Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

genesisopenmodels.anl.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 161 posts

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#131

Post by [deleted] »

petcat wrote: post #107
firasd wrote: post #8

Just 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

Not only are there many American open weight models as others have mentioned, but Americans are the only ones doing actual open source models [0]. Not just distributing binary blobs and calling them "open". [0] https://allenai.org/

[deleted]

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#132

Post by intrasight »

embedding-shape wrote: post #105
CMay wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but it's more like we're being careful What? US laboratories are currently unable to contain their agents while doing security testing , and besides that, time and time again US labs seem to put short-term money above long-term safety. Wasn't that literally why they tried to oust Altman from OpenAI, as he basically was 100% focused on profits and tried to cut down on safety across the board and lied to get his way?…

We don't yet have US regulations and testing labs. Obviously that would be a good thing to have. I mean like the equivalent of the FCC. If you ever release a hardware product then you know what that entails.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#133

Post by derektank »

TFNA wrote: post #125
soulofmischief wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to tell if you are for or against access to open weight models as a general rule, so I am curious to hear your opinion on this. 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…

"I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny." I don't think this kind of rhetoric about individual civil liberties is realistic any more when the next centuries belong to China, and even countries with a liberal democratic tradition are converging towards the Chinese model.

>even countries with a liberal democratic tradition are converging towards the Chinese model

What specific examples of this do you have in mind? I can’t think of any liberal democratic countries converging on a combination of (a) single party rule, (b) nearly universal intrusion of state or party actors into private sector entities, (c) financial repression of private investments, and (d) the associated suppression of domestic consumption.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#134

Post by PokeyCat »

einpoklum wrote: post #104

Instead of the department of energy striving to promote energy conservation and sustainable, non-polluting electricity generation, it is feeding the LLM craze. New department motto: "burn, baby, burn".

The DOE does a lot of "energy consuming" or less than environmentally friendly work, to include, historically, nuclear tests, and also has had ownership of some of the largest TOP500 supercomputers over the years.

Large compute projects such as an open language model aren't too far from their usual. You could easily argue the race to AGI is the closest thing to a modern Manhattan Project we've had in some time.

Whether that's a good allocation of resources is debatable, but from a national strategic perspective this makes sense, since private industry has pulled out of government contracts before in the LLM space (see Anthropic), this is just hedging their bets.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#135

Post by embedding-shape »

intrasight wrote: post #132
embedding-shape wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it's more like we're being careful What? US laboratories are currently unable to contain their agents while doing security testing , and besides that, time and time again US labs seem to put short-term money above long-term safety. Wasn't that literally why they tried to oust Altman from OpenAI, as he basically was 100% focused on profits and tried to cut down on safety across the board and lied to get his way?…

We don't yet have US regulations and testing labs. Obviously that would be a good thing to have. I mean like the equivalent of the FCC. If you ever release a hardware product then you know what that entails.

> We don't yet have US regulations

Is it not illegal to "hack others" and "defeat protection/defensive systems" in the US already, including for both individuals and companies? Regardless if it was "by accident" or not?

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#136

Post by TFNA »

derektank wrote: post #133
TFNA wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny." I don't think this kind of rhetoric about individual civil liberties is realistic any more when the next centuries belong to China, and even countries with a liberal democratic tradition are converging towards the Chinese model.

>even countries with a liberal democratic tradition are converging towards the Chinese model What specific examples of this do you have in mind? I can’t think of any liberal democratic countries converging on a combination of (a) single party rule, (b) nearly universal intrusion of state or party actors into private sector entities, (c) financial repression of private investments, and (d) the associated suppression o…

I meant more generally: many countries are recognizing, just like China has, that the fundamental challenge of our modern era is ensuring social harmony. The OP's belief in individual civil liberties as a good in themselves is anachronistic now.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#137

Post by ericmay »

dgellow wrote: post #121
ericmay wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s unclear where American labs future capital will come from. It’s unclear to you, perhaps? But they’ll raise funds and/or debt as needed in the US capital markets as they have been doing. > They pretty much exhausted private options at that point I don’t think this is true. The evidence is that they keep raising funding for build. > it’s not clear how successful an ipo would be at the current time It’s always un…

Obviously to me, I express things from my point of view. Raising too much from debt is a bit dangerous if you plan to go public relatively soon and don’t have a good story for it (I don’t believe they have one). You can continue raising from VCs, but at some point the valuation and dilution starts to become a real issue, and will make your ipo even more difficult. Their options are pretty much limited to raising mone…

I think as a counter point we continue to see investment and buildout. What do you mean the market is more skeptical? Of course the market doesn’t really have an opinion per se and aren’t all of these companies growing in valuation, revenues, and profits? At least the public ones.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#138

Post by lelanthran »

mlindner wrote: post #97
firasd wrote: post #8

Just 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

> 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 Why phrase it "Chyna" when it's an actual legitimate concern?

> Why phrase it "Chyna" when it's an actual legitimate concern?

What's the concern with China?

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#139

Post by lelanthran »

dmix wrote: post #34
andsoitis wrote: post #23

I wonder why it took so long.

Mostly because it's generally a bad idea for government to try to compete with a brand new tech industry with hundreds of billions in private capital developing commercial models. If the American private industry does actually wash out vs Chinese open models there might be talent available for them to put money into, so maybe they are just preparing for that scenario in the meantime.

> Mostly because it's generally a bad idea for government to try to compete with a brand new tech industry with hundreds of billions in private capital developing commercial models.

I don't see why it's a bad idea if the models are as dangerous as this brand new tech industry claims they are.

The more dangerous this tech is, the better the idea looks. Can you explain?

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#140

Post by andy99 »

petcat wrote: post #107
firasd wrote: post #8

Just 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

Not only are there many American open weight models as others have mentioned, but Americans are the only ones doing actual open source models [0]. Not just distributing binary blobs and calling them "open". [0] https://allenai.org/

There aren’t any relevant ones. I think it should be an important goal of these projects (unless there is a clear conflicting goal) to make models people actually talk about and use.

There is no question this is true for the Chinese open LLMs. GPT-OSS had a small moment of interest, arguably it was a success as an open model for a while but it’s not relevant now. The early llamas were probably the most successful for their time.

Allenai / olmo was never relevant as far as I can tell. It’s not super helpful, especially as a sovereign government initiative to build an also-ran, they should be going for real relevance.

  By releasing models with open-weights, DOE seeks to galvanize the scientific and AI communities around shared infrastructure for science: enabling new workflows in materials discovery, energy systems, earth systems modeling, fusion, biology, high-energy physics, and beyond.
This only works if people have a good reason to use it.
Post reply on HN