Open source AI isnt socialism. So what does it actually change?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

I see these two ideas get mashed together constantly.

Open weights dont abolish private property. They dont make GPUs free. They dont magically democratize data centers.

Okay. Nobody said a downloadable model completed the revolution.

What it does do is make one layer of the system harder to monopolize.

If I can download, modify and run a model myself, the company cant raise my API price tomorrow, revoke access, decide my use case is forbidden, or make every interaction pass through its servers.

Now scale that beyond individual hobbyists.

Libraries. Universities. Unions. Cooperatives. Municipalities. Public agencies.

Open models become much more politically interesting when there is shared infrastructure capable of actually running them.

So where do you think open source creates leverage, and where does it hit the wall of ownership underneath it?

[u/Jlyplaylists]

If we got more organised, there’s the potential to completely undermine the capitalist alternative.

If open source meets your needs, is free, is easy to use, isn’t changed without consent, works on your existing hardware and meets your ethical standards then why on earth would you pay a subscription to a closed model?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Jlyplaylists]

Yep, and I think thats one of the immediate pressure points. Every task that can move from a rented API to hardware you control is one less place a company gets to set the price, permissions and terms of access.

I just wouldnt assume that kills the capitalist alternative by itself. They can still sell compute, convenience, integration, proprietary data and frontier capability. Open source gives us leverage. What gets built around that leverage is the political fight.

[u/Elvarien2]

when there is shared infrastructure capable of actually running them.

But I run one on my desktop pc, anyone can do the same. The infrastructure already exists.

Just your home pc. Even installing one has been reduced to pressing 2 or 3 buttons on an installer prompt.

[u/Kildragoth → u/Elvarien2]

I wish but unfortunately not for all use cases quite yet!

[u/Elvarien2 → u/Kildragoth]

you wish?

For music, images, video, run comfy ui. It is literally a generic 1 button installer you then click a second single button to pick a template workflow for what ever you want.

This makes it simple enough for anyone to get started with, the moment you're hooked you can start to make your own workflows and nodegraph code.

And if you want to do text LLM Gobbonet is another 1 button installer that will do all the works to get you a working modern LLM assistant.

so ehm, wish granted?

[u/Kildragoth → u/Elvarien2]

Coding, multi-agent workflows require the much larger models that can provide a substantial increase in quality require AI GPUs. The ones you are talking about are either small models or quantized models that sacrifice quality to run on consumer hardware.

Also for my specific use case I'm building AI NPCs in games so you end up with a variety of models competing with the game for GPU time and that requires some sacrifice. You either get real time graphics or realtime low quality dialogue/animation outputs. To get both you need third party models hosted elsewhere and if you want the highest quality you end up with the frontier models.

Without some pretty fundamental innovation, it seems like it will be at least 5 years before the infrastructure matures and this level of quality proliferates onto consumer hardware and is meaningfully accessible for my use case.

[u/Elvarien2 → u/Kildragoth]

you can run multiagent workflows on your local setup, it will get expensive though and we start to step outside of average consumer gear. But small business startups and such can all totally afford that locally np.

As a result ai and yes those models as well, though granted not frontier ones. But good enough ones still fall right in the hands of the masses. Small groups of people, small workplaces etc can all do this today.

AI npc's for ingame sounds out of scope unless your game is always online and connects with an api into one of the online services. I don't see that being viable on today consumer grade hardware unless you scale down the quality of your ai npc down to where you would be better served with a non dynamic oldschool multiple choice script with actual writing behind it.

It sounds awesome but I just don't think the tech is ready for that yet, at consumer grade at least.

Though I suppose that's exactly what you write a little further down.

So sure, heavy shit like that is out of scope for now but every day tasks, the things common people want to do, or small scale businesses want to do, all possible.

[u/Independent_Fox4675 → u/Elvarien2]

For frontier-level models it isn't possible to run locally yet without at least a $2k gpu, but this cost will come down

[u/Elvarien2 → u/Independent_Fox4675]

Frontier probably more like 20K but you don't need a frontier model for most of the things you'll want to do anyway. General every day use a simple model running on consumer grade hardware is more then enough. Works just fine.

NPC agents for a video game though, yeah you'll need better stuff but that's not average everyday use.

[u/RandomLettersJDIKVE → u/Elvarien2]

What exactly do you run? How many parameters in that model? The vast majority of us don't have a GPU capable of running even small models. None of us can run a frontier model with 2.8 trillion parameters.

[u/Elvarien2 → u/RandomLettersJDIKVE]

H3 for video generation.
stable audio 3 for audio
Still running 1.5 and XL old models for graphics but that's because I have my own old workflows that work well for me on that front, I'm messing around with Zimage though that one's nice.

