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.
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.
I do not think there are specific laws yet, but some areas are getting there fast:
* chinese models without safety filters (it could be used to create software exploits)
* AI companion local models (waifus), similar apps are already censored on app stores
* voice and image creation models without safeguards, it could be used to create "revenge porn". Distribution of such models and customizations is already censored
* power hungry energy devices, some may argue you should not be allowed to run "unlicensed datacenter". EU already banned 8k TVs for using too much energy, some places are banning air conditioning
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.
For 55" tv the limit is 85 watts! That is very little for advanced CPU needed to process 8k video. I can buy some shitty expensive 8k samsung models, I can not import tv I would like.
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.
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 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.
In the US at least, repealing a law takes the same number of votes as passing a new one. I don't follow the purpose of this, unless it's to pass a constitutional amendment or something. Or maybe just to get clicks on a website.
And I already have the right to local intelligence, because my GPUs are my private property, and if someone freely releases a beerware model then I can freely download it.
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.
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.
As a future scenario where models become so efficient that _any_ model installed on _any_ computer could be considered "a national security risk"?
IDK, I don't live in the US, and I have no idea which "possible law" this website is referring to. In any case, it could be seen as a proactive effort to keep the gates open.
As a side note, I think this is a discussion every open-source supporter should have by actively considering the risks and what actions to take if such a hypothetical law were ever to pass.
> 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.
They could be more clear and more specific but I would not be surprised to see licensing for this as a means of creating yet another compliancre ceiling and quick cash for state government to pinch out of the productive elements of society (those pinching, mostly lawyers, being glorified parasites that offer nothing to productive society other than pay-to-win access to "justice" and serving as time-shared mouthpieces for plutocrats while claiming to represent everyone within whatever unit of representation they hold).
And when even very intelligent, but excessively conceited, people hear the echo of their own reason9ing from conversational autocorrect and assume it is somehow akin to intelligent life, the normies will go with whatever the plutocrats push with their media outlets too absorbed in their own domain specific knowledge (and cowed into intellectual laziness by other media products they consume eagerly) to ever subject it to much thought that Claude might not be Skynet after all.
> yet another compliance ceiling and quick cash for state government to pinch out of the productive elements of society
The twist is that AI is pushing all white collar jobs further into bureaucratic work. Nobody is losing their jobs and it's not quite a revolution, but despite all odds and headlines the younger generations are actually much better educated and positioned to do the right things as they take over.
An optimistic take is that since this is the middle class we're talking about, we get more productivity and more justice as a result. The only people upset about this are grifters and charlatans whose time is up.
Pardon me, so they'll hunt down huggingface, ollama and china? I don't quite understand? What about the millenia of companies that provide apis for local llms and private companies that use local llms for privacy reasons? I don't even understand how you'd execute such a ruleset.
Now the investors try to hold the bubble together by regulatory capture. They must really fear the worst. A bailout is going to cost their puppet in the White House even the last supporters in his base.
Mock it we might now, but 12 acres and (not too distant future) open weights AI models capable of driving open source robots for farm labor would be huge.
No need for huge expensive purpose built tractors. Even if they’re slow you could have half a dozen running 24/7.
It could provide independence for anyone with a modicum of resources.
I'd probably want something other than an LLM running farming machines. I'd rather a purpose build machine learning system that is actually designed to run them, not just a tractor that goes "you're absolutely right! I ignored all the rules you set for me and harvested the wheat 2 months early. It's not just stupid, it's irresponsible"
We're not going to go down the path of training a bunch of highly specialized models for tasks like "this tractor should tend this field".
We're going to (and are already on the way to) train deeply general models that can be told: "go tend that field."
And if that's the case, it no longer makes sense to build specialized, purpose-built tractors to house that level of autonomous capability. You instead put it in a humanoid frame (with a little extra sauce for locomotion of said humanoid), and get that to drive your existing tractor.
It's not an either-or. Generalist models can drive training of specialized models just fine. And while I haven't seen a generalist model decide by itself to train a specialized model to complete some large task, this seems like a natural extension of what they already do wrt writing their own tooling as needed.
