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For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

techstrong.ai

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Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#81

Post by peterlk »

petcat wrote: post #74
peterlk wrote: post #64

Over the long term, it seems like open models must win out. This feels like it rhymes with the story of operating systems. Despite the enormous financial contributions of Microsoft and Apple, linux still won because control matters over the long term. I predict that mech interp and things like Neuronpedia will matter more and more over time, and the frontier providers are disincentivized from providing those tools

> linux still won because control matters over the long term. what has Linux won? Servers? sure

Yeah. I would expect that Samsung or Apple’s bundled AI things (whatever those end up being) will be good enough for consumers, and open models will be the things that actually get used in the products of the future because they will allow technical people to alter models in ways that specialize them for whatever use case they’re building for. They will also be the onramp for engineers/data scientists of the future, and thus will have more available, specialized knowledge over time.

The bitter lesson would claim that we only need one model with more data thrown at it, but I’m a bit skeptical that we’ll end up with “the one true way” of building a model, and I think there will be model tradeoffs that we can pick from as the industry matures.

Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#82

Post by skydhash »

pmontra wrote: post #2

Agreed but I want to see how it plays out. Historically a good Windows computer cost $1000 and it was all it took to start programming. How much does it cost a computer with enough resources to run a good enough AI model for agentic workflows and a reasonable time to first token? Can "most of the world" afford buying one?

> Historically a good Windows computer cost $1000 and it was all it took to start programming

Started with computers around 2009 and later bought an oldish computer (a pentium 4 PC) for the equivalent of 50 usd. Codeblocks and Python Idle were free at the time (C and Python were the first languages I learned). The barrier to programming has always been low as the only thing you needed was books (the internet made things easier) and access to a PC (I had friends with laptop and my school lab).

Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#83

Post by Chu4eeno »

treis wrote: post #57
wrs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially considering the millions of 2026-class data center GPUs that massively overinvested companies are currently buying, which will be obsolete in a few years.

I think those are going to be run until they die. The capex vs opex is too high to obsolete them in a few years. They'll keep serving current gen LLMs for as long as they keep running.

They can also be used for other things than running the main frontier whatever model as well.

E.g. grok isn't truly multi-modal, it has a callable tool that is a separate VLM it invokes on image URLs or files (for a long time it was grok-1.5v, but I think they have upgraded now, it was pretty bad).

And then you have the small summarizer models for the CoT/thought traces, the guidable summarizer models for the standard browse tools, etc.

There's a ton of stuff that can use an aging GPU.

Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#85

Post by simonw »

verdverm wrote: post #37
simonw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see credible numbers on the energy usage of thousands of people running models on their own devices compared to sharing data center resources to run big models that serve many different people at the same time. My hunch is that the energy/water usage of the data centers is a whole lot more efficient than everyone running at home, but I'd be interested in seeing real data on that.

With hardware like the Spark and Strix, the water usage is known to be zero, yea? On the energy front, I assume less efficient, but I also think there is a tradeoff in efficiency versus freedom, that's why I have my own hardware.

The electricity used by hardware itself consumes water. When people talk about data center water usage they're often also including the water used in electricity generation.

Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#86

Post by simonw »

cold_harbor wrote: post #25
simonw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see credible numbers on the energy usage of thousands of people running models on their own devices compared to sharing data center resources to run big models that serve many different people at the same time. My hunch is that the energy/water usage of the data centers is a whole lot more efficient than everyone running at home, but I'd be interested in seeing real data on that.

the comparison misses that local LLM usage covers tasks you'd never send to an API — private code, offline work, medical notes. the baseline is 'local vs not-doing-it', not 'local vs cloud'

I have bad news about my private code and medical notes...

Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#87

Post by layer8 »

prmoustache wrote: post #80

What is Open-Source AI? Has it been defined? By all accounts, all AI companies starting with open are doing proprietary stuff. All models delivered for free as "open-models" are just freeware as no source is really provided.

The talk is about this: https://thealliance.ai/projects/tapestry

Collaboratively trained open-weight models, is my understanding.

Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#88

Post by ktallett »

echelon wrote: post #12
ktallett wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to improve the waster and energy usage and this method doesn't. Most are not reinventing the wheel, a shared AI repository, communicated between online local computers would save a lot of need for these large models.

NO! This is the wrong approach that will turn us into serfs. We need big honking models that do what the leading foundation hyperscaler models do to within a few percentage points of measured performance. The small-scale models are not productive, and the duct tape solutions built on top of them are hobbyist-tier "year of Linux on desktop" toys. I imagine fedora-wearing, crypto-shilling, coupon-cutting boffins every…

Firstly, unless you are the leader of any of the faangs, you are a serf on the whole, if you believe in that philosophy as being relevant.

We need the right tool for the job. Certain models have minimum energy expense no matter what the task is and that's often wasted, both on the scale of some tasks and also repetition.

There is a place and a need for large models, local models, and single purpose models. The same way there is a need for HPC and single board.

Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#89

Post by dwa3592 »

nxm wrote: post #70
mbgerring wrote: post #14

There is no reason we should accept the enclosure of the digital commons represented by AI. The data these models are trained on amounts to the total intellectual and artistic output of human kind through recorded history. It belongs to all of us, and accordingly, so should the models and weights produced by it.

It belongs to not us, but the copyright holders of that work

and that is millions of people; hence the use of the word 'us'.

Re: For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward

#90

Post by layer8 »

tencentshill wrote: post #44
logancbrown wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effort of humans who had to toil through training models belongs to everyone? Do they no longer have any ownership over their hard work?

Some consider copyright to be unethical. "Information wants to be free".

Copyright isn’t about information.
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