People in the west are getting increasingly salty seeing China outpace the west in science and technology. After decades of being told that China isn’t able to innovate and it’s just stealing western tech the fact that China is rapidly outpacing the west technologically is a hard pill for them to swallow.
The reality is that everybody knows that US bans Chinese companies in order to hobble China technologically and economically. US officials say this openly. China is retaliating in kind now and turns out US can dish it out but can’t take it. At the end of the day US can’t dictate to China what technology China will use or what companies they will work with. Deciding that is China’s sovereign right.
If you just need a file sharing solution then something like SparkleShare might be a good option https://www.sparkleshare.org/
a good overview of different open models here https://agi-sphere.com/llama-models/
You can’t run the same scale models on consumer hardware, but it is possible to use something like Petals to run distributed models torrent style. The core tech is fairly well understood, and the main barrier comes in form of computing power and having access to training data.
I’d make a related point about open source development. Many large scale projects are developed as open source without any financial incentive. These projects are just as complex as anything commercial companies can produce.
Open source development completely dismantles arguments that people won’t work without a profit motive, that you need capitalism for innovation, or that you can’t organize labour without a traditional company structure.
Yeah, these models take a lot of juice to run unfortunately. Until either hardware gets a lot cheaper, or models get a lot more efficient it’s going to be prohibitive for most people to run them locally. Stuff like pruning is actually really promising on the latter front.
The real cleverness lies in being able to write code that seems self evident in hindsight. Anybody can write convoluted code that’s impossible read after, but it’s a lot harder to express the problem using simple and clear code. The ability to understand a complex problem then express it using clean and maintainable code is what separates junior developers from senior ones.
Yup, US has been running around and trying to get all its vassals to stop selling chips to China.