Sami Kassab@Old_Samster
When we first met Tom, his obsession with energy markets came through immediately. Seemed random, but it's "actually" central to what he's building at Actual Computer.
The thesis is that local inference is inevitable. Open source models are getting good enough, people don't want to feed their thoughts to AI labs, and demand for compute will continue to be insatiable.
But the main forcing function is that chips aren't the bottleneck anymore - power is. Compute is derivative of energy, and the massive data center buildout has created an energy shortage where GPUs sit idle waiting for power to come online.
Yet one place that already has power, and always will, is everywhere else. Homes. Businesses. Universities. Collectively, they have more compute than all the data centers combined.
@Tom_A_Lynch goal is to build a distributed network of people plugging in their local compute (devices like Mac minis to consumer Nvidia cards) to serve inference demand. The substrate he's chosen is Bittensor, on Subnet 95.
@actualinc has an exceptional team behind it, and this is one of the projects that's gotten me most excited in a long time.
Enjoy this conversation with the two of us!