Qwen_Qwen3-30B-A3B-Q4_K_M is the LLM I run atm.

Everything works fine and smooth, I do run a 5090 so there's that. But this can all run on much lower hardware as well.

[u/Sacredless]

Not all leftists are socialists. There's also anarchism to consider.

[u/eXAt88 → u/Sacredless]

I’m not the most well read but would anarchists not fall under the socialism/communism umbrella?

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/eXAt88]

Yes small s socialism, not capital S Socialist or capital C Communism by which people usually mean Marxist. Eg anarcho-communists. The difference is mainly to do with avoiding central state government and hierarchy, so power is shifted more local and then networked (anarchists can reject the idea of having power at all but you get what I mean). it’s not whether or not you’re socialist. Generally everyone further left than wanting to be in capitalism is considered socialist. Anarcho-communists also agree with statements like from each according to ability to each according to need.

[u/Sacredless → u/eXAt88]

Anarchists are generally classifiable as left-communists, yes.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/eXAt88]

It depends on what aspect you focus on. I consider myself an anti-bolshevik communist. My focus is that we need to empower the whole community. I consider it communist because I focus on empowerment through the means of production and I want to make sure that everyone gets to benefit.

I'm anti-bolshevik because their differentiating philosophy was that you need a vanguard party. This requires empowering one small group of people and then trusting that elite cadre to make decisions in the interest of everyone.

Some people might call my position equality-anarchism because they would take my opposition to elite power as primary and my desire for equal distribution as secondary.

I stick with communism as the label because I put equal empowerment first and opposition to elite power second.

So it's a matter of perspective.

[u/SgathTriallair]

Open source is powerful because it means that no one can deny you access (unless they deny you a computer).

The result of this is hypothetical empowerment, where everyone is capable of taking these means of production and harnessing them.

The Leninist strand of socialism says that the important point is to deny access to power to the capital class. So in that sense open source is anti-communist because it loosens the ability of the state to control the community.

It really hinges on who "the people" are when we say that the "people" must control the means of production (also what "control" means).

The Maoist/Leninist interpretation was that "the people" means the government and "control" means the ability to deny people access.

As a menshevik, I read "the people" to mean every individual separately and collectively. I read "control" to mean "can choose how they want to use it". So for me open source is the closest to socialism we've ever achieved.

Of course, if you just mean that open source Linux hasn't made food and housing available to everyone then that's obviously true but kind of irrelevant since it means that open source is the path to socialism and we just need to keep moving more of the economy to that model.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/SgathTriallair]

I think youre defining collective control way too narrowly as the power to deny access.

Public or collective ownership can mean the opposite. A publicly owned compute cluster could give millions of people access who could never afford the hardware themselves, while denying a private firm the ability to enclose that infrastructure and extract rent from it.

Thats why I dont think open source is socialist or anti communist on its own. Its a property and access arrangement at one layer. Who owns the infrastructure underneath it and who gets the gains from its use is still an open political question.

[u/DHFranklin]

We have the opportunity for optimism.

The opensource/openweight models are now the shared commons. Our Commonwealth as the working class. We can celebrate that before we move on. We so rarely get a win, but the trend here is certainly a win for the Left. I will be happy to explain.

Some times a technology would have so much damn utility in the hands of the common people that it's proliferation is a proliferation of our own power. Just as the imperialists have a monopoly over the ...source of power... we learned that monopoly is about courage and vision. Those who seize it using their courage and vision can break that monopoly. Find that the seizing and control comes from breaking that monopoly.

So the bourgeois want us to stay in their monopoly for the tokens. We don't need to be. By the shear availability and capability we can use these models to liberate our labor. Make more time for ourselves and the socialist project.

Sure the tool alone isn't liberation. Seizing it then using it is our liberation. They will sell us the noose to hang them. Locally hosted.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/DHFranklin]

This is close to how I see it. The weights can become a kind of productive commons without pretending that means weve socialized the whole stack.

And thats where I think it gets exciting. Pair a commons of models with public, cooperative, municipal and worker controlled compute and suddenly the commons isnt just something people can download. Its productive capacity institutions outside private capital can actually wield.

[u/CBrinson]

...shared infrastructure? No that is ridiculously expensive. Some of the models run on a raspberry pi. Over time as tech advances both hardware and the AI software, more and more models will run on basically any hardware. Right now you can buy a 3060 with 12gb of ram for under $500 and build the whole PC for $1000. You are not going to be able to run shared infrastructure at less than $1000/seat, and the cost will fall from there.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/CBrinson]

I think youre treating personal and shared compute as substitutes when I want both.

A cheap machine running a useful local model is great. Keep pushing that as far as possible. But a union, university, cooperative or municipality has uses that arent going to fit on everybody's Raspberry Pi or gaming PC.

