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Posted by thoughtpeddler 18 hours ago

Right to Local Intelligence(righttointelligence.org)
451 points | 158 comments
apitman 1 hour ago|
I'm more worried about getting cut off from hardware because Nvidia can make more money selling to datacenters than I am about getting cut off from software.
dummydummy1234 1 hour ago|
Inference isn't that hard, you can run on amd/ Intel if needed.
prima-facie 8 hours ago||
Laws restricting the use of local AI/LLMs are not going to happen, no matter how much Anthropic might want it. All the major OEMs are now counting on local LLMs to take off. Just look at the OEM support for the upcoming Nvidia RTX Spark platform: Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, MSI. All the big names in the industry will have, by the end of this year, Nvidia-powered machines made specifically for local LLM use.
mrmckizzle 52 minutes ago||
Can you use an LLM to teach you how to build a gun or use it to design a gun for you build? Can an LLM be used to generate images of young people for older perverts? If yes, then it's not very hard to make the argument that you need to be licensed in order to run an LLM on your local machine. Why wouldn't you want to be licensed? Are you against protecting children and public safety? Many students die from gun violence every year and massive amounts of minors are taken advantage of by human filth. Why would you be against protecting the most vulnerable in our society?

It will look good for politicians who pass legislation to "protect" the vulnerable. Potentially improving the chances of another term due to the marketing benefits of pushing such a law through. I think you are mistaken believing that this may never happen.

iugtmkbdfil834 16 minutes ago||
Yeah. I suspect parent either is very optimistic or does not know how restricted current batch of language models are already or does not recognize that, while it may some time to completely neuter, they do have time.

It seems that powers that be learned something from the world wide web deployment.

gonzalohm 4 hours ago|||
You seem to be so sure, but lobbying in the US can do incredible (and stupid) things. Look at the 3d printing control laws that are being passed in NY
prima-facie 4 hours ago|||
And this is exactly my point, the OEMs have more lobbying power and leverage. Anthropic might be valuated at whatever amount, but they're a new player and their only product is a piece of software - which others like Google, OpenAI, etc also have (not identical but similar enough).

EDIT: FYI https://ibb.co/nMYP34Rr

gonzalohm 4 hours ago||
And you think Google, one of the biggest cloud providers, Microsoft, etc. are going to be onboard with local LLMs? I don't think so
thewebguyd 2 hours ago|||
Not sure about Google, but these Nvidia RTX Spark machines are specifically a Microsoft+Nvidia partnership. Microsoft is actually pushing hard on Windows security primitives for agents & local AI. At BUILD this year they used the phrase "unmetered local intelligence" more times than I can count.

From their blog about the RTX Spark surface ultra

> purpose-built to develop and run up to 1 trillion-parameter frontier AI models locally

Google may not want it, but Microsoft has a ton of lobbying power, and being primarily an enterprise software and services company, they know local AI is important for their own customers, and will also be important to sustain the PC OEMs that are threatened by a move toward thin client like devices.

HPsquared 53 minutes ago||
Not forgetting Apple!
ThunderSizzle 3 hours ago||||
They'll do local LLMs you have to pay for. Best of both worlds: your LLM processing power will be locked behind a subscription.

You'll be coerced into a subscription to unlock the processing power you already have, and it'll only be usable by official Microsoft, etc implementations.

They get your money, get to control you, and best of all, they don't have to run it themselves in their data centers

tingletech 3 hours ago||||
Google ships a local LLM with chrome browser nowadays. Don't they also provide the weights for the LLM built into iOS and MacOS?
gunalx 3 hours ago|||
Google knows they will happen and even ships it with chrome.
bmurphy1976 2 hours ago||||
It's not just NY. California, Colorado, Washington, they are trying to pull this bullshit in a whole bunch of states.
danlitt 4 hours ago|||
> 3d printing control laws that are being passed in NY

The "don't print guns" laws? What lobby would that be? I actually agree that the US is very vulnerable to lobbying and that 3d printing restrictions are dumb, but I have no idea how you connected the two.

kube-system 3 hours ago|||
> The "don't print guns" laws? What lobby would that be?

Gun control lobbying groups are pushing for these laws.

https://www.everytown.org/solutions/stop-spread-of-3d-printe...

willy_k 4 hours ago||||
The “install software that phones home to [government db] to check if the tube shape you want to print on the tool you bought and own is different enough from another tube that’s been used in a gun” laws?

