When I think about decentralization I think about ACTUAL decentralization
I don't like crypto or AI that much because of a lot of things. On the tech side I think they are marvels of ingenuity and I'll leave it at that because that's not the point here. On the practical day-to-day effects, I think it's a mess because they reflect just how much of our culture went into optimizing content and profit instead of real value and the fact that slop and enshitification are words of the years shows it. On the socioeconomic impact...
They both have a similar promise: decentralization. Finally, you are free from the banks and the government regulations. Finally, the next technological revolution - the thing, THE THING, in your computer and self-hostable.
If you have a powerful enough GPU.
(I'll be fair. The decentralization side of AI and it's ability of being self hosted on your own hardware is a less relevant point of it than crypto's decentralization - which is the base of the whole appeal of crypto to begin with. For AI it's complementary, but not strictly necessary for most of it's promises in my opinion)
They are both technically decentralized in technology. But they both hugely impacted the market in a way that centralized it even more! Crypto is in theory decentralized, but it's heavy dependency on powerful hardware to be able to profit from it - outside of the gambling and speculation, made it an attractive investment for agents with the capital to do so. Nowadays it's basically impossible to profit from cryptomining if you are not at the least an industrial beast with a few millions to burn through the initial investment.
The same with AI. It's possible to host your own AI to do image generation or something in your own computer. Or to assist you in coding or to play therapist or whatever. But it's very slow, it's lower quality, it's generally the worse experience. It's simply better to pay for some credits and use a powerful AI hosted in insanely powerful servers to get a better use of them for a fraction of the prize.
These insanely powerful servers, also run on powerful processing devices. It's the same thing again. The technology could be in theory truly decentralized, but it pushes for even more centralization of the hardware necessary to run it because there isn't any way for the consumers to compete for the market share that these giants of technology have.
Related to this is the recent news that nvidia is from now on going to focus more on AI rather than consumer GPUs, along with the ram thing. I think this is a huge LOSS for general consumers. These AI companies keep devouring hardware requirements and now we're left as an afterthought.
It makes economical sense to do this. I can't argue that. None can because it's true. I can run in circles going on and on about how I wish it wasn't this way but, just enter bluesky or whatever.
What can it be done about this? Regardless of weather I like AI or not, that's not an issue for me. My issue is that there are no real alternatives to our current models of AI accessible on hardware for all. There seems to be an interesting push for this with "AI-powered laptops" and mobiles and pc, but they still push toward centralization a lot because of the hardware requirements. I'm talking about being able to run some powerful model in potato hardware. like linux.
I don't have any solutions here. I'm sorry. I just found a new angle to worry about related to the whole AI thing and I wanted to write about it. I'm not ignoring the social impact-destruction that AI is having around us. I'm also tired of hearing 24/7 "it will be a revolution", it already is! We are in the middle of it and it's consequences on the job market and the slop media. The data privacy and copyright infringements. Just how hostile this whole thing has been for creatives. The alignment problem - oh god, the alignment. The environmental issues, directly correlated to the centralization issues. Pick a poison, dude.
(tbf, I don't think actually having an capable AI accessible on more general devices would be good. In fact I think it might be apocalyptic. But my main point that I hope I was able to communicate was that I think it's bad that AI companies and previously cryptominers and agents with large amount of capital in general are able to claim so much hardware market and leave aside the consumers, prompting more centralization now that the hardware that was required to do the thing yourself is even more inaccessible.)