Why You Need to Become a Neuro-Punk Right Now

A short essay on why the developer community should invest as much effort as possible into LLMs that are free from corporations and states. ML researchers and hardware engineers both need to contribute here. The latter may even be more important, because whether users can run advanced LLMs on personal hardware depends on breaking NVIDIA's monopoly. This essay is highly political, especially in the opening sections. Keep that in mind. Corporate AI Will Be Closed and Unaccountable by Default The other day, almost at the same time as the release of Fable 5, Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an article called "Policy on the AI Exponential", where he discussed what the world should do with powerful AI-based systems. All sections except the first contain fairly reasonable proposals, or at least proposals worth discussing. I will not consider them here. The real core is in the first section. In that first section, he effectively proposes a system in which the state would be required to license advanced AI systems, measured by the amount of compute used, and even ban the release of models that are not considered safe for society. In practice, this repeats a story as old as the world: a large corporation wants to regulate the market so smaller companies do not interfere with its ability to earn mountains of money, all under noble-sounding pretexts. And the point is not that Amodei is some villain. He is simply an entrepreneur who wants to earn as much money as possible. Any large corporation would prefer not to let smaller companies near the feeding trough in its field. Anthropic is merely saying this openly, and that is all. In effect, AI Big Tech wants a future where all non-AI companies become its serfs, mortally dependent on intelligence delivered through Anthropic's API, or OpenAI's, or Google's, and so on. In practice, those AI companies would hold the revenue of all these other companies in their hands. Without them, the whole economy around those companies would cru