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The state of open source AI

stateofopensource.ai

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Re: The state of open source AI

#51

It appears open models were used to create this slop. That opening is so hard to understand what they are trying to say, from the font and how it's written. It took me several times rereading to even grasp. Plus the article is filled with cryptic things like: Open ships easy. Open deploys hard. What?! Is it a meta answer to "the state of open source AI" question?

So good at style, so weak on substance

Re: The state of open source AI

#52

Exactly 4 months ago, the marketshare on openrouter was 60%-40% in favor of closed models. Now it's 63%-37% in favor of open models. On March 19th, the open models processed 888B tokens in aggregate, yesterday, they processed 4.19T tokens in aggregate. That's almost 5x in 4 months! I can't think of the right intensifier to describe this level of growth. If you are looking for more details (as inferred by openrouter d…

This right here is going to be considered one of the first major signs of the downfall of closed models years from now.

And look, if you disagree with me PLEASE tell me why. What moat do these companies have? I genuinely want to know because looking at the spend for companies like OAI and Anthropic with no actual moat I can identify is actually driving me insane.

Re: The state of open source AI

#54

Exactly 4 months ago, the marketshare on openrouter was 60%-40% in favor of closed models. Now it's 63%-37% in favor of open models. On March 19th, the open models processed 888B tokens in aggregate, yesterday, they processed 4.19T tokens in aggregate. That's almost 5x in 4 months! I can't think of the right intensifier to describe this level of growth. If you are looking for more details (as inferred by openrouter d…

This right here is going to be considered one of the first major signs of the downfall of closed models years from now. And look, if you disagree with me PLEASE tell me why. What moat do these companies have? I genuinely want to know because looking at the spend for companies like OAI and Anthropic with no actual moat I can identify is actually driving me insane.

The moat is enterprise contracts and artificial friction moving between harnesses. Moat is a strong word, more of a puddle.

Re: The state of open source AI

#55

It appears open models were used to create this slop. That opening is so hard to understand what they are trying to say, from the font and how it's written. It took me several times rereading to even grasp. Plus the article is filled with cryptic things like: Open ships easy. Open deploys hard. What?! Is it a meta answer to "the state of open source AI" question?

This is truly some proper slop. The "PRODUCTION RATE BY COMPANY SIZE" graph has bars that start offset from the text underneath them, which LOOKS like a mistake that happened due to word wrap, but if you visibly compare the 54% to the 55% bars they seem to have compensated for this?! I can't tell if his was on purpose or accident and it's impossible to take the data seriously!

This is on mobile in portrait. In landscape the text doesn't wrap or offset anything.

Re: The state of open source AI

#56
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the world where all models are basically equivalent (a thesis I don’t buy, but will grant you for arguments sake) - I believe there is much more to the AI business than just training and running models. It’s a very new set of technologies, and understanding what is useful to customers and what isn’t is the whole game. Call it, product taste. There were a million cell phones before the iPhone took over the wor…

>There were a million cell phones before the iPhone took over the world. You have tripped yourself up there. iPhone took over as it introduced something innovative over standard phones, but then Open Source (Android) matched the multi-touch and software differences and Apple's branding, lock-in and design etc have managed to keep it as a big player in wealthier countries. IPhone also came on the back of the massive i…

Android has market share, but Apple makes all of the money! I find it really funny when people attribute Apple’s success to “oh, the only reason they succeed is design and marketing.” Yeah, I mean factually speaking design and marketing actually do matter a lot!

Us developer types like to pretend like specs are the only thing that matters? If you could have a 10x more powerful model you could only access running locally through your terminal, versus a weaker model through a clean web interface, normies will pick the web ui every single time. Product experience is simply everything, as much as we like to pretend like nitty technical decisions are the most important thing.

Re: The state of open source AI

#58
post #33

Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…

Open models are probably also comparatively astronomically expensive to train - just less so than the frontier models because they’re somewhat smaller, +/- the creators are more incentivised to focus on getting more from less compute because they’re have to, +/- they rely on distillation of the frontier models and this is more efficient. But efficiencies aside; creation of open models still requires a lot of money an…

How does it work if people flock to open models but they're too expensive to train? What is the financial incentive to do so?

I seem to understand open models are mostly coming from China, and the benefit of training and releasing them for 'free' is a powerful geopolitical weapon against the Western/US economy that at this point depends on OpenAI & co. to succeed.

Will the West make open models illegal?

Re: The state of open source AI

#59
post #33

Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…

Open models are probably also comparatively astronomically expensive to train - just less so than the frontier models because they’re somewhat smaller, +/- the creators are more incentivised to focus on getting more from less compute because they’re have to, +/- they rely on distillation of the frontier models and this is more efficient. But efficiencies aside; creation of open models still requires a lot of money an…

I don't think it needs to be framed purely as generosity. You just need a sufficiently self-interested actor that sees open ecosystems as a necessary part of reducing their own risk profile, relative to the alternative of complete reliance of a third-party business that can take an exorbitant cut and/or Sherlock them at any time.

Valve and SteamOS are a good example of what this idea looks like in practice. (Though they may also illustrate a third thing you need: a privately-run company, that has enough profit, and enough commitment from leadership to the company's vision, that they can make long-term bets without having to eventually bow to investors seeking short-term gains.)

Re: The state of open source AI

#60

Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…

I'm a bit skeptical of the token cost/ROI for all models, but sunk costs are sunk.

It has the feel of self-improving super-intelligence or bust to me. If you get that, the frontier model(s) run away with a faster exponential. It's a bit like semi with Moore's Law with silicon, GaAs could never catch up. If you don't get it, the fast followers crush the high investment and there's no moat. Not like they can enforce copyright!

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