Peer to Peer AI
Discussion
Can we really consider this DeepSeek moment as a historical pivot to the era of ‘Peer to Peer AI’?
George Anadiotis:
"First off, it depends on what we mean by ‘Peer to Peer AI’. Certainly, it’s not P2P produced AI. DeepSeek’s models, like most AI models, were produced by a closely knit core team working for the same employer in a commercial enterprise – albeit a Chinese one in this case. There’s a number of reasons for this, which come down to expertise, supply and demand, and coordination.
The closest thing to a P2P produced AI model would be BLOOM, developed by over 1,000 researchers from various countries as part of the BigScience project. However that model is 3 years old already, which in today’s AI is a lifetime, and there are no signs of maintenance or evolution of the model or other similarly developed models on the horizon.
But what Bauwens seems to be arguing is that AI is the vehicle to bring knowledge to the masses. First, he notes, the internet created the conditions of an explosion of available knowledge, beyond the capacity of humanity to process. Now with AI we can re-summarize such knowledge in context.
Through DeepSeek and open source P2P AI, this knowledge can be available to the working classes, which now take the form of commons-based, cosmo-local productive communities, and no longer the commodity-labor of capitalism.
In other words, the argument is that DeepSeek-like AI can be used to empower P2P production. Bauwens calls this ‘networked organizations with commons’, pointing to crypto communities. He refers to idealistic efforts in the crypto community, undertaken under the name of decentralization.
What crypto has achieved, he writes, is the capacity for mutual coordination of labor and money, and a way to pay for its commons. The new organizational vehicle is no longer the state or the corporation, but ‘networks with commons’, based on open contributory ecosystems, that operate cosmo-locally.
But as Bauwens points out, the workers in crypto are mostly coders and developers. They are worker-technocrats. They need to expand and coalesce with the rest of the working class. This is the role he sees for AI. I am both hopeful and skeptical of the prospect."
(https://linkeddataorchestration.substack.com/p/are-we-entering-the-era-of-peer-to?)