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The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

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21–30 of 69 posts

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#21

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how? Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves? I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders? Or there is a co…

My understanding is that frontier researchers will work for companies that will let them publish papers and discuss them with their peers.

When you're an engineer at the tier of these AI researchers, winning an extra 100k/year on top of you current 500k (numbers out of my ass) is not worth it vs getting name recognition. Being known as one of the authors that made the transformer for example will enable you work with other bright minded individuals and create even better things.

So essentially these commercial companies have "we'll let you publish papers when you work for us" as a perk.

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#22

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how? Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves? I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders? Or there is a co…

The ACL, NeurIPS, ICLR and the rest of AI professional organizations are why this happens. Forced open sourcing of everything. No pay to access. It’s the ideal open academic environment for rapid innovation. We must jealously defend our current system, as it will soon come under attack by those who get angry about democratization of the means of computation.

Also, lots of copyright abolitionists in AI. Many people who work in the space delight in the idea of making information, especially their own, free.

The ghost of Aaron Swartz runs through every researcher in this space.

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#24
"We have something that would be of interest to the open source community, but it needs a lot of tidying to even run outside our company, and we don't have the manpower to properly maintain it when released".

Plenty of companies are in this position.

Please just open source anyway with a note saying "we won't be maintaining this, but feel free to fork!"

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#25

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how? Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves? I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders? Or there is a co…

[dead]

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#26

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how? Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves? I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders? Or there is a co…

I would guess it comes down to that the best researchers in the world want their work out in the open

Ilya doesn't. He's a strong proponent of closed source and censorship.

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#27

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how? Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves? I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders? Or there is a co…

Well Deepseek's survival also depends on the giant amount of hype they can generate, and they won't get more investor money just by having done a one-hit wonder. Becoming deeply integrated in the AI ecosystem with various tools and innovative discoveries will most like be more beneficial than protecting the secrets of their first success.

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#28
post #15

I feel like this is one way to implement censorship.

There's an ongoing debate whether LLM should be considered intelligent when it's just generating tokens from latent space. Meanwhile there are humans that are only capable of spitting out the same 5 tokens yet still considered to be "intelligent".

hehehe

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#29
post #21

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how? Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves? I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders? Or there is a co…

My understanding is that frontier researchers will work for companies that will let them publish papers and discuss them with their peers. When you're an engineer at the tier of these AI researchers, winning an extra 100k/year on top of you current 500k (numbers out of my ass) is not worth it vs getting name recognition. Being known as one of the authors that made the transformer for example will enable you work with…

> When you're an engineer at the tier of these AI researchers, winning an extra 100k/year on top of you current 500k (numbers out of my ass) is not worth it vs getting name recognition. Being known as one of the authors that made the transformer for example will enable you work with other bright minded individuals and create even better things.

Also, instead of an extra 100k a year, you get to raise a billion dollars in VC funds for your next company

Re: The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

#30

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how? Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves? I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders? Or there is a co…

This may be related to Google's business model. Google's main businesses - search engine and advertising - both rely on an open web ecosystem. Therefore, Google has long maintained a friendly attitude toward open source and the open web, such as with Chromium, Noto fonts, Go, Flutter, and others. By providing infrastructure tools that benefit the open web, Google extends the reach of its searchable content and advertising. When the entire Web ecosystem benefits, Google ultimately benefits as well. This model also aligns with the philosophy of the open source community, where everyone is a beneficiary and naturally becomes a contributor.
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