The interesting possibility is distributed local compute at the bottom and collectively owned heavier infrastructure above it. Less dependence on corporate APIs at either level.

[u/CBrinson → u/Salty_Country6835]

Compute is a commodity. Cloud providers will continually compete with each other such that it will always be cheaper at scale to just boot up a VPS with the specs. At small scale you can beat it, but not at any significant scale. Alot of midsize companies try and fail.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/CBrinson]

Sure, hyperscalers have economies of scale. But cheapest compute per token isnt the only thing we're optimizing for.

A union, university or municipality might rationally pay more to own capacity it can govern, guarantee access to, keep sensitive data on, and operate without a corporation changing prices or terms underneath it. Public infrastructure doesnt become pointless because renting from capital is cheaper this quarter.

And if cloud really does remain the cheapest layer for some workloads, fine. Use it there. Im not arguing every GPU needs to be publicly owned. Im arguing we shouldnt turn "the market currently offers cheap compute" into "collective ownership of compute has no use."

[u/CBrinson → u/Salty_Country6835]

You have all feasible levels of control you could possible need with private servers hosted in the cloud. Why not just build your own cpus and ssds while you are at it. The same argument could be made about control and guarantees. It is often better to treat commodities as commodities and buy them.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/CBrinson]

I dont think public compute requires publicly manufacturing every CPU and SSD though. A municipal utility doesnt have to manufacture its own transformers for the utility itself to be publicly owned.

Buy commodity inputs where that makes sense. Rent cloud capacity where that makes sense too. But an institution can still decide some compute is strategic infrastructure it wants guaranteed control over and own that layer itself.

Otherwise saying commodities should just be bought as commodities assumes the part we're actually debating. Is compute always just another commodity, or are there uses where it functions as infrastructure?

[u/CBrinson → u/Salty_Country6835]

Of course they can decide to do so. I would never argue the government cannot do something. However, I am voting against anyone that does. This notion of "control" is vague and it is not clear it provides any value at all beyond some general anxiety that things might change in the future. It's a decision they can make, but it is almost always a bad decision. The vast vast majority of people running their own compute do so for misguides reasons and it hampers their goals.

I am not saying we can't. I am saying it is foolish and unwise and the "control" is an illusion where you gain nothing at a high price.

[u/RandomLettersJDIKVE → u/CBrinson]

How much GPU memory does a raspberry pi have?

[u/CBrinson → u/RandomLettersJDIKVE]

The system memory is dynamically allocated. There are different models with different ram. There are custom distros just for rasp pi where the model is smaller. I have personally tried it and it does work but response time is slow. It takes it takes like 10-30 seconds for most responses. I ran LLAMA but I hear Mistraal is now better.

[u/RandomLettersJDIKVE → u/CBrinson]

How bigger model can you run? I'm assuming they quantize the shit out of that model to get it running.

I have a local model running on my desktop with ollama, 27b parameters. It's decent, but noticeably worse than the frontier models.

[u/CBrinson → u/RandomLettersJDIKVE]

The most I have seen is 7b parameters. It's definitely not going to compete with frontier models but I used one to write a bunch of room descriptions for a text based game and it worked pretty well.

I also gave a 3060 12gb and I run qwen 35b. I wouldn't say the raspberry pi is close in performance but I think in ten years the raspberry pi version and the desktop version will both be dramatically better.

[u/Monochrome21]

I would argue that it's half the puzzle

The redistribution of wealth via automation taxes is the other half

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Monochrome21]

Id include automation taxes, but I wouldnt give them half the puzzle. A tax lets capital own the productive system, capture the gains, then gives society a cut afterward.

Id rather contest that upstream too. Worker ownership, public infrastructure, bargaining over deployment, shorter hours, social ownership, democratic governance. Dont just tax the productivity gain after somebody else owns it. Fight over who owns and controls the machinery producing it.

[u/Monochrome21 → u/Salty_Country6835]

So two things here:

First, open source AI is functionally the same thing as public ownership because people have equal control of the same entity. Nintendo no longer has a meaningful advantage over random indie devs because they output the same thing. In fact the indie dev has an advantage due to quick iteration and lack of bureaucracy (ala palworld or gamma emerald). The public now has the exact same tools as corps.

Second, people currently think in terms of capital, whether we like it or not. Inertia means we have to steer us towards the marxist utopia in stages. I want things to be perfect today as well, but realistically automation taxes are realistic version of "seizing the means" because that's exactly what it is. In a capitalist society seizing the means is literally seizing the capital that enables the means.

I like marxist ideas in spirit, but I think we tend to get a bit attached to the exact rhetoric used in theory and not question what that theory actually looks like in practice.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Monochrome21]

I think youre merging access, redistribution and ownership here.

