Open source AI must win

Don't worry, open source AI will win. There's a reason everybody is desperate to IPO fast and get an exit, their competitive advantage is not lasting long.

> because AI has almost reached its most usable peak

It doesn't seem to be showing any signs of stopping. Have you used Fable 5? It's a fantastically capable model and trumps anything that came before it. Seedance 2.0 is categorically the best video model, and it's only a few months old.

> the entire business is run by a few old men

Startups tend to skew young, and in this case it's no different. Most of the leaders of AI companies are decades younger than the CEOs in other types of industries.

> who think AI is everything and invest huge sums of money to show other AI companies they need to improve to get more funding from old people.

They're spending capital to win market share and to try to build a moat. One of the most important things in business is building a durable way to keep competitors from taking your market. You spend enormous capital to win customers, and it would suck if other businesses could watch what you did, spend less money, and come in and take everything away. The money being spent is an attempt to have a durable lead.

It's working. Enterprise contracts are deep and sticky tendrils that work through governments and large companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have massive partnerships with Fortune 500s, the DoD, you name it - and these contracts will last and print enormous amounts of money. This makes it incredibly hard for other players to enter the market and build a cash flow with which to compete and thrive.

> find something new and innovative

This is easier said than done. It's an incredibly hard problem. It took decades to find the last big technological waves: the PC, the internet, broadband, smartphones. Now AI. These are generational step function increases. The groundwork can be decades old, but it takes time to proliferate before it can become a big business.

Other possibilities include fusion, green tech, quantum computing (useful for crypto breaking, etc.), AI drug discovery, etc. If you go into research one day, try to find an interesting field with potential for commercialization - that could make you very wealthy if you find something you enjoy working on, with lots of greenfield opportunity, that is ripe for turning into products.

Good luck with your game! You should post it here on HN when you finish. You'll get lots of great reviews, comments, and early players. :)

Its the closest terminology we have to describe that process.

https://github.com/cobusgreyling/loop-engineering

Its hard to come up with new names for novel processes, you mostly reuse what is close enough and well known.

I fully support this. How can I help?

This is a good idea. I've been hoping that a large player with enough social reach would create an open-source fund that everyone can contribute to, to develop a company that trains and releases open-source models at the cutting edge. We can crowdfund the training costs, and the whole world benefits.

It's the most logical solution for AI anyway, considering that it's training on humanities collective knowledge. It should be more of a public-funded and public-access resource, rather than something greedy tech companies distribute like crumbs while they use unlocked powers internally to clone all of our businesses and swallow the economy.