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Open source AI must win

opensourceaimustwin.com

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Re: Open source AI must win

#111

Post by hirako2000 »

hecanjog wrote: post #98
gslepak wrote: post #23

Where 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.

Or just opt out... you don't have to use these things.

It works at the individual level but won't if mass adoption happens.

The mechanism will become like taxes, you don't have to use public services thus pay those taxes, unless most people comply as it's easy to oppress those who don't.

The parallel isn't about legitimacy, but Mechanism. Some companies already oblige employees to use AI to deliver their work. In a near future we may see jobs seekers registering their AI ID for companies to decide which humans qualify to be plugged into the compensation system, at what rate, and usage conditions to avoid terminations.

Food delivery systems already show a glimpse of how it could look like.

Re: Open source AI must win

#112

Post by kelnos »

Davidzheng wrote: post #56
palisade wrote: post #44

I'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.

Is the issue that training with less compute takes more time? Or is it just not possible? I think a collective using distributed training could tolerate the idea that it takes 10x as long as Anthropic to train a model, or whatever.

Re: Open source AI must win

#113

Post by digitaltrees »

gslepak wrote: post #23

Where 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.

I couldn’t agree more. But what can we do? If intelligence confers a competitive advantage, which it does, the incentive are aligned against collaboration to preserve equal access. Asymmetric access is too valuable.

Re: Open source AI must win

#114

Post by jongjong »

abhinavsharma wrote: post #69

Open-source AI can, by definition, never "win". AI is just hillclimbing today, and closed labs can always absorb everything the open world does and build upon it. It doesn't really matter for most use cases, because the way AI is working is capability saturation. https://www.delanceyukschoolschesschallenge.com/the-rising-t... The only exception to this is fields that are inherently adversarial (to nature or others) a…

Open source models don't need to be anywhere near as good as Claude Mythos or even Claude Sonnet to 'win'.

Open source 'winning' just means that there exists at least one open source alternative to closed models which is as good as, say, GPT 4... I mean, we're essentially there already with Google Gemma models.

As a software engineer, I didn't notice any difference in my productivity since Sonnet. Of course Opus is better and I'm sure Fable is better yet, but we're already hitting diminishing returns in terms of economic value.

I went from Cursor running one of the earlier GPT models to Claude Code on Sonnet and that was essentially a 5x productivity boost for me. Before Claude Code, I only used AI for small snippets. With Claude Code + Sonnet, I could trust it for entire sub-tasks... But I still don't trust Opus with full end-to-end features. I'm not sure it will ever get there. It probably doesn't need to.

Companies need software engineers to have a certain moderately high level of talent but above that level, they really don't care AT ALL. They don't even notice the difference, even if the gap is significant.

Re: Open source AI must win

#115

Post by dakolli »

kamaal wrote: post #105
dakolli wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Loop engineering, whatever that is, is obviously just a way to get people to increase the amount of tokens required per task/request. They did the same thing with Ralph loops, they just need more revenue. Just write your code and use it to search and clarify, it can't build that magical thing you think it can.

Re: Open source AI must win

#116

Post by Grombobulous »

WarmWash wrote: post #75

Who is going to fund it? Training is unfathomably expensive. You have either VC funded models looking for a return on investment, or CCP funded models looking to solidify authoritarian "model Chinese society". Maybe there are some university 4B models, but I doubt those will carry far.

I share your concerns, although we still see pretty similarly large and complex things that remain open source today.

I am astonished on a daily basis that my Linux computer is so close to the same experience as two operating systems put out by trillion dollar companies. It even does things that those commercial alternatives don’t do.

Also, if DeepSeek is truly putting out models with 1/10th the cost of Western competitors, and a fraction of the employee headcount, I think it implies that there will be a market for someone else to be in the space offering an alternative.

I think about how companies like IBM are so willing to contribute to Linux and give away those contributions for free because they are part of group of corporate sponsors that need an alternative to more dominant commercial players in the market.

Meta “gives away” React for similar reasons: it’s more beneficial for them to have it be a standard and be able to hire people who already know it.

It’s definitely harder to imagine the same ecosystem benefits of an AI model, but maybe it’s out there somewhere.

I could imagine some data center/VPS providers trying to sponsor something like that so that the big AI companies have less leverage over them.

Or maybe all this optimism is a pipe dream?

Re: Open source AI must win

#117

Post by kelnos »

george_max wrote: post #2

With 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…

Yeah I think that's a decent analog (Photoshop & GIMP). We're in a sort of "rapid expansion" phase right now, but unless the tech behind "AI" really evolves, better and better models will be harder to come by, with diminishing returns.

Even if the GIMP of LLMs is only 80% as good as the VC-funded stuff, that will still be plenty useful for lots of people.

And I think just having the option to use open source models is a win, even if it turns out to be true they'll never be quite as good as the proprietary ones.

Re: Open source AI must win

#118

Post by Fordec »

WarmWash wrote: post #75

Who is going to fund it? Training is unfathomably expensive. You have either VC funded models looking for a return on investment, or CCP funded models looking to solidify authoritarian "model Chinese society". Maybe there are some university 4B models, but I doubt those will carry far.

Anyone who isn't currently own a piece of who is winning by the current model. Basic disruption theory, if the game isn't going your way, change the game.

Re: Open source AI must win

#119

Post by LastTrain »

Grombobulous wrote: post #91
operatingthetan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Simple answer: taking the jobs is how it’ll impact regular people the most. We already have personalized, algorithmic advertising and what I would call “control” all over the place: things like consolidated oligarch-owned media. AI isn’t going to change how we are advertised to or controlled all that much, at least compared to the prospect of being put out of work or taking a huge salary cut similar to the mid-centur…

Hyperinflation is how it will impact most people. You will still have your job, at your pay, but a continually higher percentage of earnings will go to very few at the top.
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