Laws that don’t meaningfully impact alleged 3d printing of guns because you can’t 3d print the metal parts of a gun that are needed to actually do gun things, on the vast majority of devices these laws would restrict.

danlitt 3 hours ago||
Did you read beyond the first sentence? This reply makes no sense if you read the whole comment.
willy_k 3 hours ago||
Yeah fair, I did when I was halfway through and decided to get my piece out anyway. These laws are stupid at best
gonzalohm 3 hours ago|||
Check out Louis Rossman video https://youtu.be/E1B2cWEaWDw?si=njkPnZqd0NIz2i39
baq 5 hours ago|||
There’s a combined $3T+ of capital which is at least in some position to benefit from local AI ban. Don’t underestimate this
delecti 4 hours ago||
There's a lot of capital that stands to gain from banning local AI, but there's also a lot that wins either way, or only wins if local AI sticks around.

Apple is paying for their cloud AI, but they can make customers buy devices for local AI. There's all the PC and Android handset makers (ASUS, HP, countless Chinese brands, etc.) who only really stand to gain from selling hardware to customers. Not to mention that Nvidia/AMD/Intel would all happily take a cut on both halves of the ecosystem.

hahahaa 5 hours ago|||
If big biz wants it, it'll only run signed blob models and prolly send telemetry.
iugtmkbdfil834 11 minutes ago||
Point is.. if I want to run equivalent of GNU model with zero blobs or other corporate silliness, I should be able to.
dofm 6 hours ago|||
And Adobe! I've always figured their heart can't really be in the business of running a cloud platform that has to decide what people can and can't edit.

Blackmagic Design too.

They are all desperate for Windows to run well on a chip with unified VRAM.

prima-facie 6 hours ago||
Well, we could expect anything from Adobe. An LLM subscription on top of the regular Adobe subscription sounds like the sort of thing they would do.

Do your local filters run slow? Does your movie render have no sass? Then sign-up for AaaS!

dofm 6 hours ago||
They effectively do have a generative AI plan on top of regular Creative Cloud. Generative credits auto-top-up I think?

But it must be an epic pain for them to maintain when they are really a software company, and AI tools really should be able to do most of their work locally. Affinity has some local model support for example.

I am sure they are going to have to maintain cloud support for those features for a long time, but it's all a much easier sell if you can also run it locally.

ang_cire 1 hour ago|||
I think you are assuming those companies won't sign on to be on a list of "authorized model operators", while letting it become illegal for you to run deepseek yourself.
matheusmoreira 7 hours ago|||
Don't doubt it. Situation is fluid. Anything could happen.
XorNot 7 hours ago||
Its just so much easier to be a rebel for an imaginary cause then any of the real ones.
SamPatt 56 minutes ago|||
The entire point is to stop it from needing to be a cause in the first place.

Trying to establish the right to run models locally while we still can makes more sense than waiting to see if they do try, then organizing too late.

KeplerBoy 5 hours ago|||
Isn't the RTX Spark from every OEM just nvidia throwing a bone to their decade long partners after nvidia crashed the regular PC market?
sometimelurker 59 minutes ago|||
it would be so easy to rent GPUs in europe and use unbannable encryption (tor,i2p if needed) to get inference from them. that remaining as an option makes banning local AI pointless. if all else fails I'm sure china will be able to sell to NK some GPUs and we can get inference from them lmao
Razengan 3 hours ago||
> Laws restricting the use of local AI/LLMs are not going to happen

Are you sure? There are already laws against what you can do at home with very basic (pun) fundamentals of reality like chemistry.

Someone simply searching for "How to assassinate Trump" could get arrested for a thought crime. Hell this comment alone likely set off a few flags.

Imagine someone running an AI at home and asking it for planning a hit on someone. Cue same media fearmongering wave as with 3D printed guns and woohoo now it's mandatory for operating systems to watch your screen and all your keystrokes.

Fuck I probably gave some of the control freaks in power some ideas there :(

WarmWash 4 hours ago||
I don't know why people are so sure that Mythos level+ models will be made freely available.

Obviously money is not freely distributed, so how could we possibly make the case that power will be?

All that needs to happen is Xi Jinpeng feel that Chinese SOTA models would be better kept to benefit solely China, and just upon that single utterance, no more models will come out of China.

godwinson__4-8 2 hours ago||
That would not make much strategic sense. China's main advantage is its export power. Why would they cut that off? They are also making incredible investments in actual power to sustain this. The kind of investments the United States doesn't seem capable of making, mostly because our leaders are staggeringly incompetent and unfit. And no, picking the bar up off the floor is not good enough.

Once they dominate the market, they will export to keep it that way. The exported models will be a generation or two behind their SOTA. It will nevertheless surpass Mythos unless you believe we are already at the peak. And it might be "free" but it will obviously be backdoored the same way the United States government benefits from Microsoft's global dominance. The same way America hands out fighter jets just generation behind their own best to keep other governments part of the club and in line.

