The future of AI hangs in the balance.

At the center of it all, consumers have the ability to dictate AI's future.

Local AI is better than OpenAI and what happened this weekend at OpenAI proves it.

OpenAI Chaos

Unless you're living under a rock, you know there was a major shakeup at OpenAI with Sam Altman, CEO, and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and a company co-founder who quit in solidarity with Altman.

Knowledge is power - without a doubt, Generative AI is considering your conversations to predict trends and steal intelligence. Every conversation teaches AI something new and the person with the ability to listen to those conversations is benefiting.

OpenAI's Board of Directors, Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, Ilya Sutskever, and Tasha McCauley, share concerns about the direction Altman was taking OpenAI — ultimately deciding to remove the CEO with a vote of no confidence — a hostile takeover.

There are a few thoughts here that I've gathered:

1. The OpenAI Board of Directors, a non-profit, is young and shares roots in the desire to keep AI advancements open and transparent. I see the move as an effort to correct the recent OpenAI announcements that it would further consumerize their system. There seems to be some validation of this with Brockman's departure — who was working to monetize.
2. Microsoft got an incredible deal. They scooped up Altman and Brockman, that some would argue were OpenAI's lifeblood. Instead of outright purchasing OpenAI for the market value, Microsoft just has to pay Altman and Brockman's salary. This transitions incredible power to Microsoft, where the pair will be leading an independent research lab, no doubt monetizing with extraordinary resources where OpenAI may have struggled.
3. Twitch cofounder, Emmett Shear, will be taking over as OpenAI's CEO where he says trust and mission are central to how he intends to operate.

The real question lies in whether OpenAI can withstand the looming influence of Microsoft or if it's destined to fade into obscurity. The recent upheaval, with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman's departures, seems like a power shift. It's a classic tale of the innovative underdog versus the corporate behemoth.

Microsoft's absorption of key OpenAI figures appears strategic. Only time will tell if OpenAI can resist being assimilated by corporate interests or if true open innovation will prevail.

Local AI

Initially, I aimed to use Generative AI for prototyping, but my 2016 GPU posed a challenge. After months of learning python, Large Language Model (LLMs), and tweaking, I got several popular local LLMs running on my machine, pushing the old hardware to its limits.

All of this translates to a Generative AI experience similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Now, if you have a newer Mac, Windows, or Linux system, all of this should be much easier for you. LM Studio has a great interface that "just works" for those on newer systems (maybe 2020 and older).

To make my Generative AI accessible to machines older than 2020, I had to address non-AVX2 support. In simpler terms, AVX2, or Advanced Vector Extensions, is a microarchitecture that executes multiple data instructions simultaneously, working with 256-bit vectors. This technology, present in newer Intel and AMD CPU chips, enhances GPU performance.

Nevertheless, for those of you like me that have older systems and want to enable GPU support, Text-Generation-WebUI worked for me — after several failed attempts. Similar to LM Studio, Text-Gen-WebUI is a user interface that sits on top of different standards to run local LLMs.

Perhaps the most interesting component of Text-Gen-WebUI and LM Studio is the ability to enable an OpenAI API standard — which means I can communicate with the local GenAI service from whatever system employs ChatGPT's OpenAI API. In my case, I tested MemGPT and AutoGen.

Important to note, I was surprised to discover a vibrant and responsive community on Discord for almost all of these tools: LM Studio, Text-Gen-WebUI, AutoGen, MemGPT, and much more.

Let me know if you want me to talk more about my experience with AutoGen, MemGPT, and/or MageGPT in a future update.

Conclusions

I think it's important to note here that thinking independently - beyond OpenAI and Microsoft's system - is critical to staying relevant with AI.

The power these 2 companies have right now is disproportionate.

If the little guys, individuals or companies, have any hope of competing, we need to be building Lean Systems with open source resources like Text-Gen-WebUI.

For another twist, Microsoft owns AutoGen!

My name is Scott Purcell, a Product and UX Design Leader with 15 years of experience.

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