On Tue, 28 Jul 2026 at 18:09, Marc Haber <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2026 at 07:00:45AM -0600, Sam Hartman wrote: > >I second this proposal and prefer it to the one I seconded previously. > >I support this as an amendment to the previous proposal from Charles. > > I don't see that proposal as a solution for the issue we are facing. > Calling out to the community to develop Free AI is orthogonal to > allowing or forbidding the use of ALL AI in Debian. > > Let's compare that with automobiles. > > We have combustion engines. > > We have electric cars. > > Many people object to having electric cars and would prefer to continue > using the inferior and outdated combustion engine because that's how we > always did it. Those people are now calling out to the Industry to > create "highly efficient" combustion engines, giving that those will be > up to par or even better than electric cars. > As a car guy I feel obliged to correct, this would be like calling to create sub-20k electric cars with 1000 mile range and no rare eaths or cobalt used in production that must also be 100% accomplished with green power and zero CO2 emissions. It would be great to have and eventually we will have that, but not really *all* of that in the short term perspective. > >In my mind, I consider these proposal related because I think that if > >there is strong free AI, the objections people have to the use of AI in > >Debian will be largely addressed. > > I am pretty sure that I would not buy the hardware needed to run a local > AI model on. Some latest improvements in AI efficiency make it possible to run *quite* advanced coding-focused AI models on reasonable commodity hardware, like AMD XTX/XT 7900 video cards, for example. Or on unified memory machines, like M-series Apple computers. Additionally many datacenter providers allow people to rent AI-capable hardware by the minute. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-gpu/ let's you have one for as low as 0.37€ per hour. If Debian *wanted to* and had really good use cases, I would not be too surprised that sponsors could be found that would provide a limited off-peak usage allotments to Debian from their existing datacenters. The ones that are GDPR compliant and operate on 100% green energy. -- Best regards, Aigars Mahinovs