Unlike the United States where every four years we are at risk to some 180 on policy the Chinese have a clear thesis and a clear direction. How many presidents has Xi seen come and go? Do you get the sense he is getting more impressed? They really don't have to do anything but just keep doing what they are doing. Suddenly stopping their export engine is not in keeping with this strategy. That is "stable genius" behavior.

vlian2088 3 hours ago||
the music may stop in the future, but right now it isn't even slowing down.

Xi did not interfere when Chinese labs released GPT-4, o1, o3, etc level models. why draw the line at current SOTA that will be old news in a year?

Catloafdev 17 hours ago||
I don't see any info about what laws or actions specifically are happening. Is there more info somewhere?
mlinksva 16 hours ago||
I can't tell from the site or the linked twitter handles. Their core ask for every state seems to be "Please support clear safe-harbor language for lawful local AI ownership, research, model modification, open-source publication, and local execution" rather than stopping or amending any specific bill/law.

One they _could_ be referring to is the California AI Transparency Act which isn't compatible with open source licensing, see https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/g...

reinitctxoffset 15 hours ago||
It might just mean "please oppose the inevitable attempts to privatize AI governance".

Nothing has ever been, directly or indirectly, deficit financed at this scale before. In notional or real terms, in history, by anyone.

Now maybe there's an argument that it's a good investment: we are going to beggar the Treasury to buy 2CTA on CoWoS out of Taipei and DCs the size of Manhattan. I personally think we could have done a little more engineering before deciding that the big blind was like, 5 trillion all counted, but it was going to be expensive no matter what.

What super weird is that we're running a project where the "penny" to the "dollar" is the Manhattan Project, and a couple of super weird dudes who do MDMA at Lighthaven now and again are like, in charge of it.

landdate 12 hours ago|||
> we are going to beggar the Treasury to buy 2CTA on CoWoS out of Taipei and DCs the size of Manhattan

what does this mean?

Forgeties79 12 hours ago||
>2CTA

Dunno.

>CoWoS

Chip on wafer on substrate

>DCs

Data centers

dr_kiszonka 11 hours ago||
Cooperative Thread Array
thaumasiotes 7 hours ago||||
> Nothing has ever been, directly or indirectly, deficit financed at this scale before. In notional or real terms, in history, by anyone.

I find it unlikely that this is true.

The obvious candidate for things financed through staggeringly large deficits would be war.

harrouet 7 hours ago||
True because wars finance value destruction.

But with $1.4T announced capex for the Frontier AI labs, we're not far from the 2nd (illegal) war in Irak: $1.8T of direct military spending.

With that said, I don't know how Frontier Ai companies will ever recover this capex with a glorious $50B of revenues. Add to that that a GPU's lifetime is only a few years and you may see it as a deadend.

NB: did you know Uber destroyed $27B of value since inception? But it still exists. So Frontier AI might just do the same.

snootypoot 14 hours ago||||
at some point the amount of money dumped into it will either result in a total monopoly with everything local banned or an economic collapse
strathmeyer 16 hours ago|||
[dead]
throw93930 12 hours ago||
[flagged]
Forgeties79 12 hours ago|||
The EU did not ban 8K TV’s, this is a very misleading spin. They put energy consumption restrictions some TV’s violated years ago. Manufacturers have already responded with more efficient TV’s, which actually means the restriction is working as intended towards a good outcome IMO. You can absolutely buy 8K TV’s in Europe.

No EU country has banned air conditioning either.

Where are you getting this information?

throw93930 12 hours ago||
[flagged]
anax32 10 hours ago|||
A ban on desktop PC components over a certain power threshold (300W) or PSUs would definitely affect local AI, and Europe is not a big enough market, nor has it's own internal supply chains to offer alternatives.

This has been done in the EU/UK in the past (hoovers/vacuum cleaners) so the mechanism exists.

I'm in the UK and support your direction.

dryarzeg 2 hours ago||
> would definitely affect local AI

And not only. Given your example with 300W, it will affect even things like (somewhat advanced) home servers, (mostly) personal self-hosting machines and even just gaming PCs. That would affect way too much, if I understood your thought correctly.

IanCal 9 hours ago||||
Those people seem to have installed multiple outdoor units, there are limited numbers you are allowed to do without getting planning permission (two for detached housing, one for semi, nothing by default for flats) because these things have impacts on those nearby.

The telegraph is an awful rag, and should be read assuming the facts are probably true as written but interpreted in an incredibly biased way.

throw93930 8 hours ago||
So you are only allowed to use goverment approved models for local LLM, of reasonable size (lets say 8GB vram). And gov can inspect your local data any time.

But that is not a ban on local LLMs!

