Do not be fooled by companies trying to make you think their cloud is helping democratize Ai. While they may initially fool you by the fact that the “cloud” does seem to make initial access easier and cheaper, in reality the owners of the cloud become the absolute gatekeepers of access and can at any time bar anyone for any reason whether price increases policy change or politics.
Not too long ago, perhaps during the time of the you shall own nothing commercials and be happy, I recall a TED talk by a woman who was praising the idea of not owning anything, such as a car, and how wonderful it would be if ‘everything’ was a ‘service’. Although again initially it may sound as if all your worries of upkeep and maintenance of a car would be liberating, take for a moment to think that in reality it is impossible for everyone not to ‘own’ anything, “someone” will definitely own it, just not you, the little peon person.
Then imagine pressing the button on your app to request that “service” to send a car to you only to find out you have been denied service. It may seem far fetched to some but ask those who’ve had their banks deny them service. The point is that there will always be trade-offs between own your own things and be responsible to upkeep and maintain, or off-load that responsibility to others, which by necessity also give them the ultimate power and “control”.
Ai will never be truly democratized so-to-speak, if powerful billion-dollar or trillion-dollar corporations will control all access to it.
The reality is that although no one has been able to fully control the ‘internet’, it is actually a whole lot easier for powerful entities to completely control “Ai”.
In fact, to give a little glimpse to the reality of the above statement, think for a moment back in time when the “internet” was a thriving place for a myriad of websites and ‘discussion forums’ and look at what exists today. Every website pretty much uses the same exact discussion forum as ‘cloud service’. There are now very few independent viable websites, all that used to be are ghost towns or have completely disappeared. The entire global population spends the absolute majority of their time either on YouTube, X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or a few other sites owned (either directly or indirectly) by billion or trillion dollar companies. So if the powerful entities can hijack the internet and turn it into the old days broadcast TV where they controlled all programming, how much more easily will they be able to control a technology such as “Ai”??
It will be much easier, and that is why every company is salivating at the thought of the possibility of such complete dominance. Governments as well.
So do not be fooled when companies use the word “democratize” in relation to subscription plans or CLOUD ONLY access to Ai. That will not democratize Ai but will lead to exactly the opposite. Especially reinforcing the trend toward subscriptions and Cloud Only access.
For example, Stability Ai, to whom we all owe a great deal of “gratitude” for their Stable Diffusion Open Models, have said their:
“aim is todemocratize access to open generative AI technology for everyone.”
https://stability.ai/news/init-ml-divestment
And we applaud them for their truly “Open Models”, the ones that anyone can freely download and use locally not just in a cloud, and even use them without maintaining a “subscription”.
But it seems that they have unfortunately fallen victim to the thought that “Cloud Only” Closed Models are a way to “democratize” Ai!
Or that Ai Models available for use only as long as you are ‘licensed’ and ‘subscribed’ to their monthly licensing, is also a good way to “democratize” Ai.
We feel Stability Ai had and has “good intentions”, and we hope to help them in their quest to “democratize” by proposing better ways to “democratize” Ai:
Please take a page (not all) from META and Llama2, and release your Ai Models “openly” as fully “Open Models” but with the caveat that, certain users must purchase a Commercial License.
So who should be those “certain users” who must request to purchase a Commercial License in order to use your Ai Models?
They most certainly shouldn’t be all the little people of the world. They obviously can and should be your direct “competitors”, you can name some by name:
The following companies and their employees may not use our models commercially (or perhaps whether for personal or commercial) without requesting a LICENSE from your “Ai Open Source Company”, Stability Ai etc.
In addition to, or instead of naming specific companies, you can do as META’s terms did and stipulate that IF at the “time” that Stability Ai released the Ai Model, your company had more than 700 MILLION “active monthly users”, you and your employees must request a license to use Stability Ai models.
Of course you can reduce 700 MILLION “active monthly users” if you must, or add other stipulations such as if your company is traded on public exchanges, or if your company has a valuation above etc, and/or if your company has assets of over certain amount, or if you company has over a certain amount of employees or a world-wide presence with physical offices internationally etc.
Stability Ai can do all of the above to protect its hard work from competing companies and other billion dollar companies while at the same time knowing they are truly helping “democratizing” Ai for the average person in the world.
We believe that with the above approach, enough companies will “license” Stability Ai Models and products, that there will not be the need to charge all the little guys.
Also, we highly discourage Unreal Engine type licensing royalty models as well as Unity and other popular “revenue” based licensing models. There is no average person anywhere who wants to stress out over the prospect of opening up his entire life and finances to some Big Brother company so that he can “prove” his innocence and show his net or gross profits everywhere.
This kind of intrusiveness should be RESERVED for those companies that have already been ascertained as “REQUIRING” licensing to being with. But the method delineating who must request/purchase a LICENSE and who may use under the Open License should be as unintrusive as it can possibly be. This means that the “threshold” for requiring a license, should be high enough that it should be pretty “obvious” if a company likely falls in that “category”.
In fact with this approach, the little guys you may find may appreciate it you well enough to DONATE. Perhaps look at BLENDER as a prime example of a truly viable “Open Source” company, if you can call it that, we’d say it’s not a company but an open “community”! https://www.blender.org
The BLENDER “community” can’t wait for Stability Ai to embrace such common values. In fact, we might ask, when should we expect to see Ai driven 3D Animation in BLENDER?
Temporal Cohesion is not an issue with 3D renders, what about helping Eevee or Cycles out with some Ai accelerated rendering?
Or perhaps Blender can help train Ai Models, what if BLENDER users all over the world, artists, could help train Ai models via their workflows or scripts? Perhaps it’s time for Ai models to not only learn new things, but to start learning in different ways? We need more open source Ai Models in Music Generation and in 3D animation, physics and rendering etc, even if the Holy Grail for now is how to beat SORA at text to video. (Medical Models Anyone?)
Ai Open Source can and will be the leader in Ai, if we realize and capitalize on the inherent advantages both technologically and legally (such as opt-in training contributions, people will let you train on their data) that it affords.
In conclusion, is the cloud completely bad? No, but the cloud or subscriptions must not be the “only” way for the average person to legally use Ai models.
Let the users buy into “cloud subscriptions” not out of compulsion but out of preference and for any benefits that are ‘intrinsically’ (and not synthetically) limited to “cloud” deployments. Create a great cloud discussion community or some other benefit that can’t logically be recreated without the ‘cloud’ and people will happily pay and not feel that you’re strong arming them. Be ‘open’ and good to the little guys of the world, and they will love you. Again: Blender!