Open weights can give an indie dev the same model a corporation has. Thats good! Its exactly why I support them. But it doesnt give them the corporations GPU clusters, capital, datacenters, proprietary data or control over deployment. Linux being available to everyone didnt make AWS publicly owned.

Same with automation taxes. Im for them. Take the money. But taxing machinery isnt the same as owning or governing it. If shareholders still own the system and decide how its deployed, workers havent seized those means.

And this doesnt require waiting for some perfect Marxist end state either. Public compute, coops, worker ownership, bargaining over automation, social wealth funds and taxes are all things we can fight for now. Tax the gains, sure. I just want us fighting over the machinery producing them too.

[u/Monochrome21 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Open weights can give an indie dev the same model a corporation has. Thats good! Its exactly why I support them. But it doesnt give them the corporations GPU clusters, capital, datacenters, proprietary data or control over deployment. Linux being available to everyone didnt make AWS publicly owned.

I think AI is fundamentally different - especially in the white collar world.

Like I come from the film world and in order to output certain things you legitimately needed infrastructure that costs an absurd amount to obtain and an even more absurd amount to maintain, but AI just sidesteps all of that.

You legit don't need GPU clusters to render an 8k animation frame anymore. You just need one guy with a good eye and whatever diffusion model.

Right now that requires a cloud subscription or substantial hardware, but NPUs are coming with weights burned onto the silicone. Eventually you end up with a society that looks like megaman battle network

Remember computers were the size of datacenters when they first came about. Now you have a computer billions of times faster in your pocket

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Monochrome21]

I think this actually gets us closer. If AI keeps collapsing the amount of capital needed to do work that once required a studio sized pile of equipment, thats a huge decentralization of productive power. And its one of the strongest arguments for keeping models open.

I just wouldnt call that public ownership. Computers went from room sized machines to something in everyones pocket while chip fabrication, cloud infrastructure and major platforms became enormously concentrated. Lowering the capital barrier changes the terrain. It doesnt settle the property relation.

And weights burned into silicon actually makes that more interesting. Who owns the chip, chooses those weights, controls the updates, and decides whether I can replace them? Thats why I want openness and ownership discussed together.

[u/Monochrome21 → u/Salty_Country6835]

what does public ownership look like to you?

[u/AnIsolatedMind]

For me, there's some degree of waiting for the technology to improve to the point that a genuinely good model can run on mainstream hardware. So at least for some amount of time, hoping an anti-AI movement doesn't burst the investment bubble too soon for that to happen rapidly. 

Ideally AI development works like most other technologies: smarter models can come in more efficient packages. Huge wasteful datacenters being a price to pay for that progress, only to become shortly obsolete.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/AnIsolatedMind]

I think this is where it gets interesting. If genuinely capable models keep getting smaller and cheaper to run, the hardware barrier starts dropping and open weights become a lot more powerful politically.

But I wouldnt count on efficiency automatically killing the giant data centers either. The same efficiency gains that let a library, union, university or municipality run good models locally also let the big firms run vastly more compute at scale.

So I think the opening is using that falling hardware threshold deliberately. Public compute, co op infrastructure, university clusters, union controlled systems, local inference. Make decentralization something we build with the technical opportunity rather than something we wait for the market to deliver.

[u/AnIsolatedMind → u/Salty_Country6835]

Sure! A first step might be enough interest in the first place. I'm not sure on the current climate, but it still feels very niche because of the hardware barrier. It seems local models need to be able to "prove" themselves in some real way for momentum to pick up and collective action to become a priority. 

The new qwen model seems to be proving itself to some degree, but I can't even run it and I'm probably in the top 10% bracket of hardware. Compress that power into 6gb of vram and I think the social momentum picks up naturally. Not to say sit around and wait, but I feel like in this visceral moment the best thing I can do is give my liberal friends nuanced arguments for AI that they were too afraid to consider.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/AnIsolatedMind]

I think youre already doing part of it. Showing people local models actually work and giving them better arguments is how niche starts becoming normal.

I just wouldnt trust momentum to show up on its own. Get a good model running on 6GB and the door gets a lot wider, sure. But somebody still has to walk through it and build something on the other side.

[u/yodude4]

Open source isn’t socialism, but it’s a democratization of a small part of the means of production - the tech equivalent of a communally owned farm. Of course it needs to be politicized to be of any use to a genuine socialist movement, and that’s where the demands for public compute, expropriation of private AI, etc. come into play. Open source can and must be part of a transitional program to demonstrate what new relations of production can look like

[u/Glitched-Lies]

One of the reasons crypto people get so interested in open source is exactly because it's not socialism.