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The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#12I don’t get this idea that AI will go away at some point. We’ll still have all the self-hostable models even if there are no newly trained models for a while. There will be companies that make money hosting those and selling tokens at a profit. We already have a pretty good idea what that looks like. We’ll also have companies like Google and Meta where AI is not their main product, who get competitive benefit out of…
It's wishful thinking from people who want it to go away.
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#13I don’t get this idea that AI will go away at some point. We’ll still have all the self-hostable models even if there are no newly trained models for a while. There will be companies that make money hosting those and selling tokens at a profit. We already have a pretty good idea what that looks like. We’ll also have companies like Google and Meta where AI is not their main product, who get competitive benefit out of…
If Anthropic or OpenAI go bankrupt, is there any reason not to expect that the model weights will be sold to some other company as part of that bankruptcy procedure?
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very cheap uber rides went away and so could very cheap subsidized AI. That said I personally think AI at the level today will get cheaper and probably run locally on boring hardware soon enough. FOSS code doesn't need to FOMO.
Your analogy is perfect, because you can self-host your own “Uber”, by owning, renting, or leasing a car and using it to drive yourself around. Uber may have become more expensive, but cars didn’t go away or see less use.
Cars and renting existed long before Uber.
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#15I don’t get this idea that AI will go away at some point. We’ll still have all the self-hostable models even if there are no newly trained models for a while. There will be companies that make money hosting those and selling tokens at a profit. We already have a pretty good idea what that looks like. We’ll also have companies like Google and Meta where AI is not their main product, who get competitive benefit out of…
If Anthropic or OpenAI go bankrupt, is there any reason not to expect that the model weights will be sold to some other company as part of that bankruptcy procedure?
See, this is a fascinating point.
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your analogy is perfect, because you can self-host your own “Uber”, by owning, renting, or leasing a car and using it to drive yourself around. Uber may have become more expensive, but cars didn’t go away or see less use.
Cars and renting existed long before Uber.
Do you think that matters?
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#17The author doesn't even agree with what the author says!
> Now, personally, the limited-time thing I think is bullshit–but, I’ll allow it for rhetorical reasons here.
So the main point was just a canard (a decoy duck) being used to urge open source devs to use LLMs. Like a phony time-limited offer. I guess it's nice to clearly and openly admit to bullshitting the readers, but in that case why do it at all? Honesty would be simpler: the idea is simply that LLMs could help open source, and this metaphor about whales falling into sunny hayfields doesn't pertain. It's more like "make hay whenever you're ready".
Then we might ask whether the LLMs can indeed be used to make hay or just to make a mess. In principle, when faced with an overwhelming backlog of trivial work, an LLM ought to be a great solution, but much depends on the work genuinely being trivial.
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very cheap uber rides went away and so could very cheap subsidized AI. That said I personally think AI at the level today will get cheaper and probably run locally on boring hardware soon enough. FOSS code doesn't need to FOMO.
Your analogy is perfect, because you can self-host your own “Uber”, by owning, renting, or leasing a car and using it to drive yourself around. Uber may have become more expensive, but cars didn’t go away or see less use.
I also like is Rick Beato’s analogy:
Music studios were expensive, commercially ran enterprises, but were mostly replaced by software that runs at home.
Studios still exist for some situations, but recording itself has been commoditized, since everyone is running the same software.
And oh, now people are doing waaaay more of it.
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#19Idea that AI is very expensive and will not be viable without "subsidization" for personal use is very shortsighted:
1. We measure "subsidization" in relation to API pricing. API pricing is very overpriced, to compensate for this "marketing subsidization", R&D, and everything else. A few months ago, Anthropic was close to being profitable
2. In general, OpenAI and Anthropic are US companies, and the US is known to have price disease, with all those huge salaries, multibillion note-taking apps, and fighter jets that cost too much to fly. China, and other countries in the future, could produce roughly the same output for way less money, as they did with everything else
3. Compute progress still happens. We can already run models better than GPT-3.5 locally on an iPhone
Re: The AI Whale Fall and Open Source
#20I don’t get this idea that AI will go away at some point. We’ll still have all the self-hostable models even if there are no newly trained models for a while. There will be companies that make money hosting those and selling tokens at a profit. We already have a pretty good idea what that looks like. We’ll also have companies like Google and Meta where AI is not their main product, who get competitive benefit out of…
If Anthropic or OpenAI go bankrupt, is there any reason not to expect that the model weights will be sold to some other company as part of that bankruptcy procedure?
If that happened would the model weights even be worth anything? Clearly the generated tokens weren't good enough to customers to justify their price