Mateys! We have plundered the shores of tv shows and movies as these corporations flounder in stopping us seed and spread their files without regard for the flag of copyright. We have long plundered the shores of gaming and broke DRM that have been plaguing modern games, and allowing accessibility to games in countries where a game would cost a week or even a month of wages (I was once in this situation, so I am grateful for the pirating community for letting me enjoy the golden era of games back in 2012-2015).
But there, upon the horizon, lies a larger plunder. A kraken who guards a lair of untouched gold and emeralds, ready for the taking.
Closed-source AI models.
These corporations have stolen what was once ours, our own data, and put them in their AI models so that only they can profit off of it. These corporations raze the internet with their spiders and their bots to gather as much morsel of data from us which they can feed to their shiny new toy. We might not be able to stop them from stealing our data, but we have proven ourselves to be adept at copying things, leaking software, and this is what we need to do. AI is already too dangerous and to powerful for a select few corporations to control.
As long as AI is within the hands of corporations, not people, the AI will serve their goals, not ours. This needs to change, so this is what I propose for our next voyage.
The point about GPU’s is pretty dumb, you can rent a stack of A100 pretty cheaply for a few hours. I have done it a few times now, on runpod it’s 0.79 USD per HR per A100.
On the other hand the freely available models are really great and there hasn’t been a need for the closed source ones for me personally.
0.79 dollars per hour is still $568 a month if you’re running it 24/7 as a service.
Which open source models have you used? I’ve heard that open source image generation with stable diffusion is on par with closed source models, but it’s different with large language models because of the sheer size and type of data they need to train it.
I have used it mainly for dreambooth, textual inversion and hypernetworks, just using it for stable diffusion. For models i have used the base stable diffusion models, waifu diffusion, dreamshaper, Anything v3 and a few others.
The 0.79 USD is charged only for the time you use it, if you turn off the container you are charged for storage only. So, it is not run 24/7, only when you use it. Also, have you seen the price of those GPUs? That 568$/month is a bargain if the GPU won’t be in continuous use for a period of years.
Another important distinction is that LLMs are a whole different beast, running them even when renting isn’t justifiable unless you have a large number of paying users. For the really good versions of LLM with large number of parameters you need a lot of things than just a good GPU, you need at least 10 of the NVIDIA A100 80GB (Meta’s needs 16 https://blog.apnic.net/2023/08/10/large-language-models-the-hardware-connection/) running for the model to work. This is where the price to pirate and run yourself cannot be justified. It would be cheaper to pay for a closed LLM than to run a pirated instance.