Rob, James, all,

What a fascinating discussion! The comments about phones makes me feel
better about spamming you with https://unphone.net/ -- an "unPhone" made in
Sheffield, UK :)

I agree with James' point about opportunity, and about the connection
between building our own stuff as therapy, as escape, and as a potential
pole of attraction to a new world. (This was what the Transition Towns
movement was about, I think, and Cory Doctorow's lovely *Walkaway*.)

One hopeful thing in the context of the new AI is that since Facebook
decided it was losing the LLM race with M$ and Google and opened up LLAMA,
the open source AI community has begun producing models that perform at
similar levels to ChatGPT. Although it is still prohibitively expensive to
build the foundation model that these are based on, for end user
applications they can run on hardware that's a fraction of the price of the
corporate cloud (e.g. a €1.5k GPU can both infer that "I'm hot" means turn
the heating down and do a decent job of spouting general knowledge on a
multitude of subjects). I think the era of *DIY* AI is now upon us :)

Looking forward to the zoom call, best,
Hamish


*Hamish Cunningham*
Professor of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK

*I used to hope that as time passed I would get older and wiser,
        but it seems that in fact I just get odder and wider.*

*Not everything that can be counted counts,and not everything that counts
can be counted. (Einstein)*

*Phone: 07740 149 842 / 0114 222 1891             * *unphone.net*
<https://unphone.net/>
hamish@???
https://hamish.gate.ac.uk    *https://iot.unphone.net
<https://iot.unphone.net/>*
https://gate.ac.uk                 https://pi.gate.ac.uk

*https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/dcs/people/academic/hcunningham
<https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/dcs/people/academic/hcunningham>*