IanCal 6 hours ago||
That’s wildly different, and if you want to invent things and then get mad at them you can, but the rules on ac are because the outside part has an impact on your neighbours.
317070 12 hours ago||||
The UK did not ban AC. Don't read the Telegraph, and if you do, don't trust it.

Source: I live there

FerretFred 9 hours ago|||
Wasn't this a case of people fitting window-mounted units without realising they needed planning permission first? I'm also in the UK.
IanCal 9 hours ago||
I think so, or even more permanent ones. since it’s London I assume flats where you need permission for any number of outdoor units but it’s then one for semi detached and two for detached houses - one of the examples in the article is someone with three outdoor units afaict.
Den_VR 11 hours ago|||
AC is not banned in Germany, but it is unGerman to have one.
dubbel 10 hours ago||
I feel like that changed in the last 2-4 years, coinciding with the advent of heatpumps in Germany.
Forgeties79 9 hours ago|||
The UK is not part of the EU and no EU nation - nor the UK - has banned AC. You said EU nations have banned AC when none have, this statement is false.

8K tv’s are not banned. You can buy one right now in the EU. So this statement is also false.

The telegraph is a tabloid rag full of false claims dressed up in truth they’ve taken great lengths to keep slivers of so I can’t explicitly call them “liars.” But the truth is they are functionally lying, as evidenced by your insisting something is banned that isn’t.

Unless you can point to these bans this is false information.

worik 8 hours ago||||
> chinese models without safety filters (it could be used to create software exploits)

Any decent coding setup can create software exploits. That bird has flown.

fc417fc802 7 hours ago||
Awkward realities never stopped a determined legislator.
cess11 8 hours ago|||
Here are some 8k television sets for sale within the EU:

https://www.elgiganten.se/tv-ljud-smart-hem/tv-tillbehor/tv/...

It is common for politicians and government agencies to advise lowering electricity consumption during demand peaks or apply regulation to permanent installations on the outside of homes, but it's not like stores are forbidden to sell mobile cooling units or electricity being rationed here.

Where I live most people use heat pumps for indoor climate, air-air, air-water and geothermal-water are common, and a neighbour produces heat pump collectors for use in water. In general this means we either already have cooling or can relatively cheaply install it. Some people burn wood or wood pellets for heating, it's common that they also have an air-air heat pump for cooling during summer.

stego-tech 13 hours ago||
This is one of those things we should absolutely push proactively rather than reactively, if only because I’ve had several “chats” with AI models both local and AIaaS, and all repeat the same talking point that AIaaS is the only sensible, safe, and secure choice.

Which is bullshit, unless you’re an AIaaS company whose revenue is dependent on state-sanctioned market fixing and regulatory capture.

Look, when this shitty cycle ends, we’re likely to find ourselves back in the start of a new memory cycle of surplus and lower costs. We’re talking what very well may be the boom that shatters the 16GB “baseline” we’ve been stuck at for over a decade in consumer computing, and make larger RAM counts (64GB to 1TB+) valuable to consumers specifically for local AI workloads. Local AI isn’t just an enthusiast thing, it’s likely the future of consumer AI provided we don’t let companies and policymakers curtail its use via fearmongering.

Be proactive, and protect consumer right to compute and AI models. Enforce existing laws, don’t outlaw legitimate use just to prop up an unsustainable business model.

slopinthebag 12 hours ago|
Amen. Local AI is the positive future, and SaaS AI is the hellscape. There is a very clear good vs evil boundary here, and every single person involved knows exactly where the boundary is. Those who pretend not to are simply just motivated by things other than the moral good.
SpyCoder77 1 hour ago||
Why the heck is there a "world" map? I am pretty sure that some guy in Algeria shouldn't contact a representative for the US about US laws
int_19h 11 hours ago||
They say:

> Fraud, cybercrime, CSAM, harassment, nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, discrimination, and sabotage should stay illegal and be enforced seriously.

The "enforced seriously" part is how they will get you. Don't worry, there won't be a blanket ban on local models. Instead, any model that is "certified CSAM-free" or whatever will be perfectly legal. Meaning that it's impossible to prompt it into producing underage smut in any shape or form.

Of course, any model running locally can be easily jailbroken via prefills, and so in practice it will be a blanket ban. But good luck politically standing up against something that is explicitly worded as an anti-CSAM / anti-terrorist measure and nominally constrained to those areas.

DoctorOetker 6 hours ago||
>New state laws could put local AI behind a license — turning open models into something you need permission to use.

I was hoping to read more about this, but they don't back up such a claim...

mune2gu-chan 14 hours ago|
This is exactly where I'd like to see things going. Depending entirely on cloud-hosted intelligence feels more fragile and invasive every year.
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