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Open source AI must win

opensourceaimustwin.com

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Re: Open source AI must win

#441

Post by theptip »

xtracto wrote: post #391

This, and distributed LLM inference. We are at a point where no single person can setup a rig to run a SOTA model, it is just too expensive. So we must build and adopt frameworks that allow individuals to share resources to run SOTA models in a distributed manner. That way they will also be non-censorable by governments. Also The only way to prevent that one entity weaponizes it, is by giving EVERYONE access to it.

> The only way to prevent that one entity weaponizes it, is by giving EVERYONE access to it

There is a middle way; the policy space also includes government regulating both access and monopoly.

I’m opposed to monopolies of this tech, but I hope the risks of giving everyone jailbroken AGI/ASI are clear.

As a toy example you could imagine a Universal Basic AI where government subcontracts to (n_quorum) labs, everyone gets a token budget, but operating the APIs comes with the safety controls.

If everyone does get to run their own jailbroken AGI, then the only stable societal norm I see is A LOT of surveillance to make sure nobody is building CBRNE threats. This doesn’t seem like a clear win from a civil liberty perspective, though I could see the argument.

Re: Open source AI must win

#442

Post by dofm »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #435
dofm wrote: post #402

It won in my house/my business right from the start. (Well, open weights, at least — which is an uncomfortable nuance.) 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 A…

Interestingly, I've taken a different approach. AI supplements how my business builds and I'd much rather have all my engineers using Opus 4.8 rather than whatever the best open source models are. I believe open source is important, but for my business I'm just going to use the best tools I have available to me.

As a business decision it makes sense if you think that spilling out agent-written code to meet some profitable objective is a race you can win?

I know I can't win that race or outspend the competition. So I have to rely on my instinct that in my area of business, people becoming dependent on agent-written code are getting further and further out of their depth, and that slow and steady will win the race. I am going to spend the time trying to integrate the open source tools into the way I work. (I am still working on this; frankly I may have bigger problems on an individual level than they can solve)

To be maximally clear, if this two-inscrutable-megacorps model does survive, and it becomes how everyone works over even the medium term, I'll have to quit tech.

I will probably retire early and just plan for a shorter, quieter life that ends when I am out of money, because like everyone else I won't be able to afford a longer one.

I don't want that "nobody prompts now, we just specify loops" bullshit for myself and I don't want what it will do to me for anyone I love.

Open source and open weights have to win for human culture's sake but in the short term for the sake of the culture of tech work. We need control over how we use these tools, not just to be steered down whichever channel makes the most money for Dario and Sam.

Re: Open source AI must win

#443

Post by singpolyma3 »

antupis wrote: post #65
singpolyma3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've never seen open source win before so I'd be dubious that it can win here without concerted effort.

Every machine nowadays runs Linux in some form and Postgres is the default database.

Indeed. And are most of those machines being used to run open source applications? No.

Re: Open source AI must win

#444

Post by throawayonthe »

sanbor wrote: post #349

I would be totally willing to pay $50 per month to support an open source AI lab, rather to get open source models as byproducts of corporations.

afaik deepseek doesn't have any closed models and publish more code/data/papers than most.. could start using their api i guess?

not a byproduct of the corporation

Re: Open source AI must win

#445

Post by aerhardt »

rustcleaner wrote: post #195
hirako2000 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom out. It's a matter of time the trillion valuations will be deemed senseless, only once it will prove inpossible to extract trillions from consumers. In the meanwhile, and regardless, software optimisations coupled with hardware continuing to scale, we will end up, soon enough, with some open weight that run on a mobile device with greater capabilities than Fable.

>only once it will prove inpossible [sic] to extract trillions from consumers. I am spreading a message of peace and sovereignty: Never subscribe. Never. Subscribe. Ever. Starve them out. Make their lenders take 95% haircuts. Just don't subscribe , whatever you do!

This is utopian thinking. The products are way too useful to not subscribe. The argument presupposes the worst-case negative-utility in the long-term scenario (AI companies will create a totalitarian nightmare) and pits it against the radical usefulness that the products are creating right now.

Re: Open source AI must win

#446

Post by pvirgiliu »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #395
WithinReason wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Math is math, but sadly math isn't physics nor engineering.

math has physics.

Re: Open source AI must win

#448

Post by [deleted] »

xtracto wrote: post #391

This, and distributed LLM inference. We are at a point where no single person can setup a rig to run a SOTA model, it is just too expensive. So we must build and adopt frameworks that allow individuals to share resources to run SOTA models in a distributed manner. That way they will also be non-censorable by governments. Also The only way to prevent that one entity weaponizes it, is by giving EVERYONE access to it.

[deleted]

Re: Open source AI must win

#449

Post by dboreham »

lucb1e wrote: post #355
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…

Could have said the same for Linux? Microsoft could have learned from it however much they liked, but not only is Linux relevant despite commercial competitors (think Firefox market share as of today), it's now by far the most widespread one Absorbing all the good ideas or data from openly available systems doesn't seem to be the only determiner

Linux is only widely used/successful today due to commercial vendors who consumed it as way to reduce their input costs. Arguably the same incentives exist for AI in which case the way forward would be through some sort of consortium of companies that use AI themselves funding the creation of models. Obviously when this scheme is extended to the limit, you get governments funding model creation, much like they fund building of roads, railways, ports and atomic weapons.

Re: Open source AI must win

#450

Post by edg5000 »

When "open source" means freeware, it's like saying "we want free copies".

What we should be saying is: We want a public, community-ran project that does pretraining and training collectively. This means working on a training corpus in public and somehow coordinating the training work.

This is a complete change of what the term means, It's like how people conflate piracy with theft. Two different things, use different words. Free weights, inference code and chat template is very different from a community-ran LLM project.

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