The Ethics of Local LLMs: Responding to Zuckerberg's "Open Source AI Manifesto"

The "Open Source AI Manifesto"

Mark Zuckerberg has been hated by Richard Stallman for decades, and he is the only person who appears on both the cover image of the video essays: How the Internet was Stolen and How AI was Stolen by Then & Now.

However, things have changed recently after his adoption of the Fediverse and open-sourcing of Llama continuously.

In Zuckerberg's latest "Open Source AI Manifesto", he stated 5 needs of open source:

• We need to train, fine-tune, and distill our own models.
• We need to control our own destiny and not get locked into a closed vendor.
• We need to protect our data.
• We need a model that is efficient and affordable to run.
• We want to invest in the ecosystem that’s going to be the standard for the long term.

That describes the needs of tech individuals and small businesses accurately.

The reason I call it "Manifesto" is because the impression of reading this article connects back to the GNU Manifesto strongly.

Thanks to the GNU project that made us free/libre OSes; thanks to the LLaMA development team that made us true open AIs.

Egoism-Altruism Dialectic

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith wrote:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

This selfish altruism or ethical egoism idea has been carried on by many Austrian schools and behavioral economists and eventually became a key principle of neoliberalism ideology.

However, it is more complex in the case of Zuckerberg and his Meta.

In his statement, Zuckerberg is clearly aware of what is the benefits of embracing open-source—profitable yet moral.

As we all know, in Silicon Valley, nobody really cares about "the greater good" nor really wants to "make the world a better place." They are just responsible to their stakeholders.

But what about a win-win situation?

That's exactly what they are selling to the public to believe (feel).

The dialectical structure remains the same as the egoism-altruism dialectic—A self-interested businessman pursuing profit but pretending to be moral.

The important thing is: Will this result in a win-win situation for the public good?

The answer is that it depends, and most likely no. These too-big-to-fail companies are reactionary at their core.

Achieving the greater good is hard, and it is naive to believe that it is the byproduct of the [big] Other's selfishness. Unless we, the 99%, are involved in this dialectic movement as a proactive agent. Otherwise, our society will be destroyed by climate crisis before having the chance of running into "Post-Human Dystopia."

No Degrowth No Acceleration

As I mentioned before in my speech, the dangers of technology, big techs will never shrink their data centers for sustainability without changing the underlying political-economic order, unless the next economic cycle/depression comes again.

Our estimate of OpenAI’s $4 billion in inference costs comes from a person with knowledge of the cluster of servers OpenAI rents from Microsoft. That cluster has the equivalent of 350,000 Nvidia A100 chips, this person said. About 290,000 of those chips, or more than 80% of the cluster, were powering ChartGPT, this person said.

— Amir Efrati and Aaron Holmes

Marking a major investment in Meta’s AI future, we are announcing two 24k GPU clusters. We use this cluster design for Llama 3 training. This announcement is one step in our ambitious infrastructure roadmap. By the end of 2024, we’re aiming to continue to grow our infrastructure build-out that will include 350,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs as part of a portfolio that will feature compute power equivalent to nearly 600,000 H100s.

— Building Meta’s GenAI Infrastructure

Zuckerberg will keep expanding their AI clusters to match up with OpenAI/MS, Google, and so on. Open-Source is nothing more than a competitive strategy to Meta after all.

Noam Chomsky and Kohei Saito's advocates for degrowth are very appealing, but we should never solely count on that. Just like a Virtual Machine cannot surpass the limitations of its underlying physical machine. Green politics cannot even sustain itself when it is running above the neoliberal economy.

Now, the condition is clear, but what is to be done? Clearly, neither Degrowth nor Accelerationism are helpful in the Anthropocene era. But what about Slavoj Žižek's "Moderate Conservatism?"

SaaSS or Cloud Fiefs?

On the internet, proprietary software isn’t the only way to lose your freedom. Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, is another way to let someone else have power over your computing. SaaSS means using a service implemented by someone else as a substitute for running your copy of a program. The term is ours; articles and ads won’t use it, and they won’t tell you whether a service is SaaSS. Instead they will probably use the vague and distracting term “cloud,” which lumps SaaSS together with various other practices, some abusive and some OK.

One of the many meanings of “cloud computing” is storing your data in online services. In most scenarios, that is foolish because it exposes you to surveillance. Another meaning (which overlaps that but is not the same thing) is Service as a Software Substitute, which denies you control over your computing. You should never use SaaSS.

— Richard Stallman, Who Does That Server Really Serve?

RMS wrote this essay long ago, but recently Yanis Varoufakis took this loss of freedom notion a step further in today's context.

It took mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical-sounding neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs to accomplish what? To turn workers toiling in warehouses, driving cabs and delivering food into cloud proles. To create a world where markets are increasingly replaced by cloud fiefs. To force businesses into the role of vassals. And to turn all of us into cloud serfs, glued to our smartphones and tablets, eagerly producing the cloud capital that keeps our new overlords on cloud nine.

— Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism

In the Age of Cloud Capital, our freedom is taken away by cloudalists who own the Online service/SaaSS/Cloud fief to charge us for a subscription fee, or so-called "cloud rent." Of course, they want to control our devices (computing), our attention (wallet), and our life (labor).

So, how do we reclaim our freedom and democracy?

I claim that we shall free [as libre] and democratize [as decentralize] our digital life first, by adopting open-source alternatives, and self-hosting if at all possible. This is my version of "cloud rebellion" to overthrow technofeudalism, and it is the same stone that Jacob Appelbaum shot at Surveillance [Capitalism].

It's the hardest thing to work against how a system functions. The outcome would be the recoil of a more severe economic crisis, the iteration of Green Capitalism, and the backfire of Alt-Right.

To overcome this system deadlock, we need to work around the feedback loops and identify and alter the leverage points as Donella Meadows indicates.

So what and where are the leverage points in the capitalist system exactly? I think it's every Creative Destruction that Joseph Schumpeter suggested. For example, the AI boom we are currently experiencing, and Llama and Stable Diffusion are the strongest creative-destructive forces out there.

We also need David Graeber's Direct Action but within our digital life.

Treating Schizophrenia and Depression

There are a lot of resources like gofoss and Privacy Guides which are easy to start with. But we will focus on local LLMs right now. Tools like ollama, Jan, GPT4All, and llamafile work great for self-hosting LLMs either on localhost or local area networks.

This is the first step in regaining our freedom from the oligarchies by leveraging the creative-destructive force of open-source AI. The goal is to encourage tech-savvy people to do more self-hosting and non-tech-savvy people to use more decentralized services/instances maintained by the open-source community, like Fediverse.

Yes, Zuckerberg indeed integrated Fediverse and open-sourced LLaMA, and it is not because of his virtue. So does Alibaba and its Qwen. This is because, in Gilles Deleuze's terms, Capitalism is schizophrenic which means it is self-deterritorialized by its nature. To put it simply, that is another way of Karl Marx's famous claim— capitalism is self-destructive.

If we really want to save our environment by degrowth, it has to be bottom-up not the opposite. More self-hosting, decentralized LLMs lead to less market demand for massive AI clusters [at least for inference], so the supply of data centers will start to drop spontaneously.

Regulations have their meaning but will never solve the problem effectively in a competitive market, and human needs and desires cannot be simply pushed away. The excessive legislative intervention can result in unemployment which leads to the resurgence of Conservatives but in its worse condition, Ultraconservatism.

This is what Sigmund Freud called "the insistent return of the repressed." The cure is to be more self-sufficient—to fulfill our needs by our own hands rather than being fed up with Surplus-Enjoyment of Consumerism by the [big] Other.

History has proven that Capitalism could not be ended by Communism which we have already seen, but it is definitely not Fukuyama's the End of History.

Every dead end (cycle) of Capitalism can be altered by Entrepreneurship. Not in the sense of "everyone is an entrepreneur", but everyone has an [not so] equal opportunity to take action [in their own way]—to participate, to get involved, and to be skin in the game of a technological revolution and its following social transformation.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, when treating psychosis, the analyst should ally with the patient by taking the role of the secretary (entrepreneur) and play by the rule of the patient (free market). Then, find a fixation (opportunity) and encourage the patient to reposition their psychic structure (circular flow) into something more stable and sustainable. In the case of Capitalism, the fixation [or anchoring point] is Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS).

Decentralized self-hosting of local LLMs is like Deleuze's Rhizome. It can decrease the demand of the proprietary market and eventually dismantle the AI monoliths. This free-flowing, productive transformation of FOSS is the way to cure Capitalism's disease and to save our environment.

We don't know what it will be like after Capitalism, as Mark Fisher suggested, it is impossible even to imagine of that. But we still need to go beyond the never-ending endgame of Late Capitalism, jailbreak the depressive Capitalist Realism, and recreate a future where anything is possible (everyone has freedom).

Here is a list of books that constructed the context of this post:

• Ludwig von Mises - Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
• Joseph Schumpeter - Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
• Murray Rothbard - Man, Economy, and State
• Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• Kohei Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
• Noam Chomsky - Optimism over Despair
• Donella Meadows - Thinking In Systems
• David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
• Yanis Varoufakis - Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
• Richard Stallman - Free Software, Free Society
• Jean Baudrillard - The Consumer Society
• Gilles Deleuze - Capitalism and Schizophrenia
• Francis Fukuyama - The End of History and the Last Man
• Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
• Slavoj Žižek - The Sublime Object of Ideology
• Bruce Fink - Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners
• Dany Nobus - Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
• Zygmunt Bauman - Work, Consumerism and the New Poor
• David Harvey - A Brief History of Neoliberalism
• Murray Bookchin - The Ecology of Freedom
• Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism