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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 18, 2026, 1:22 AM

    @mirth
    @joepie91 that part is still citation needed for me. The critical question is sharding coordination, not model capability. And a shared model bootstrapping and maintaining coherent sharding for itself and its clones is a not trivial hard tradeoff between the capability of the model and the difficulty of coordinating the swarm. The plausible models here can't even install the bundled model which is like 4 shell commands, could glm size model autonomously shard over thousands of hosts and remain coherent? I'll believe it when I see it

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  • mirthmirth@mastodon.sdf.org
    Oct 19, 2026, 4:29 PM

    @jonny @joepie91 I don't see a functional advantage to sharding beyond a few machines on the same fast network, it would be too slow and unreliable to be effective. What I expect is that models that fit 32-512GB will get strong enough to cover pretty much everything too fuzzy to do with traditional logic and planning algorithms. I imagine people will start making analogies to cell biology.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 7:07 PM

    @mirth
    Yeah this is the kind of balance I mean - the reason you would need to shard is because then you can access much smaller devices like IoT and such for the "Grey goo" story. But sharding any model that wide becomes a coordination and latency problem, and it gets worse with model size. So you either have a capable but small botnet, or an incapable but large botnet, and neither of those seem particularly apocalyptic to me - though it could be, as you say, annoying.

    And yes, if the shards could take on defined roles and responsibilities, something like cellular biology could be a metaphor, as far as I know they don't work like that now, but why not

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  • mirthmirth@mastodon.sdf.org
    Oct 20, 2026, 5:41 AM

    @jonny Oh, I was thinking biological analogies in the sense that you might have a "cell" composed of a few thousand hosts of various sizes that has a "nucleoid" process that hold the core machinery that manages the whole thing, "ribosomes" that work to set up resources like storage and relay service, "pili" that map the nearby resources, etc. Strained analogy, really, but people will want to come up with something. Those people who think their TV is listening to them might be right in the end.

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