People With No Internet Stand to Gain the Most from AI

It's no secret that AI in the form of LLMs have taken the world by storm in the last couple of years thanks to the transformer technology invented in large by Google and popularized by Open AI's ChatGPT service.

The technology has quickly become part of a lot of people's routine, doing everything from summarization, answering questions and countless other use cases.

Personally, the features that excite me the most are code generation, asking it for quick facts to learn about a specific subject and as kind of a side-kick to bounce ideas off of before I make decisions.

One of the issues that strike me is that these features have an even more massive effect on a certain population: those without access to the Internet. As devastating as it would be to those of us with Internet access to remove LLMs from our lives, let's face it, we can survive by going back to Googling the way we used to prior to the paradigm shift. However, to those without that option, LLM access is life altering. This, in my opinion, is the best way to judge the utility and usefulness of a product - how drastic is the change when a product is suddenly removed from your life?

33% of the world population is still without Internet access or without access to fast and stable Internet. Not long ago, I was part of that demographic having grown up in a place with little to no Internet. The Internet we did have, topped out at 33Kb/s (theoretical limit which we never really reached). It being dial-up and extremely expensive, surfing the Web was a luxury you only got to experience once in a blue moon.

I taught myself how to write code in high-school with the little Internet access we had, often downloading single web pages and editing their code with unsophisticated text editors on my bootleg Windows machine. I learned strictly through trial and error. My mind can't even comprehend what it would be like having access to AI enabled code generation; the kind that is readily accessible to everyone now.

This is what gets me excited about Persys and local inference in general and why this project exists. There's version of my story spread across the globe, filled with people and kids who could learn not just to code with the help of AI but to learn pretty much whatever they want. LLMs have the power to even the playing field without having to wait for the Internet infrastructure to become a reality for them. Lack of Internet is not just a monetary issue, it's often a political issue that will remain an issue for decades to come. Not to mention lack of access to credit cards for continued LLM use.

Growing up, I remember CDs containing an interactive Encyclopedia that I would browse at libraries to learn different subjects. It was the closest thing we had to Wikipedia. Having an LLM by your side is that CD on steroids, especially when you have no other alternatives. I get excited thinking about all the possibilities for those who are underserved.

Local inference has still a long way to go until it is as common as a generic music player that comes pre-installed in virtually any operating system. As models continue to get more efficient and commonplace hardware gets better at handling these models, I hope we see the dissemination of AI into geographies and demographics that can benefit the most.

To accelerate humanity as a whole, we need everyone to be in the same realm at the very least when it comes to education. Even thinking about a large part of the world population having no idea what an LLM is (or AI in general) or the fact that you can now just generate realistic images out of thin air makes me very nervous. My mind drifts to fake political or tribal images that can potentially be used to drive mass panic or stoke fear. This has been a thing with Photoshop and Facebook for years and those of us in the know just call it "AI slop" and move on, but to the uninitiated, there would no way to tell. Images get spread like wildfire in places with no Internet, often with Bluetooth transfer from phone to phone. So even if you don't have access to the Internet, you're still at risk when it comes to unreal media.

AI literacy, amongst other AI issues, is going to be one of the most important problems in the coming years and spreading access to cheap LLMs is the first step in closing that gap.