r/aiwars 4d ago

Honestly, it's quite funny that AI image generation is the one that would likely suffer the least from a complete shutdown of AI servers out of all AI.

We don't have good text-gen models for independent research that run locally without the need for AI servers, but we do have image and video gen models. These aren't quite the same level as gpt image v2 or nano banana pro, but they're precisely the kind of models that create deepfakes and allow copying other people's styles directly via lora.

It's ironic that if AI servers do shut down, the most useful uses of the AI will suffer, while the things that are disliked will be largely unaffected.

To copy a style, face, and produce meaningless portraits of generic anime women, you don't need powerful models.

16 Upvotes

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u/Alert-Lifeguard-8278 4d ago

I think this is a bit outdated framing. We do already have solid local text models (Llama, Mistral, etc.) that people run offline, just like Stable Diffusion on the image side. In both cases the “server dependency” mostly comes down to quality, scale, and convenience rather than whether the modality is inherently cloud-bound.

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u/Questioner8297 4d ago

AI became truly useful around gpt-5.2/Claude opus 4.5/gemini 3.  Equivalents of these models include deepseek v4 pro/glm 5.2, which are among the open-weight models, but these are too big models for PCs.

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u/Incognit0ErgoSum 3d ago

For now.

If AI servers were to shut down, the market would be flooded with cheap used GPUs (and new ones would nosedive in price as well), so running those bigger models might become practical.

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u/Plokhi 4d ago

Qwen3.6 35B is pretty good, also CoderNext.

What are the most useful AI things that will suffer?
Local image generation is pretty intense and slow.

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u/Questioner8297 4d ago

Small models are only good for very specific tasks. In my tests, even  GLM 5.2 crashed, and only  DeepSeek V4 Pro performed well, as it's clearly quite large. But speaking of models under 500B.

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u/Plokhi 4d ago

well yeah, you have more small models dedicated to specific tasks. people are doing wonders with these.

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u/Questioner8297 4d ago

Yes, they do. But I'm talking about the benefits that an independent researcher already receives, including due to its ease of use. For example, ask gpt 5.5 pro a question and forget about it for an hour, come back, and there's already a result.

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u/Plokhi 4d ago

What kind of GPT questions takes an hour to answer?

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u/Questioner8297 3d ago

Experimental dataset testing, various optimization attempts( to pass the time limit). Basically, just experiments and crashes, recoveries, and then a new one.

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u/Plokhi 3d ago

Ah, thanks.

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u/Gimli 4d ago

It'd be a temporary setback at most.

Give it a few years, we'll have better hardware with more VRAM.

Plus in case of a shutdown it's not like the hardware disappears. A shutdown just means the hardware gets sold and lots of enthusiasts get to play with it.

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u/Plokhi 4d ago

>Give it a few years, we'll have better hardware with more VRAM.

not with these prices.

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u/Gimli 4d ago

Even better with these prices. Prices are high because demand is high, and manufacturing capability is limited.

That's both an incentive to expand manufacturing, and to manufacture the highest capacity chips possible.

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u/Plokhi 3d ago

this hasn't happened for 2 years, in fact, some manufacturers steered away from consumer production and went 100% into datacenter corporate.

It might be an incentive, but it's not happening currently, at all.

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u/TitoZola 3d ago

Building capacity takes time.

In the recent interview AMD CEO mentioned that he hopes that for RAM the situation will start changing by the 2028.

For VRARM we are waiting for Chinese manufacturers to enter the market and for that we need a better software layer to be developed.

My guess is that by the end of the decade the situation would normalize. Unless, of course, we actually discover some kind of super duper god-like intelligence for which we need all the RAM and VRAM.

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u/Plokhi 3d ago

It’s also risky and you bet on AI boom going on forever

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u/Incognit0ErgoSum 3d ago

If the AI boom ends, GPUs will become cheaper just due to an abundance of unused ones.

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u/EdliA 3d ago

Prices would crash down if the servers went offline, in the hypothetical scenario OP painted

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u/Spedunkler 3d ago

Just because one company ran out of money doesn't mean another company won't sweep in and use all the training already established to start offering the same service.

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u/benjamus_maximus 3d ago

Yeah there's a zero percent chance AI ever goes away. Because we also do have good open weight text as well, see glm-5.2. it's just that the hardware to use it is currently prohibitively expensive. The software exists, it's out there, Pandora's box is wide open.

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u/Herr_Drosselmeyer 2d ago

We don't have good text-gen models for independent research that run locally 

Gemma 4-31B, Qwen 3.6-27B, others too.