That’s exactly what a model should be: Implementation detail.

On prem AI makes sense for more than just the cost. More control, IP, model improvements you can keep, data privacy to name a few. People will realize that AI is not like compute the moment they get their own knowledge sold back at a premium.

What are the advantages to on-prem for a company that's already in the cloud and trusts it with their IP? That company can just rent GPU instances from the cloud if they want to train/fine-tune their own models and keep avoiding CapEx.

> People will realize that AI is not like compute the moment they get their own knowledge sold back at a premium.

But what if your competitors sell their knowledge to AI companies?

Then you're still screwed.

The church has arguably used technology progress to its advantage, repeatedly. I cannot wait what the Magnifica Humanitas will start. Will Musk respond by making Grok more faithful, what will be the Leonardo DaVinci of our times for future generations to admire, will the Vatican research if God can express himself in LLM?

> will the Vatican research if God can express himself in LLM?

Such would be dangerously close to divination, in the style of reading tea leaves or Ouija boards.

> no one would use cloud providers

I think many are trying to move away from US providers actually. FISA section 702 and the current administrations liberties taken towards international law are not helping. The trust problem is real.

Not sure I’d trust China with anything onshore. But offshore, it does seem they play by the rules, because it pragmatically serves the stability of the people. China has not started wars in the past 50 years or so. By that logic one may assume they’d not abuse the arguably broad powers over Chinese firms abroad to risk one now.

In a world where rules are increasingly less important how states use power matters more to me than how they claim to be monitored.

Besides the cost you get the control, transparency and ability to identify small language models or LoRA you want to serve even more cost effective.

Well, available for Gemini means these days that half the time they are “Receiving a lot of requests right now.” and so sorry they couldn’t complete the task. Luckily the model supports long time horizons because that’s what’s needed. /me likes Gemini a lot just wishing Google would add the compute!

Are you on a paid plan?

I was, yes.

That argument can well be made, given how (un) effective it is. But what would be the alternative?

Does there need to be one? It's not clear to me where the moral good comes from AML in the first place. That's why things like Monero are so exciting.

If you are OK with child abuse, unfettered corruption, sex and weapons trafficking or scammers stealing your parents savings and generally like to wonder constantly if the next terrorist bomb or cyber attack happens close to you. Then there really is no need for such things as AML/CTF controls. That isn’t saying AML/CTF stops all crime but it’s making it more expensive and less criminal activity happens.

You are not alone with your view, in a sense Meta, Google and AWS as well as most social media platform act like they don’t think they need to have such controls. They just provide the platform.

By that logic AML/CTF controls would need to stop for banks and all others. Processing a payment for murder would become OK. Even though the killing would be a criminal act the payment processor would not have any obligation to support the investigation, they just processed a payment.

Is that aligned with your moral view?

The concerning aspect is 1 of 6 objectives so it’s no minor goal. The transmission to self-hosted anonymous wallets is what makes crypto so effective for fraud, sanction evasion, money laundering and other crimes. It clearly fails FATF Recommendation 16 and virtually all KYC standards. Seeing Coinbase and a German exchange support such an objective is rather unexpected.

Analogous situation to self-hosted communication encryption keys, where criminals can host military-grade encryption keys on any common mobile device, allowing them to discuss child porn and terrorism in a way that the police cannot monitor

I see nothing advocating against requiring KYC for user wallets and continuing to do wallet screening (which is the norm)

All my life I've dreamt of fighting for and fulfilling FATF Recommendation 16. :D

I can only imagine what a nightmare real life must be like :D

I count myself to the pro crypto camp but some of this ask is inviting criminals more than supporting legitimate use.

> I'm pro-crypto camp, yet I misquote and post misleading titles about it.

What did he mean by this?

I took editorial license on the title. Having worked to convince people that blockchain technology really solves more than just the privacy and payment problem I am just annoyed when the industry seemingly erodes trust established over years with a carelessly written manifesto. I just believe it merits more discourse.

Why is everyone obsessed with US military when the news seems to be Bitcoin? Just like that the US Dollar suffered because clearly a crypto currency may well become what the US Dollar was, a commodity to exchange value in a way that nobody can reasonably refuse. Whether that is for better or worse, I think that is bigger news then whose got the bigger gun.

The problem with bitcoin for this-it is very traceable. The US government can declare paying Iran Hormuz “insurance” to be a sanctions violation (they probably already have). Any Western company - even non-US - paying this “insurance” will be faced with the full ire of the US government.

I guess it might work if shipping company is non-Western (such as Chinese or Russian) - but I’m not sure what the advantage of bitcoin is in that case, as opposed to simply paying in yuan or rubles

How does it matter that it's traceable? Everyone knows the ships going in and out thanks to AIS. Many of these ships are already either falsely flagged, sanctioned, or just Iranian flagged. And as far as paying in rubles or yuan, this tells me that Iran doesn't think the shipping companies are willing to pay in either or think there's a safe/effective way to accept payment through those currencies.

I'm curious what makes your think these ships are unknown. There are 2 blockades in place and suspicion of mines in the conventional shipping route through Omani controlled waters.

The significance of being traceable is simply that US could tell you to not abide by Iran's insurance scheme by threatening sanctions if you do.

Whereas if it's not traceable then all that others know is that your ship got through the strait and there's at least some plausible deniability of why it got through

Iran is already sanctioned. The actors willing to ignore the US's feedback on Iran's insurance plans are already not playing by US rules. This is insurance for the shipping companies that are already operating on sanctioned fleet and oil.

More than USA would sanction you if you start paying terrorists to pass a strait, none of the big players wants that.

I think this is more due to the fact that the Iranian currency has completely collapsed.

It is bigger news indeed. I think previously China and Saudi were settling their account deficit with gold, a big airplane load every now and then.

One thing I'd wonder is whether using bitcoin actually involves real de-dollarization. Most stable coin is dollar based and other stable-coin don't seem like strong US competitors. China bans bitcoin trading so any Yuan/rmb based stable coin is marginal. So bitcoin seems strongly related to dollars.

They are using Bitcoin exactly for what it's good at, which is to support sanctioned regimes against the interests of the West. We've seen Russia and North Korea siphon money from gullible Bitcoin promoters this way, and now Iran is getting in on the action.

I would have thought so too, but the current bitcoin prices do not suggest the market agrees?

Because people are not going to pay this. The US will block or even seize the ships that pay Iran fees, whether in Bitcoin or other currencies. Iran isn't the only one who can close the strait.

> Why is everyone obsessed with US military

Shock of the unsavvy