Hamish,

A fascinating thread on the Reprap-unphone.

Your insight into the real costs of open source AI engines is very important.

And yes I also don’t know where it is coming from, but maybe we can give it a hand :)

Greetings, Rob


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Inspiring talks on #IoT and #AI
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> On 12 Sep 2024, at 09:56, Hamish Cunningham <hamish@???> wrote:
>
> Rob,
>
>> The unphone is awesome! Can it be a platform for open source AI?
>
> Tnx! It came from teaching a course on IoT devices -- https://iot.unphone.net/ -- so the core is a tiny ESP32 microcontroller. It can do sensing and manage control tasks and etc. -- and is great for off grid messaging https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/unPhone/ -- but it won't run any version of the foundation models that are a key component of the new AI. Although those models have now been dramatically reduced in size to fit on consumer grade GPUs, they will likely always need multiple GBs of VRAM and huge parallel matrix computation. So the AI engines will for the foreseeable need a machine that currently costs upwards of €2.5k to run end user tasks. The good news is they have broken out of the corporate cloud and can be used to give back the technology to the people who created the necessary preconditions for its existence: every author or artist or scholar or teacher or pupil or... well, let's just shorten that to "humanity"? :)
>
>> I think we have a great analogy here. Bricolabs was started by the promise of open source hardware, fuelled by Adrian Bowyens REPRAP. We ‘produced’ an imaginary that kept a lot of us going in our minds as having - knowing there were similar intelligences around, in itself a great ‘result’. We did not aim for a movement.
>> And now you are here telling us DIYAI is on us!
>> To me, this is a similar moment.
>> Let’s discuss how we can harness this in an imaginary and a product, based on the unphone. And a movement unsingularity :)
>
> I remember REPRAP! How inspiring that was! I remember James showing me it running at Access Space, which later provided the laser cutters that Paul Beech used after winning the Raspberry Pi logo competition to make the first case for that machine. Paul (and Jon Williamson) later founded a successful maker company (Pimoroni) who now make the unPhone...
>
> I don't really know where the next leap forward in this story of tech-for-the-people is coming from, but the existence of communities like yours gives me renewed hope that it is coming soon!
>
> Have a good one,
> Hamish
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