Cellframe Social

I love the privacy aspect of local models, love the sentiment of this post but... We really need better local machines with massive amounts of unified RAM and insanely fast networking to run big models privately and in a decentralized way. The problem is my man is not running these "for free." You can easily drop 40-50k on these machines if you don't want models quanticized all this shit. This is a classic build versus lease problem. The upfront cost is massive and these machines will be worthless for running new models in short order. Not many years. Maybe a year tops. And then you're sitting on 50K of hardware you could have spent on inference. The cost is not Claude/GPT versus local Qwen/Kimi/DeepSeek. It's those models running locally versus Fireworks. Right now it's cheaper to just run models on Fireworks or Together by a long shot and faster. Not as private, for sure. But cheaper. I hope someone out there is solving this problem for people because we need a better solution than pony up 50K for hardware that depreciates 10x faster than your car.

buy a GPU. a single 24GB card fits more intelligence than you think in 2026. call APIs wisely. stop giving away your cognition for free. people keep asking about claw and openclaw bots. let me be clear. i will never run anything connected to OpenAI. that includes their arrogant false-confident codex models and their newly acquired openclaw bot. none of it. they are watching every prompt. every idea. every thought you feed them gets augmented into their next product. you are the training data. when i need frontier reasoning i use opus. other than that, everything runs on my hardware.

Dario Amodei just dismantled the biggest myth in the AI industry. Open source AI isn’t free. It never was. Amodei: “It’s not free. You have to run it on inference and someone has to make it fast on inference.” For decades, open source meant something real. It meant a teenager in a basement could download the same tools as a Fortune 500 company. Could read the code. Could modify it. Could build something that competed with the giants. That was genuine democratization. That actually happened. AI is different. Fundamentally. Physically. In ways the ideology hasn’t caught up to yet. Downloading the weights is the easy part. The part that actually costs something is turning the weights into a running system. Into responses. Into intelligence operating in real time at scale. That requires compute. Power. Infrastructure. The kind measured in billions of dollars and years of construction. Amodei: “These are big models. They’re hard to do inference on. Ultimately you have to host it on the cloud. The people who host it on the cloud do inference.” The open source debate was never about who owns the model. It was always about who owns the cloud. And Amodei goes further. When a competitor drops a new open model, he doesn’t ask whether it’s open or closed. He doesn’t care about the licensing. He doesn’t engage the ideology. Amodei: “I don’t think it mattered that DeepSeek is open source. I think I ask, is it a good model? Is it better than us at the things that matter? That’s the only thing that I care about.” That’s the ruthless clarity of someone actually trying to win. While the media debates licensing frameworks, Amodei is asking one question. Is it better. Everything else is a distraction. Amodei: “I don’t think open source works the same way in AI that it has worked in other areas. Here we can’t see inside the model.” This isn’t Linux. You can’t read it. You can’t fork it. You can’t understand it the way generations of developers understood the tools they inherited. You can download it. And then you need a data center to run it. The teenager in the basement who was supposed to be empowered by this revolution needs a billion dollars of infrastructure before the empowerment starts. The era of the basement coder rewriting civilization on a laptop is over. The future belongs to whoever commands the compute, owns the power grid, and can actually turn the intelligence on. Open weights without infrastructure isn’t democratization. It’s a promise the physics of the universe won’t let us keep.

Ethereum will disproportionately benefit from AI vs alt L1s. "Bitcoin will absorb all innovation" was a meme that never came true. But I think it will be true for Ethereum. Ethereum's biggest risk has always been technological obsolescence by faster-moving competitors. But if AI speeds up development by 5-10x, Ethereum will be able to rapidly absorb any worthwhile innovation an alt-L1 comes up with. Combined with existing network effects, Ethereum becomes almost impossible to displace.