Open source AI must win

I have never understood the willingness to make the functioning of or development of a product so completely dependent on the secret sauce of one of two big unprofitable, inscrutable startups.

It really defies sensible engineering principles to do that. So I was never going to do it. I'm exploring AI now but because I have decided that open weights make it a good use of my time.

It's bad enough that any given business often ends up beholden to a single payment platform and the policies of two US credit card providers.

I guess it is the freelancer in me but I always feel nervous when I am asked to put so much energy into studying or learning someone's product, rather than the underlying technology. I still remember the days when Microsoft was pretty much lobbying academic departments with promises of access to the NT source code. I remember a senior figure in our own saying that Linux was a sideshow and access to NT would make us relevant.

More control over destiny is always necessary, and I remind myself and others that the "state of the art" is behind the "cutting edge". Progress is made at the cutting edge, but there is risk of damage. Engineering should focus on building on the state of the art, not on hitching a ride on someone else's progress.

While if "Open Office" switches to a more problematic license at some point, the existing source has all you need for an organization to support the project without regard to the original company (this has happened already!). If Qwen decides to stop distributing models for download, you're basically stuck, _even_ if you have unlimited resources, it's not clear how the released weights help you; your best bet is to start almost from scratch. This has also happened...

These models are not "Open" by any definition of the word. It is just freely redistributable. You can justify yourself in whatever way you want re a cowboy approach to copyright, but this doesn't change the fact that this is not open, and has almost none of the benefits of open, and therefore it is a huge abuse of the word "Open".

Ironically about the only thing that is copyrightable here is the sum of the training data (possibly) _AND_ the software used to build the model (most definitely). The model itself most likely isn't (databases are not copyrightable), which makes it even more pointless to abuse the word "open" for it. All the value is in the former two.

In the OSS donations war (Visual Studio Code being a really fascinating example of it) you could see that the taps can't be turned off so easily. Whatever is donated can be built upon forever.

I think there will come a point, soon enough, where open weights models are capable enough that even if they stagnate, they can be augmented with tooling that essentially keeps them current. Maybe we are there now?

But the risk of the taps being turned off is not negligible.

My own feeling is that governments will ultimately ask consortia of universities to train open weights models and support them financially in doing so.

(And for what it is worth, I think diffusion text models are likely to trigger a hardware arms race that makes this possible)

In much the same way that they used to do that for the supercomputer race, which we just don't hear about right now!

I'm not sure exactly why you would buy through them vs rolling your own if you could afford the equivalent hardware.

I'm a firm supporter of local inference though so good on them for doing something