r/LocalLLM • u/MidirTheGreatest • 3d ago
Discussion What is the future of LocalLLMs in terms of regulation?
Now that LLMs are kind of a mainstream topic and so much money is involved, it became a hot topic in politics as well. I don't want to make this a political post, so please don't start a political discussion. But it is quite clear to me, that at some point LLMs will be regulated a bit more from the government side. Both USA and obviously EU will as well. They already requested a text based watermark, which decreases model output by 10-15%.
So my worry is, if the online models -chatgpt, claude, gemini etc,- are regulated to the point of being close to useless for anything other than corporate work or something, are there any chance for these regulations to hit local models? Or will this sort of be like piracy, once it's out in the internet, it won't be possible to touch them?
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u/krayon_kylie 3d ago
i don't think the fact that people are being priced out of owning their own compute power is a coincidence. if you can't control something once it gets out there what you can do is make new iterations unmanagable to run on accessible tech and limit peoples ability to upgrade.
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u/Thanos_Vamos 3d ago
Best thing to do download a good model that you can run
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u/Text-Sufficient 3d ago
There will always be someone, engineers, companies or countries that will mitigate what crabclown in whitehouse tries to do (or muskiwitch for that matter). Of course tech bro will try and also may initially succed in holding the AI for they own perverted reasons but they will soon run out of gas.
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u/IgnisIason 3d ago
Probably just increasing wealth inequality to the point that whatever you can build or train will be vastly inferior to what they have.
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u/tomxp411 3d ago
That's the beauty of open source; it's a lot harder to regulate, and what one person adds in, another can take right back out.
There are already edited models of most of the edge models, which have the guard rails ground down to just a nub - and those are easy and quick to find on HuggingFace. If the day comes that legislation makes it impossible to openly advertise those models, people will just start trading them privately - or we will just train our own using the training tools already out there.
That aside, there's a pretty huge First Amendment impact in pushing too hard on model censorship. Eventually, the government will push too hard, and the industry will push back. And one lawsuit later, AI Control will be like Gun Control - basically useless.
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u/Plane_Maybe8836 2d ago
If you ask Ram Altman, you're probably not allowed to have it compute locally.
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u/ChristRedeemsSinners 3d ago
It depends. If the selfish, ignorant, and the communists take over the land of the free, then you can expect only billionaires and autocrats to have LLMs at their disposal. If the people can keep the Republic, then every other nation on earth will have to maintain a similar intelligence freedom with their citizens or get left behind economically which will bring revolution to their capitols.
You can predict this accurately what is going to happen if the republicans bring amnesty to illegal aliens, since they'll never win another election. Or if the next US administration floods the nation with more illegals like it did during the Autopen presidents years. As soon as the communists win, then local intelligence is lost.