AI Becomes Cheap, Next It Will Be Everywhere

You can't stop an idea. The genie escapes: Stanford copies the ChatGPT AI for less than $600

Stanford's Alpaca AI performs similarly to the astonishing ChatGPT on many tasks – but it's built on an open-source language model and cost less than US$600 to train up. It seems these godlike AIs are already frighteningly cheap and easy to replicate.

It is called Alpaca because it is based on Meta's open-source LLaMA 7B language model.

Six months ago, only researchers and boffins were following the development of large language models. But ChatGPT's launch late last year sent a rocket up humanity's backside: machines are now able to communicate in a way pretty much indistinguishable from humans. They're able to write text and even programming code across a dizzying array of subject areas in seconds, often of a very high standard. They're improving at a meteoric rate, as the launch of GPT-4 illustrates, and they stand to fundamentally transform human society like few other technologies could, by potentially automating a range of job tasks – particularly among white-collar workers – people might previously have thought of as impossible.

Companies working in AI, and even Open AI are working to restrict that, but it is all via terms and conditions, and all of LLaMA model was leaked on 4chan within a week of its announcement.

You can't stop an idea, not even a bad idea.

So what's to stop basically anyone from creating their own pet AI now, for a hundred bucks or so, and training it however they choose? Well, OpenAI's terms of service do say "you may not ... use output from the Services to develop models that compete with OpenAI." And Meta says it's only letting academic researchers use LLaMA under non-commercial licenses at this stage, although that's a moot point, since the entire LLaMA model was leaked on 4chan a week after it was announced.

Oh, and another group says it's managed to eliminate the cloud computing cost, releasing more code on Github that can run on a Raspberry Pi, and complete the training process within five hours on a single high-end nVidia RTX 4090 graphics card.

What's to stop anyone from running amok? Absolutely nothing.

Welcome to the brave new world. I hope it doesn't turn into one of the many versions of dystopia we've seen in Sci-Fi.

And for the rest of us, well, it's hard to say, but the awesome capabilities of this software could certainly be of use to an authoritarian regime, or a phishing operation, or a spammer, or any number of other dodgy individuals.

Is the Golden Age of SPAM upon us? I hope not.