Ask HN: Why isn't my ISP providing AI as a service?
My ISP already has an optical fibre to my home, I could be directly connected to a rack of GPUs as compared to API requests that I make over the internet Gemini/GPT. AI truly will feel like a commodity if ISPs started providing it. Maybe I am missing something really fundamental/silly ??
First, the ISP would need fat stacks of not-mismanaged cash and decide to invest those in huge amounts of hardware that will atrophy in value from before the moment the check clears.
Next, the ISP would need the technical chops to set up that hosting themselves (or be able to afford outsourcing the setup and maintenance).
All the while, the ISP would need to withstand moving outside their area of expertise and primary business focus and core competence, that being delivering network connectivity (at the lowest possible cost and, most often, at the highest possible price).
And finally, if the ISP can do all that, they would need to decide it would be a solid business decision; that the investment would pay off continually, that the customers not only exist but with sufficient quantity and spending capacity to make it worthwhile.
And before all that, they need to think of this idea, convince management, executive, board, shareholder, and/or lobbyist levels that it's a good idea and not too risky.
*And then* they need to successfully execute the project to bring it to market (including successfully getting their hands on that hardware, which might be tricky in and of itself).
All in all, an outfit provisioning AI as a service needs fat stacks of (potentially funny) money, the knowledge and guts to pull it off, and, to have thought of the idea in the first place. And to have convinced the money people that it should be done.
Now, make a business leasing these appliances to the ISPs and managing them as a service. That could be a business.
I just thought it would be "better" if AI is served as WiFi? You go to someone's house and ask if they can share their 'AI password'? You put in the password and you have access to the models. You'd still have it on your phone just like your phone internet but probably a light weight local model?
These models can also be available to countless devices in the house or delivery vehicles of the future (drones asking to share an AI token so they can land properly??).
I was just thinking on the lines of what would the world look like when AI is in abundance, which there will be for sure, how would we use it etc.
I do find these kinds of exercises useful(_sometimes_) to imagine, what if we have a lot of something or we don't have it at all. I might be totally off here though.
Thank you for this response. I understand that these are all crazy challenges that probably no ISP is positioned to solve by themselves. I just wanted to know if there was something basic that I missed.
I have always believed that for the insane customer soaking that ISP's do, a little of that Fort Knox could go to quality content creators. Devil's in the details, of course.
The idea is to let customers choose which content creators they want to reward, and not have to set up 100 potentially hackable accounts with small creators without payment processing.
User gets to choose, from a vast array of creators, not just inane "bundles" and from excess ISP profits.
Unlike the internet for decades, quality gets a chance versus quantity.
Mom and Pop thank you.
I’m not sure what problem this would solve. The data sent to, and revived from, the LLM is small. Why would saving a couple theoretical hops on the network matter? That’s not the bottleneck.
That's a fair thought. Sending my data to a local office would be much more quicker than sending it to Virginia or California.
Can we ban questions like this? Though I recognize this person is a perfect YC candidate by asking why you can't connect a home connection to a rack of GPUs.
Your response says more about you than "questions like this".
Really? What does it say?
Perhaps as your ISP rather than HN?
> Maybe I am missing something really fundamental/silly ??
Your ISP doesn't own rackspace?
ISPs do have local facilities, sometimes climate-controllled, such as offices, headends etc.
They can install a rack of GPUs there.
most have very little local facilities these days