Democratization of generative AI

A surprising phenomenon whereby jugaad processes and idk what else, a lot of excellent AI research is being done by the people.

cf Stability, RWKV

• Deepseek is a Chinese company, not a community. But they seem to be changing the game in terms of cost, accessibility, and openness of AI models. TBD.

  • DeepSeek on X: “🚀 DeepSeek-R1 is here! ⚡ Performance on par with OpenAI-o1 📖 Fully open-source model & technical report 🏆 MIT licensed: Distill & commercialise freely! 🌐 Website & API are live now!
  • deepseek-ai (DeepSeek)
  • Paper page - DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
  • deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B

• The DAIR Institute “The Distributed AI Research Institute is a space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.”

• LMSYS Chatbot Arena: Live and Community-Driven LLM Evaluation | LMSYS Org

Democratizing the hardware side of large language models seems to be an advertisement for some new hardware, but there is interesting background in there.

HuggingFace distributes, documents, and implements a lot of Transformer/attention NLP models and seems to be the most active neural NLP project. Certainly too active to explain what they are up to in between pumping out all the code.

An example: Agora

Agora is a collective of AI Engineers and creators advancing humanity through artificial intelligence.

0.0.1 Our Guiding Principles:

• Humanity First: Our research has one definitive purpose… To advance Humanity above all else.
• Open Source: From start to finish every project we work on is completely open source even if it does not work yet, our devotion to radical openness facilitates accelerated learning.
• High-Impact: All of our research is high impact, we focus on projects that can improve the quality of life for millions of human beings through multi-modal, continual, and collective learning!

0.0.2 Research Priorities:

• 🌐 Multi-modal Approach: Utilizing AI to process and reason with multiple forms of data.
• 💧 Adaptability: Models that are as fluid as water, capable of being fine-tuned and trained in real-time.
• 🌲 Reasoning: Our work aims to achieve superintelligence as swiftly as possible. To this end, we strive to augment models’ reasoning capabilities through innovative prompting techniques like the Tree of Thoughts or Forest of Thoughts.
• Collective Intelligence: Scaling up collaboration between agents to accomplish real-world tasks.

Our ultimate goal is to foster the development of superintelligent AI that can reason across modalities, tasks, and environments and can collaborate with other AIs!

Now, how can you contribute?

• Daily Paper Club: Every night at 10pm we read, analyse, and review the newest and most impactful AI papers! Join the forum chat in the discord

• Contribute to our active projects below or look towards Kye’s github and Agora’s Github for projects to collaborate on! Find a project that piques your interest.

• Every Saturday at 3pm NYC time, we host a community meeting to talk about the progress made so far in AI research and the remaining challenges left to solve! Sign up here:

• Share your favourite papers in our papers channel in our discord and discuss it

• Share your projects in the creator showcase!

• Gain access to GPUs and resources for ML experiments!

• Join our Finetuning team where we fine-tune the latest models with extreme precision and share them openly! Join the Agora Discord to learn more!

• Soon, we’ll build research monasteries in various cities around the world where you can conduct research without distractions like paying rent, food, and other obstructions!