Well true, that's possible. The sensors and compute are relatively expensive and tractors are already highly automated. Plus a small tractor can be relatively inexpensive and optimized for the mechanics of the task!
I'm thinking more of the small tasks that are often needed. Mending fences. Pulling weeds. Feeding chickens. Running off coyotes. Lots of things.
And yet actual farmers veer toward Ag-bots - autonomous "tractors" that have no human driver and pull the same farming trailer that already exist - ploughs, seeding bars, spray bars, etc.
The greater question centres about who will tend the machines - 4,000 hectares of seeding requires a week and more of prep work on the air seeder, hoses, points, tines, etc.
"I am eighteen years old, have a good set of passkeys, and believe in Sam Altman, the star-spangled banner, and the fourth of July. I have taken up a BLM lot, cleared up eighteen acres last year, and placed top of it a bitcoin mine. My vibe coded drop-shipping startup looks first-rate, and the conversion rate and total addressable market are bully.
Given the state of corruption in politics, I think Anthropic and OpenAI will likely bribe … oh wait I mean “lobby” … for bans on open source. Otherwise their imaginary trillion dollar valuations make no sense.
This. They can see their valuations slipping. They hope that in a few/several years they will start reaping profits. However, in several years local hardware will be well suited to run models locally at 80-90% efficiency - for "free". You won't need frontier models for daily tasks in a few years. I'd guess.
You get about 80-90% of the results for daily tasks like: getting summaries or explanations of complex material. Writing software tools for data analysis. Getting recipes for a given set of ingredients in the fridge.
Frontier models like Fable are mostly useful if you want to paste in one or two prompts, and receive a subtly broken application that looks impressive. That is very hard to do with local models today.
What current local models work fine for is delegating clearly-described tasks in a code base the programmer actually understands. Qwen3.6 27B and DeepSeek V4 Flash are both great little workhorses.
There's also GLM 5.2, which is kind of like "store brand Opus", and which might be considered a "near-frontier" model. I don't have as much experience with it.
FWIW Fable is insanely expensive for the task you just described, so much so that I don't think it's practical for that. Its practical use is as a dev lead / architect / project manager model, doing planning and writing detailed feature specs and code reviews while Opus/Codex/Gemini does the actual coding.
They already are. Altman is basically begging the US to buy into OAI, that's just the start. Both OAI and Anthropic are going to have to go down this path or their financials will never work out. Open local models are where the enterprise will need to go for any of this to be cost feasible, but we can almost guarantee this will be a battle nobody using AI will have asked for. You can thank Dario and Sam for the dystopian future that will pad their bottom line!
If neither model+1 or model-1 are providing tangible value to the business does anyone really care, though? At a certain point nobody believes Chicken Little.
I get it. These models can be powerful. But will they be useful is a different question.
This whole situation is very reminiscent of how Microsoft was trying to get Linux and open source banned when NT started losing market share on the server.
The Chinese are the open ones, with free downloads, open weights, and loads of published research. The USA with OpenAI is some of the most closed shit out there.
There's gpt-oss from OpenAI, gemma from Google, phi from Microsoft, granite from IBM, nemotron from NVIDIA, Ornith from DeepReinforce, Olmo from the Allen Institute.
compared to the chinese models those are all garbage. its almost as if there is a minimum effort being made just to later say "see, we werent always for the closed models, its just that the open stuff was so far behind". or maybe they think that an environment full of terrible models will push everyone harder into the closed stuff.
Ah yes, voting is always effective. Thank goodness people in Germany kept voting in the early 1930s. Imagine what terrible things might have happened if they hadn't.
For this to work there needs to be a standard protocol for model routing so that you as the user can decide where requests go. You may wish to use mainly local models but at some times for some tasks you'll need to route requests to cloud models.
I've designed the role-model protocol for this, allowing routing between any model, however to function optimally it needs consumer applications to use the protocol when sending requests: https://role-model.dev/concepts/how-role-model-works
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...
