Remember when you were young, your responsibilities were far fewer, and you were still at least a little hopeful about the future potential of tech?
Anyway! In our present moment, nothing appears to be safe from the sticky fingers of so-called AI—and that includes nostalgic hardware of yesteryear.
Exo Labs, an outfit with the mission statement of democratising access to AI, such as large language models, has lifted the lid on its latest project: a modified version of Meta's Llama 2 running on a Windows 98 Pentium II machine (via Hackaday).
Though not the latest Llama model, it's no less head-turning—even for me, a frequent AI-naysayer. To be fair, when it comes to big tech's hold over AI, Exo Labs and I seem to be of a similarly wary mind.
So, setting aside my own AI-scepticism for the moment, this is undoubtedly an impressive project chiefly because it doesn't rely on a power-hungry, very much environmentally-unfriendly middleman datacenter to run.