I vote that you become the next Richard Stallman
Open source AI must win
261–270 of 538 posts
Re: Open source AI must win
#262I'm assuming this is popular because of Fable restrictions. AFAIK, open source is not excluded from ITAR / EAR restrictions (or other export restriction in other countries). So the real solution you're looking for is technology that can't be arbitrarily gatekept by a sovereign nation.
I’ve been exceptionally displeased with Claude Code since end of February and switched completely to Codex in April. The blasé way in which one person (Borris) capriciously changes the system prompt multiple times a day, also no longer writing his own prompts (whatever that means).
That, the 5 different secret levers you have to pull to make it not stupid, the fact you hs e to go to the guy’s twitter account to find all the un-dumbing features and flags that aren’t documented anywhere else. That they decrease thinking budgets silently when they run out of compute instead of announcing the rationing, and gaslighting users at every step of discovery. The fact that internally they have their own coding harness and don’t use Claude Code primarily. The lack of formal evals and consideration for millions of users collective hundreds of millions of hours of investment in their workflows — that’s all off the top of my head, let me tell you how I really feel about what they did to Claude Code..
I adore gpt5.5 and maintain my own codex fork - but I have no idea how long I’ll get this performance / cost - I know it won’t be forever. I’d like to know precisely how much it’ll cost in hardware to run a gpt5.5 open source model locally. Hell a lifetime license to a model I can run locally is also be open to.
But I like building my own tools, from software to physical shop tools. I like being able to rely on my tools.
More responding here to the assertion that this is blowing up due to Fable.
Re: Open source AI must win
#263Are there any platforms to discuss this? (Like matrix/zulip?)
Re: Open source AI must win
#264If any AI wins, how can that be good for humans? It's high minded but if any AI wins, why would any of "The ability to study, build, repair, deploy, audit, adapt, teach, preserve" be important? Is the real problem to be solved something else, if you want those things?
Re: Open source AI must win
#265I'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…
The gradient info can be compressed 10000x with the right tricks, I think it is achievable. Nous claims they did it already:
https://github.com/NousResearch/DisTrO
There are other gradient compression papers from the past reporting large compression rates
Re: Open source AI must win
#266Where 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.
huh? You think using it to advertise to us is worse than taking our jobs? Why would anyone advertise to jobless people. How is what you seem to be trivializing not the central problem? I don't think controlling is high on Dario's list. But he is absolutely gleeful, he cannot even hide his arousal in his interviews in which he never looks anyone in the eye about taking people's jobs and destroy our future ... but yes, oh the agony of advertising ...
Re: Open source AI must win
#267I'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…
As I replied to a child comment - this is a nice idea that just isn't tenable in reality. AI hardware isn't just hilariously faster than consumer GPUs, it's also hilariously more power-efficient and has hilariously better connectivity. Every one of these dimensions kills the idea. The far, FAR superior power efficiency means that even if you did harness every public GPU or GPU-like device on earth, you'd end up consu…
Efficiency difference between training on GPUs and TPUs is 2x at best. You can get very efficient with tensorcores, converging to TPU efficiency. In the end math is math, you can't make a multiplication more efficient than it already is on GPU.
Re: Open source AI must win
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Jensen (Nvidia) was doing interviews at his recent public talks, he was asked something along the lines of: "Why release these new laptops which are a low margin market, if your other businesses are vastly more profitable?" and his answer was basically that if they can build the coolest and best technology and push the frontier, they will do it. It's not all about making tons of money. He seemed genuinely excite…
Amazing that anyone in 2026 still can believe in "don't be evil" marketing from multibillion dollar corporations.
The proof is in the pudding though. I'm judging based on their actions, not on their words. They're making AI models and AI research widely accessible, including selling consumer grade hardware to run them locally, and to use open-weight models. They could have just gone all in on selling to Anthropic, OpenAI, and all the other big tech companies, but they aren't. Meanwhile, Anthropic is trying to price people out of the market, increasing their restrictions, cutting the latest model from subscription plans, etc.
Re: Open source AI must win
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The total power of all GPUs on the planet dwarf their capabilities That just isn't true. It misunderstands exactly how much silicon has gone directly to those companies, and exactly how much more powerful said silicon is compared to consumer grade gear.
If folding@home is a useful yardstick by which we might estimate the amount of GPU-ish capability that civilians might be coaxed into donating to a shared enterprise, yeah, it doesn't look pretty. This is extremely rough napkin math but comparing to xAI's Collosus 2 for example, for training workflows you're probably looking at 4-5 orders of magnitude the capability of all of folding@home combined. That's 100,000 tim…
folding@home reached 2.43 exaflops by April 12, 2020, which would make it the largest supercomputer on the planet.
Re: Open source AI must win
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Jensen (Nvidia) was doing interviews at his recent public talks, he was asked something along the lines of: "Why release these new laptops which are a low margin market, if your other businesses are vastly more profitable?" and his answer was basically that if they can build the coolest and best technology and push the frontier, they will do it. It's not all about making tons of money. He seemed genuinely excite…
Nvidia and "open source" is like opposite things. Nvidia only ever opened stuff that helps their bottom line or improve vendor lock-in. But yeah they are good shovel seller and competitor to actually evil companies that literally wants to eat all the world chips and energy supply.
Strongly disagree: https://build.nvidia.com/models
Their license terms are also incredibly generous and allow commercial use, modification, etc, at no cost.