Recent post re: AI as utility
Myself, I’m a fan of local LLM / self hosted ML… but if you ever needed a clarion call that a hard pivot is coming (soon) for online/ cloud based AI…Altman et al are making some concerning mouth noises (to say nothing of broader concerns with OAI, Anthropic etc).
Right now, I’m sketching out a plan where my Raspberry Pi (always on, 2-3w) uses a magic packet to wake up my modest AI server (Lenovo P330 with Tesla P4) if/when needed (Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B); no point in chugging down 80-100w, 24/7 for no good reason.
If the trend continues the direction it appears to be (increasing costs, environmental impacts etc) then I’d feel a lot better hosting my own as port of first call and replacing simpler tasks with more traditional programs. YMMV.
Sure but all these self hosted ais are still done by companies who used massive amounts of power and water to train it.
No.
Even the biggest open weights models are trained on pennies compared to OpenAI and Claude. They just don’t have the hardware to be so wasteful.
In fact, the Nvidia GPU ban was the best thing to ever happen to “small” AI devs. It made them thrifty.
Which is an interesting dilemma: Those AIs are already trained. That power and water was used. If you use them, you will not pollute anything. But you may encourage those companies to train another AI