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Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

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21–30 of 134 posts

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#21
post #2

[flagged]

Redistribution can only get you so far. Creating new wealth is more sustainable.

> Redistribution can only get you so far.

That "so far" being a middle class the envy of the rest of the world which the US threw away to create a new class of oligarch.

"Back at the tail-end of that era, in the early 1960s, America’s richest faced a 91 percent tax rate on income in the top tax bracket."

https://inequality.org/article/tax-the-rich-we-did-that-once...

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#22
Just because a software is closed-source doesn't mean the knowledge can't be shared. You don't need to see the underlying code to explain to someone architectural patterns or best practices.

The library analogy in the scenario would hold true if LLM providers refused to answer any questions about RL or Transformers.

I am a big proponent of open-source open-weight models, but mostly because I think it's just a better product. We've seen that they are much cheaper to train and operate. Frontier intelligence might not be needed for most tasks. Just let the market decide. My bet is that LLMs will become analogous to programming languages, and big labs will make their money by fine-tuning models for very specific use cases or by deploying them for customers.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The U.S. system is neither fish nor fowl, there is more spending per capita than other countries' public systems and endless amounts of red tape because instead of one government bureaucracy you're also dealing with the insurance networks, the providers, etc. I certainly don't think it'll be automatically cheaper, but one can't help but think that the current system encourages hop-ons that exploit the inconsistencies…

But our publicly run systems are full of inefficient bureaucracy and red tape, too. Why shouldn’t we assume our public healthcare system would be operated the same way as the public school systems in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles? Moreover, there is a massive amount of overcare that americans aren’t willing to confront. My wife’s grandmother had a stroke at 87 and was airlifted from rural oregon to a hospital in…

Frankly, dealing with healthcare claims as an American consumer is an excruciating experience and it is at the situation where “try anything else” is worth considering.

Also, as your description of overcare is happening under the current system, a profit-oriented one at that (which incentivizes the ordering of unnecessary tests and procedures) it sounds like you would actually benefit from a non-market-controlled, more modest (even austere), system!

Postwar America was built on the customer being right. The healthcare system is one of the glaring major examples of the customer not getting what it wants. Give the customer a better system.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you cut out the insurance middlemen and pharmaceutical companies driving up record profits at the expense of care you can get pretty far with less in taxes

You cut out the insurance middlemen but you introduce government bureaucracy. There's absolutely no way the government operates more efficiency in this space.

We know how efficient government operates tho, the admin expenses of say social security and medicare is less than 3%. Pray tell, what corporation operates with 3% admin expenses?

Once again, what a crock of shit.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#27
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number one expense for SMB is healthcare, providing a nationalized healthcare service would likely unlock trillions in value (imagine what Americans would do if they got $200-500 more per paycheck?). Instead we are forced to watch some of the wealthiest companies on the planet burn money for fun because apparently the government is "wasteful." What a crock of shit.

The U.S. spends more money on education per student than any OECD country other than Norway and Luxembourg. Yet it gets quite mediocre results. Why do you think the U.S. will be able to do public health care in a more cost efficient way than it does public education? I favor universal health insurance, but you’re going to pay more, not less. European countries didn’t flip some magic switch where they saved a bunch of…

There is zero evidence we would pay more for healthcare under medicare for all, what a bunch of neoliberal nonsense.

The idea that a for-profit system is more efficient than say medicare is hilariously out of touch. Medicare is one of the most popular programs in the country (like >80% from overall public, >90% from active users). There is no reason to deny such a program from the vast majority of Americans, unless you stand to profit from it.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#28
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number one expense for SMB is healthcare, providing a nationalized healthcare service would likely unlock trillions in value (imagine what Americans would do if they got $200-500 more per paycheck?). Instead we are forced to watch some of the wealthiest companies on the planet burn money for fun because apparently the government is "wasteful." What a crock of shit.

The U.S. spends more money on education per student than any OECD country other than Norway and Luxembourg. Yet it gets quite mediocre results. Why do you think the U.S. will be able to do public health care in a more cost efficient way than it does public education? I favor universal health insurance, but you’re going to pay more, not less. European countries didn’t flip some magic switch where they saved a bunch of…

[deleted]

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#29

Just because a software is closed-source doesn't mean the knowledge can't be shared. You don't need to see the underlying code to explain to someone architectural patterns or best practices. The library analogy in the scenario would hold true if LLM providers refused to answer any questions about RL or Transformers. I am a big proponent of open-source open-weight models, but mostly because I think it's just a better…

[deleted]

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#30
post #20

They already invest in open-source AI, but nothing is truly free. Commercial AI will usually dominate because devs are paid to make it their primary effort. Goodwill and part-time contributions cannot reliably compete with livelihood and profit incentives.

That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS

OSS only dominates for software that is commoditized and the published computer science research for that software domain is close to the frontier.

OSS struggles at being relevant when software is non-commodity e.g. office suites. In software domains like databases where the state-of-the-art computer science research is often unpublished, OSS struggles to be relevant at the higher end of the market on technical merits.

When deciding what should be OSS, it is useful to consider the preconditions that have made it successful.

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