it is inevitable that it will win information wants to be free
We've never seen open source win before so I'd be dubious that it can win here without concerted effort.
Open source AI must win
51–60 of 538 posts
Re: Open source AI must win
#52what 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…
Call it open weights if you must. But even with OSS just because you have the source code doesn't mean your machine is high performance enough to run it usefully this has always been true.
Re: Open source AI must win
#53Can we assume that the author isn't using "Opensource" to mean "Openweights"? Or are we still collectively brainwashed by the strategic false equivalence established by Big AI CMOs?
On this very thread you already have people talking about "open weights" and similar nonsense. What is open about them? They're free to download, but that hardly qualifies as open. Where is the source? Where are the instructions to modify and build your own? I'd never though I'd have to utter the expression "open as in beer". The blatant attempt at manipulating vocabulary here is... quite blatant.
There is no source because it's not software. You can of course modify and make your own.
Re: Open source AI must win
#54Where 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.
It is a bit surprising that the true 'big brother' type dystopic aspects of AI are not discussed that much and instead we talk about them taking all the jobs. We feed these things so much information. It could be used against us for advertising, control, or worse.
Re: Open source AI must win
#55Can we assume that the author isn't using "Opensource" to mean "Openweights"? Or are we still collectively brainwashed by the strategic false equivalence established by Big AI CMOs?
On this very thread you already have people talking about "open weights" and similar nonsense. What is open about them? They're free to download, but that hardly qualifies as open. Where is the source? Where are the instructions to modify and build your own? I'd never though I'd have to utter the expression "open as in beer". The blatant attempt at manipulating vocabulary here is... quite blatant.
I'm a strong proponent of Open Source (TM) but I disagree with this take.
The weights are the useful artifact here. You can modify them, fine tune them and do what you want with them.
Unlike binary software there is nothing limiting that.
It is also useful to have access to the training recipes and to some extent the data. But I'm of the opinion that learning on something is not copyright infringement, so there are many circumstances where distributing the raw training data will not be possible.
For me this is like Open Office: it is open source, and largely inspired by and learned from Microsoft Office. But they don't need to distribute MS Office for Open Office to be Open Source.
In addition there are models that meet the criteria you appear to propose. The AllenAI models are a good example.
Re: Open source AI must win
#56I've been contemplating a decentralized model training system for some time using volunteer machines that we all contribute. But, it is astronomically difficult. The communication speeds are untenable. And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datu…
Is the total compute capacity outside of meta, google, amazon, anthropic, oai and x is higher than even the capacity of any of them? In any case, there's no chance a public collaboration gets to anthropic levels of compute even if communication were no issue.
Re: Open source AI must win
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
If humanity is over-reliant on frontier labs' models to perform work, the result is a dependence on the actual intelligence of these models -- not on human intelligence. This could be a small reason, on top of many others, why investors are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars a bit "carelessly" to these labs. It's fascinating seeing the models do the "hard work" (the deep, challenging thinking) for you. The conu…
It's not just a dependence on the intelligence of the models, but also their intentions, as programmed by their owners.
A friend of mine asked me if I was optimistic about AI. I told him, it depends on who owns it. If the people own it, I'm optimistic. If the oligarchs own it, I'm pessimistic.
Re: Open source AI must win
#58With 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…
Perhaps, unless there is a way for users to donate compute to training, folding@home style. I don’t see how that could be practical though.
Re: Open source AI must win
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 appl…
Lives of trillions?
Current and possible future populations?
Re: Open source AI must win
#60I've been contemplating a decentralized model training system for some time using volunteer machines that we all contribute. But, it is astronomically difficult. The communication speeds are untenable. And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datu…
there are some strong open source groups like NOUS research taking the fight
https://nousresearch.com/