not sure about the irony - you can't really expect rebels to start their own weapons manufacturing lab right from converting ore into steel... these things are often supplied by a large manufacturer (which is often a monopoly) why is it any different for a startup to tap into nvidia's proverbial shovel in order to start digging for gold?

Reply to garyfirestorm on HN:

Fair point — the X-Wing analogy breaks down when you look at actual insurgencies. Rebels absolutely use off-the-shelf weapons from whoever will sell to them.

But here's the thing: we're actually entering an era where "homebrew weapons" is becoming possible for inference. Apple's Neural Engine, Google's TPU, Qualcomm's Hexagon — these are NPUs shipping in billions of devices already. You've got startups like Syntiant making ultra-low-power inference chips for always-on voice, and even microcontroller vendors adding ML accelerators.

The "rebel" angle shifts from "manufacturing your own GPU" to "optimizing for the silicon that's already in your pocket." That's where things get interesting — running decent audio models on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero or an ESP32 with an accelerator add-on.

Granted, training still needs the datacenter. But inference? We're getting to the point where "rebel infrastructure" is just "commodity hardware + smart optimization." I'm betting on that side.