This includes the price point for running 70b models, such as the one recently announced by Switzerland. I've also been looking at what it would take to run these in much smaller compute, such as microcontrollers.

However, fine-tuning may be run locally -- what are you thinking about in terms of training?

"At some point your OS will ship with a local model, your system will have access to some Intelligence APIs, and that's that."

There's a secondary effect that I had not even discussed in detail here. I don't know how to explain it concisely because it requires reframing a lot of things just to be able to see it, let alone to understand it as a problem.

Let me see how concise I can be:

1. There are non-financial capital such as social capital, knowledge capital, political capital, natural capital, etc.

2. The propensity is to convert non-financial capital into financial capital at the expense of the other forms of capital. I think this is the core dynamic driving enshittification (beyond how Cory Doctrow described it when he coined it).

3. While LLMs and AIs can be designed to enhance the human experience, right now, the propensity is to deploy them in a way that does not develop social and knowledge capital for the next generation.

Interesting points.

1. Expanding in more detail, my feeling (absent correct truth obviously) is that we'll find a Pareto Optimal point of intelligence. At that point my feeling, again unproven, is that with available hardware fine tuning open weight models would not be too difficult.

Training from scratch? I'm really not sure that's something an individual can do. But at some pareto optimal point I do think small organizations can train models.

I'm okay with that threshold. This world I envision is like today's open software which runs on closed hardware or interacts with closed systems like networks that use proprietary hardware.

2. I'm not sure the tendency to convert everything into financial capital is as all subsuming as folks like Doctorow make it out to be. The sentiment certainly drives engagement among a certain demographic, usually a college educated progressive one, but while I see evidence of its truth in some spaces I don't in many others. PCs are a good example. PCs continue to offer more functionality to the end user. Despite endless avenue to lock down and monetize the idea of a PC, it doesn't happen. Firms like Apple and Lenovo remain fairly committed to offering strong consumer experiences.

I suspect this sort of financialization is more prevalent for services or goods that are difficult to meter. Search is a great example.