extracting profit

Yes, making money.

Profit isn’t the origin of money, it’s an accumulation function of currency users. See MMT.

Pepper them throughout existing infrastructure

Well, wasn’t that kind of what we were doing? Everyone hosting their own data servers, without the addition of holding data outside the infrastructure owner?

I’ll rarely advocate for going back to what existed before, but my concept is to build on that distributed deployment, but tie it together with federation and fibre to provide agency, efficiency, and resilience. A distributed data centre for lack of a better term.

AI and LLM infrastructure isn’t just my concern and it isn’t even where my issue came from. It’s data security, the kind of people that tend to own these, what they might do with it and the environmental and social impact.

Smaller, intentional, federated sites could address this, it needs a solid model to build a proof of concept upon.

Outside this very small echo chamber I’m not alone either. Most of those I know professionally harbour the same concerns I do, and don’t believe they are necessary. I agree with Taleya that a lot of people automatically think AI and LLM. I don’t and neither do most of those I’ve worked and engage with.

I suspect something was lost or omitted in the thread to this point which masked a broader consensus, and I think there’s a lot of potential if our agreements can be realised less violently.