Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China has basically commoditized LLMs What do you mean by "basically"? Why are Anthropic's and OpenAI's annualized revenue about $50B each? LLMs need massive amounts of compute to compete, so I wouldn't claim that the great (and leading, and likely to continue to lead) LLMs are commodities end-to-end , even if the non-executing-at-scale LLMs files and IP are commoditized. The execute, the compute, that is what brea…
OpenAI's annual profit is $0,000,000,000,000
U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
111–120 of 156 posts
Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
#112https://science.osti.gov/-/media/grants/pdf/foas/2026/DE-FOA...
Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s distinguish a bit. There are political appointees (Trump’s government employees as you say) who are mostly upper management, and there are career civil servants (all the government scientists are under this category) who have a strong culture of apolitical dedication to the mission of their agency and to the American people and Constitution, regardless of who the current president is. And in the DOE labs in par…
> and there are career civil servants (all the government scientists are under this category) US national lab scientists are not even civil servants. The labs themselves are run by a corporation under contract to the DOE and the scientists work for that corp. The managing corporation changes from time to time and the scientists transparently start working for whatever assumes the replacement. The land, the hardware,…
As an added complication, some of the DOE labs do have civil servant scientists, for example National Energy Technology Lab and National Renewable Energy Lab are like 50/50 civil servants and contractors. And most of the funding arm of DOE are career civil servants. LANL, Sandia, Livermore, Argonne are all staffed by contractors
Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
#114Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess? Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0 But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC
LiquidAI LFM models are amazing, but very situational. IBM Granite series are also unique and interesting for trying to reduce liability and extend local context size. Nvidia ships some and there was also that Inkling model recently. Poolside just released theirs. Meta might release something this year. X AI's Grok is still due to release a model, if Elon keeps to his word even if they only release a distilled versio…
Personally, I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny, the way the second amendment is framed today. Just as encryption has become, which we similarly had to fight for in the 90s. I also understand that some regulation is sensible, but that doesn't automatically mean mandatory restricted or supervised access; any such restriction has to be extremely well-justified as essential for protecting the liberty of the people.
And as far as supervised access, whether or not identification is "handled by a third party" or "data is deleted after verification is complete" is immaterial; a citizen must not be required to trust their government. Any trust can and will be abused given enough time. Our systems must be trustless, and any expansion of government must be matched by an expansion in citizens' ability to check said government, in order to stand the test of time.
So supervised access seems completely off the table. And this can't just stop at access to models. Because linguistic analysis is a thing, and LLMs are scarily good at it (and existing non-AI solutions are still quite good given enough data), even the possibility that a government or other entity can save your messages means you've opened yourself up to deanonymization and surveillance. The chilling effect this has is undeniable, and the Supreme Court has made it clear that we cannot authorize government policy which creates chilling effects against essential liberties. Not to mention the possibilities that each category of users may be served subtly different models designed to influence them or constrain their agency/capability.
We're left with a situation where distributed access to capable open models is the only defense against a government or NGO which has access to billions of dollars of surveillance infrastructure and compute.
Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but it shouldn't be government operating on the frontier of new technology
I don’t quite understand what the argument is. Government does as a matter of fact operate on the frontier of new technology. (It’s how we got the web.) Why shouldn’t it, exactly? Also, the US has been involved in AI research since the 1940s. So it’s not exactly a new thing.
The government was involved in basic internet research. It didnt try to operate pets.com
Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
we're about witness the realization that "here's a tech that can make us a whole bunch of money" is actually "here's tech that will establish the next hegemony." american companies may compete with chinese companies on the former. only the USG can compete with the PRC on the former.
The USG getting involved might actually harm US AI efforts. It's not just about money. Who would want to use Claude or ChatGPT if it were run by the US government? Yet these products are essential for gathering training data.
Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
#117Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's referring to weirdo freak Dario's school shooter manfiesto tier ramblings on open weights I imagine.
Dario doesn't have a problem with open weights, he just thinks that open weights should be tested prior to release so you aren't giving everyone a zero-day button or a "make a virus" button. That's it. That's the whole stance. Most sane normal people agree with this stance, the techno-libertarian crowd find it egregiously offensive.
Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's referring to weirdo freak Dario's school shooter manfiesto tier ramblings on open weights I imagine.
Dario doesn't have a problem with open weights, he just thinks that open weights should be tested prior to release so you aren't giving everyone a zero-day button or a "make a virus" button. That's it. That's the whole stance. Most sane normal people agree with this stance, the techno-libertarian crowd find it egregiously offensive.