Live data from Hacker News

Open source AI must win

opensourceaimustwin.com

471–480 of 538 posts

Re: Open source AI must win

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor's composer 2.5 is a perfect example. It's right on the heels of the frontier (for coding only) for an order of magnitude cheaper. As much as I've shit on Cursor in the past, I do think the company is well positioned to pick up people getting sticker shock on Anthropic tokens, if they can get their marketing down.

If that's Kimi-based it would very much be on the larger side of open-weight models (1T params).

It is, but the US labs have been pushing parameters heavily. There was a pullback from big models after GPT4.5 in particular, but with a shift towards emphasis on post training and the good results Google got with scaling Gemini 3, all the labs started to push scaling again, which is the reason the frontier is getting more expensive. So that 1T isn't as big as it sounds, the American frontier is probably sitting at 3-5T at least.

Re: Open source AI must win

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that the API calls by themselves are ~60% profit if you ignore capital expenditures. The labs haven't generated profit because they're constantly sinking money into the next generation of larger models to stay relevant. Dario has talked about the economics of this a lot, and I do believe him there. There's clearly also a lot of pent up demand in the corporate world for inference, the problem is that it's c…

The number of capital-heavy businesses that are wildly profitable “if you ignore capital expenses” is too many to list. Airlines, for example, which are so profitable they continually go bankrupt.

That's true, but if the frontier doesn't advance there's no depreciation or ongoing capital expenditure. If all the frontier labs agreed to stop making stronger AI and just try to sell what they've already trained today, their books would turn green in a hurry.

Re: Open source AI must win

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this very thread you already have people talking about "open weights" and similar nonsense. What is open about them? They're free to download, but that hardly qualifies as open. Where is the source? Where are the instructions to modify and build your own? I'd never though I'd have to utter the expression "open as in beer". The blatant attempt at manipulating vocabulary here is... quite blatant.

What would the 'source' be for an LLM? There is the structure, and the weights, there is no 'source'.

In case you're not just trolling, please learn how "the weights", which are analgous to a compiled executable, are made.

Re: Open source AI must win

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

We have nothing anywhere near AGI/ASI so you're good for another 25 years, my friend

That is exactly what ASI wants you to think. foil hat off

Re: Open source AI must win

#477
post #197

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…

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…

Dunno, in a sense, torrents came among similar restrictions. Everything at consumer level was just plain awful and at dial up level, mebbe ISDN if you were very lucky, with fiber only available to ridiculously rich people and corps. But with restrictions, came approaches on how to mitigate them.

Re: Open source AI must win

#478
It doesn't matter if open source models win or not. The bottleneck is the compute. When capital becomes cognition everyone other than the demigod class is cooked. We have a vanishingly small window to make sure that the benefits of large scale automation go to the species and not the owners. Once the owners become more powerful than governments or accumulate enough power to co-opt the governments we're done for. You can already see that creeping in along the edges.

Re: Open source AI must win

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OpenAI ruined the trust. How do you know this 'open source AI lab' won't somehow spin off a for-profit?

Coups like that can happen due to organizations having a small number of board members that can decide to do as they like. Proper mass-membership organizations are possible though. Same rules as a public corporation, but one vote per members, and the yearly meeting decides the board members and approves important decisions or introduce motions that steer the organization. So the right way to do this would be to creat…

So elections guarantee fair outcomes, you say…

Re: Open source AI must win

#480
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dunno, in a sense, torrents came among similar restrictions. Everything at consumer level was just plain awful and at dial up level, mebbe ISDN if you were very lucky, with fiber only available to ridiculously rich people and corps. But with restrictions, came approaches on how to mitigate them.

Yes but not violations of the laws of physics. You need extremely fast communications, memory bandwidth, etc; you cannot get that with distributed training. You're up against the speed of light and the interconnect that powers the internet. You will always have horrifically slow latency compared to if you pack the servers together in the same place with specialized networking.
Post reply on HN