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.
what does this mean?
Dunno.
>CoWoS
Chip on wafer on substrate
>DCs
Data centers
* chinese models without safety filters (it could be used to create software exploits)
* AI companion local models (waifus), similar apps are already censored on app stores
* voice and image creation models without safeguards, it could be used to create "revenge porn". Distribution of such models and customizations is already censored
* power hungry energy devices, some may argue you should not be allowed to run "unlicensed datacenter". EU already banned 8k TVs for using too much energy, some places are banning air conditioning
No EU country has banned air conditioning either.
Where are you getting this information?
UK already removes existing air con units: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/air-condi...
There is discussion in France today about aircon (you are far right if you want aircon). Aircon units were also banned in olympic village in Paris.
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.
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.
Source: I live there
8K tv’s are not banned. You can buy one right now in the EU.
The telegraph is a tabloid rag full of false claims. Unless you can point to these bans this is explicitly false information.
And I already have the right to local intelligence, because my GPUs are my private property, and if someone freely releases a beerware model then I can freely download it.
What am I missing?
but I wouldn't advise it
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.
IDK, I don't live in the US, and I have no idea which "possible law" this website is referring to. In any case, it could be seen as a proactive effort to keep the gates open.
As a side note, I think this is a discussion every open-source supporter should have by actively considering the risks and what actions to take if such a hypothetical law were ever to pass.
> 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.
And when even very intelligent, but excessively conceited, people hear the echo of their own reason9ing from conversational autocorrect and assume it is somehow akin to intelligent life, the normies will go with whatever the plutocrats push with their media outlets too absorbed in their own domain specific knowledge (and cowed into intellectual laziness by other media products they consume eagerly) to ever subject it to much thought that Claude might not be Skynet after all.
The twist is that AI is pushing all white collar jobs further into bureaucratic work. Nobody is losing their jobs and it's not quite a revolution, but despite all odds and headlines the younger generations are actually much better educated and positioned to do the right things as they take over.
An optimistic take is that since this is the middle class we're talking about, we get more productivity and more justice as a result. The only people upset about this are grifters and charlatans whose time is up.
Misleading title.
The article is about local "AI".
No need for huge expensive purpose built tractors. Even if they’re slow you could have half a dozen running 24/7.
It could provide independence for anyone with a modicum of resources.
We're going to (and are already on the way to) train deeply general models that can be told: "go tend that field."
And if that's the case, it no longer makes sense to build specialized, purpose-built tractors to house that level of autonomous capability. You instead put it in a humanoid frame (with a little extra sauce for locomotion of said humanoid), and get that to drive your existing tractor.
I'm thinking more of the small tasks that are often needed. Mending fences. Pulling weeds. Feeding chickens. Running off coyotes. Lots of things.
The greater question centres about who will tend the machines - 4,000 hectares of seeding requires a week and more of prep work on the air seeder, hoses, points, tines, etc.
* https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/12/376781165...
wdym by that
> for daily tasks
which are?
What current local models work fine for is delegating clearly-described tasks in a code base the programmer actually understands. Qwen3.6 27B and DeepSeek V4 Flash are both great little workhorses.
There's also GLM 5.2, which is kind of like "store brand Opus", and which might be considered a "near-frontier" model. I don't have as much experience with it.
I get it. These models can be powerful. But will they be useful is a different question.
The Chinese are the open ones, with free downloads, open weights, and loads of published research. The USA with OpenAI is some of the most closed shit out there.
Aside from that you're 100% correct.
In the worst case it communicates the magnitude of dismsissiveness while demonstrating your intention to claim agency.
That symbolism is akin to prayer.
I am not casting prayer in a negative light, I’m simply categorising your voting concept.
Visibly praying in public would be symbolic. Prayer is not symbolic; it's thought.
I'm talking about external signaling.
I've designed the role-model protocol for this, allowing routing between any model, however to function optimally it needs consumer applications to use the protocol when sending requests: https://role-model.dev/concepts/how-role-model-works