Re: the recent meta discussion and ongoing chats about self hosting, open vs closed source, AI etc, I wanted to share some food for thought.

I’ll explain why this is related to self hosting at the bottom (section bolded): our lovely new mods can call it. I hope it inspires some out loud thinking.

Disclosure: I am not the content creator nor am I paid by them to signal boost. I just like their stuff and think this is an important topic, from multiple angles.

“The future of AI depends on the moral compass of five people.”

I’ve been watching “AI in context” for a few weeks (they make long form biopic content on current state of AI - really good stuff).

This dropped today; it’s about the wheeling and dealing behind closed doors at OpenAI re: Sam Altman’s firing. It’s a lot more watchable than that sounds :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eYTkvZqbnQ

The line that brought me to a stand still was “the future of AI depends on the moral compass of like 5 people”.

I think folks here (and Lemmy generally) are more savvy about AI then the gen pop (though Lemmy is famously FuckAI)…but even if you’re training a nanoGPT model from scratch on hardware you own …you’re still beholden to outside forces.

Eg: the people’s champion - Qwen - seems to have split or gone closed weights for 3.7. That’s not a good sign.

Reason for post

In the recent [Meta] chat, I noted an undercurrent of “no man is an island” - that is, yes, you might host your own X, but you’re still dependant on external Y (eg: SearXNG).

Self hosting / FOSS / forking mitigates some of the “we changed the terms of service after the sale” enshittification we see occurring in related spaces (eg: right to repair). But there’s only so much leverage you can enact before it becomes pyrrhic.

I would like to believe “fuck you, I won’t do what you told me” is our bulwark against market forces.

At the same time, it’s sad to see so many “Don’t be Evil” mission statements not survive contact with reality (watch the vid: OAi was founded on the ideal of “don’t let AGI kill us”)

I think what happens upstream has effects down stream too (see prior X vs Y examples)…

Not sure where this leaves us. It’s a weird time to be alive.

Enjoy the video (and their others - Ai2027 is eye opening). Look forward to any productive chat this post might inspire.

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
    15·
    6 hours ago

    I’m confused by your confusion. I can try restating it another way if you can tell me what isn’t clicking.

    • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      5 hours ago

      Well, from my second reading of your post, you make a number of observations, but it’s not clear whether you support AI, or whether you support self-hosting.

      Generally, most posts have a point to make or an opinion on a topic, some will summarize their ideas into a cogent question for discussion.

      None of that is present here. You give what amounts to be an opinion, but counter it with “on the other hand” and we dont end up knowing what you actually think.

      • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
        22·
        5 hours ago

        The post was fodder to stimulate discussion, but to make it clearer -

        Self-hosting gives you real but bounded sovereignty.

        You control your stack, but not the foundations it runs on.

        Even the most committed local-AI person is downstream of decisions made by a handful of people in boardrooms they’ll never enter.

        “Fuck you, I won’t do what you told me” is worth defending, but it has a ceiling, and that ceiling is getting lower as AI consolidates upstream.

        That holds for self hosting anything else.

        The community sometimes talks about sovereignty like it’s binary, but it’s a dial, and we should be thinking harder about who’s turning it.

        Finally, i am pro self hosted AI. I am also an AI critic.

        Clearer?

        • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          4 hours ago

          Clearer?

          Not really. Most of your statements have no relative reference, so they are really ambiguous. Example:

          The community sometimes talks about sovereignty like it’s binary, but it’s a dial,

          Great start! And I agree, we should welcome all shades of self-hosting, whether that’s someone just starting or a hardcore digital off-grid self-hoster.

          But then comes the next part:

          and we should be thinking harder about who’s turning it.

          What does this mean? Are you saying we all have different tolerances and preferences for how much we value digital sovereignty? Are you suggesting that we are all at the mercy of the Powers that Be and that they “turn the dial”?

          One thing I think would have helped would have been to indicate that your topic is AI-focused. For me, I went into the reading with the impression that you were talking about self-hosting in general.

          • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
            1·
            3 hours ago

            What does this mean? Are you saying we all have different tolerances and preferences for how much we value digital sovereignty?

            Are you suggesting that we are all at the mercy of the Powers that Be and that they “turn the dial”?

            Let’s use SearXNG as framing device.

            SearXNG is a metacrawler. It’s not a search engine, it’s an aggregator. People talk about it like it’s a search engine but it’s not.

            Which means your operation of it is beholden to others (quite a lot in that case). Sure, you control the hop. You don’t control what’s upstream of it. Whoever you use still gets pinged. Eg: Google still gets queried. Bing still gets queried.

            You’ve added privacy at the point of entry, not independence at the point of source. What they do affects you directly, whether you want it to or not.

            That’s something to think about if sovereignty is a concern.

            Same issue with pi hole, email, VPN on VPS etc etc.

            One thing I think would have helped would have been to indicate that your topic is AI-focused. For me, I went into the reading with the impression that you were talking about self-hosting in general.

            It’s not (just) about AI. It’s the same pipeline. Frontier lab to local LLM. Upstream (Google) to downstream (SearXNG).

            In both cases you’re running your own endpoint against infrastructure you didn’t build, can’t audit and can’t influence.

            Self-hosting the bottom of the stack doesn’t change what’s at the top of it, and that’s exactly the problem…because the top directly influences the bottom.

            The dependency just sits further back in the chain.

            The chains bottom out at the same chokepoints - a handful of labs, a handful of infrastructure providers, a handful of index owners. No man is an island.

            Anyway, I didn’t really want to pre-digest it this much, so I framed the post to allow out loud thinking in which ever direction it goes. This was not meant to be an exercise in “here’s what I think, fite me”, it was an invitation to think out loud together.

            • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              3 hours ago

              OK, I get where you’re coming from.

              This has been an issue for a very long time, partly caused by the lie we were all told, that the internet would free us. And we were OK with Google et al taking the helm.