[flagged]
Open source AI must win
31–40 of 538 posts
Re: Open source AI must win
#32I hope the news moves this debate past "open weights vs. closed APIs" as the only axis. Open weights matter, definitely, but applied AI also needs open infrastructure around the model and it feels a bit like I'm yelling into the abyss highlighting the future we're incentivizing - cognition rented from a few institutions with access changing based on policy, geopolitics and platform incentives like advertising
Re: Open source AI must win
#33With open-weight AI, there might not be an incentive to put large sums of capital towards training / research. There might be a donation fund of some sorts, but it certainly won't reach the level of fundraising that the frontier labs are receiving. Because of this, I think it might not be possible to have AI *only* open-weight; major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google will likely stay for good, with better models…
That is fantastic news then, if commercial product products will always be better than open source, and open source products will continue to get better
Agreed. The only "issue" is that commercial products will always be ahead, with less friction for most users. This ultimately results in most people using these over open-weight variants. Users might not even be aware that the open-model variants exist. Similar to Windows / MacOS and Linux.
Re: Open source AI must win
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can run open weight models on our own machines.
yes, but a model that runs on my own machine will never have the capacity of a model that runs in a datacenter. as i said, it can't compete with that.
If RAM prices ever come down, you can have a machine that can run a capable local model.
Qwen 2.5 72B is surprisingly capable, almost on par with GPT-4o if not a little better. You can run it on a 128GB Mac Studio with 8-bit quantization. You need about 77GB for the weights and ~15GB for your context window & cache.
Pricing remains to be seen, but there's also those new nvidia laptops coming out the surface laptop ultra should have 128GB RAM w/ Blackwell GPU, they're saying 1 petaflop of AI compute, if you can tolerate Windows (no idea if it'll boot Linux until the hardware is out).
These models are roughly ~1 year or less behind the frontier models. We really just need hardware to catch up and alleviate the price pressure on RAM.
Re: Open source AI must win
#35Available components must win. I’ve often been a critic of open weights and open architectures that give very few normal people access. What’s the point of releasing the plans for a nuclear reactor if no one can have the fuel?
Re: Open source AI must win
#36With open-weight AI, there might not be an incentive to put large sums of capital towards training / research. There might be a donation fund of some sorts, but it certainly won't reach the level of fundraising that the frontier labs are receiving. Because of this, I think it might not be possible to have AI *only* open-weight; major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google will likely stay for good, with better models…
Which is the nearterm future that we must demand: a stop to the amounts of capital flowing to ASI research. Join me, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI’s-founding-charter in saying the obvious, y’all; Pause AI, now.
It should be clear by now that there’s a whole universe of work to do with the models we have today, from studying to securing to ‘harness’ing. There are tons of economic benefits to be reaped already, if applied carefully. Doesn’t that sound nicer than rolling the dice with the lives of trillions?
Re: Open source AI must win
#37Where does Anthropic or OpenAI winning leave us? Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work? It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc. Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.
> Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work?
It's worse than this, it's more like our thinking. There's already plummetting math grades [1], handing over our thinking to AI megacorps where there's likely to be a monopoly or duopoly is an incredibly dangerous thing for humanity as a whole.
[1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...
Re: Open source AI must win
#38Were it not for China, America would have restricted the most advanced models from being used outside the US. NATO members would have access to GPT-4, with some countries entirely blocked from AI. Biden's GPU controls should give you an idea. Thank you, China. Open source AI must win.
Unfortunately the US is no stranger to using export controls to restrict frontier technology.
Famously, the PowerMac G4 was briefly subject to export controls. Apple turned it into a marketing campaign.
Re: Open source AI must win
#39the public only wins once we shut it down globally through treaties like other tech that's too dangerous for anyone to have
Re: Open source AI must win
#40what is Open Source AI even? to me Open Source, like Free Software, is something i can run on my own computer. any AI system that runs on a computer that i do not control is by my definition not Open Source. so how then can Open Source AI win? it can't even compete. even if we collect enough money and create a dedicated Open Source organization to build and run a community owned AI datacenter, how does that help? so…
Projects like pluralis agora solve this problem. Really what you want is the model to be collectively owned and governed, not local