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AGI Was Never Going To Kill Us Because Suicide Happens At The End of Doomscrolling
I'll go ahead and call this the peak of AI version one-dot-oh
The headline reads "OpenAI Is Preparing to Launch a Social App for AI-Generated Videos." People will, I guess, be able to share AI generated videos with their friends (and who doesn't have THE ALGO as a friend). Awesome. This is also on the heels of the introduction of live ads within OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Some of us were waiting for The Matrix. I know I've always wanted to learn Kung Fu. Others were sharpening our pointing sticks so that when the paperclip machine came, we'd be ready. Most of us just want to look forward to spending a quiet evening with AI Waifu before we initiate her kink.exe module.
But we'll never get there. Because Silicon Valley just can't help itself. Hockey sticks and rocketships. Series E-F-G. If I can just get 5 million more Americans addicted to my app, I can buy a new yacht made completely out of bitcoin.
I am a daily "AI" user and I still have very high hopes. My current operating theory is that a combination of whatever the MCP protocol eventually settles into plus agents trading some sort of crypto or stable coin will create a kind of autonomous, goal-seek driven economy. It will be sandboxed but with (semi) real money. I don't think we, humans, will use it to actually drive the global economy, but as a kind of just-over-the-horizon global prediction market. Think of it as a way for us to have seen 2008 coming in 2006. I also was looking forward to a team of maybe 10 people making a legit billion dollar company and this paving the way for groups of 3 - 5 friends running thousands of $10 + $50 million dollar companies. No more corporate grind if you're willing to take a little risk and team up with some people you work well with. No bullshit VC games - just ship the damn thing.
And I think these things are still possible, but I also, now, think the pure consumer backlash to this silicon valley lobotomy of AI could be very much Dot-Com-2-point-O. The normies at my watering hole are making jokes about AI slop. Instead of "lol I doomscrolled into 3 am again" people are swapping stories about popping in old DVDs so that they can escape the ads and the subscription fatigue.
Culturally, this could be great. Maybe the damn kids will go outside and touch some grass. In terms of advancing the frontier of human-digital knowledge, it seems like we're going to trade it in early not even for unlimited weird porn, but for pink haired anime cat videos that my aunt likes.
To what extent is it or will it become possible or practical to run a homebrew jailbroken LLM on local hardware? That's the big question in my mind.
I'm late to the party, and I'm aware of it, in that I'm only just now using LLMs beyond a toy for research and education purposes. But essentially every day I'm aware there's an expiration date, that the product is just a few bad days for the SP500 from being enshittified. Whether that comes in the form of censorship and legal caution that makes it useless for my purposes, or in the form of pricing that makes it prohibitive, or commercialization and monetization in ways that make it unreliable (pay extra for your product to be recommended!), or optimization for it as people start to operate their products specifically to be seen and understood by LLMs. There's going to come a time when I can't just log into ChatGPT and get a good result, I'm sure the old timers are already complaining; and there's going to come a time when there isn't enough VC money sloshing around to fund a competitor like Grok that throws off shackles.
So at that point, can I or will I be able to operate a homebrew LLM for my personal and business purposes? I'm not handy enough to know how possible that currently is, or how user friendly, I'm at the level of "I can run a Linux machine but I'll need to look stuff up once a week or so."
I strongly endorse what @erwgv3g34 says below. You can, in theory, run a model far superior to GPT-4, and not that far from the SOTA, all on consumer hardware.
Of course, as he correctly points out, it's going to be expensive to host it on your personal hardware. Somewhere between used car and new car expensive, but people can and do buy cars. But not that difficult, if you're capable of following instructions. He's right that it makes more sense to just rent an H200 as and when needed, a while back I saw them going for below $2/h.
If you have an archived copy of a decent model, especially one fine tuned to remove censorship, there's little that can be done outside of totalitarian legal action to stop you from using it. That's far less likely than potential enshittification or censorship online.
Elon is a stubborn mf, and supremely wealthy. xAI is probably one of the companies most resilient to VC panic. Or look at DeepSeek, which is owned by a net profitable quant firm. They'd be relatively safe options to out last a market downturn.
The idea of Google being enshittified was incomprehensible when I was young. Clearly it isn't so anymore.
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