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The state of open source AI

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Re: The state of open source AI

#81

Post by inigyou »

echelon wrote: post #71
sph wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Will the West make open models illegal? We better not. > What is the financial incentive to do so? If we'd been sharing all along (as we should have been), we probably would have gotten even further along in the development of the tech. Think of everything we could do if every researcher on the planet had first class access to the frontier. No academic fallback models. No crude API access. No limits, but direct acc…

> No X. No Y. No Z, but Q

Re: The state of open source AI

#82

Post by afavour »

gallerdude wrote: post #56
khurs wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 loca…

> Android has market share, but Apple makes all of the money!

So? The benefit of open source is that you don’t have to worry about making a ton of money. You just need to be viable.

Apple: premium product a minority is willing to pay for

Android: standard product the majority use

I’m sure there will continue to be iPhone equivalents in the AI world, premium bespoke models. But the vast majority of people will be happy with a cheaper offering.

Re: The state of open source AI

#83

Post by lgessler »

sublinear wrote: post #76
babblingfish wrote: post #6

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 still strongly believe Google Gemini has the best position for one simple reason: model maintenance. Accurate information is a moving target. Open models are indeed very capable, but they will eventually become more specialized to the application to keep an edge. It makes perfect sense that the future shape of AI conforms to the landscape it was born out of.

You're saying it's important to have up-to-date facts stored in parametric knowledge? It seems to me like that's grown less and less important as agentic capabilities have grown. Even if a frontier model doesn't know something, if it's out there, it can easily find it through tool use.

Re: The state of open source AI

#84

Post by inigyou »

sublinear wrote: post #76
babblingfish wrote: post #6

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 still strongly believe Google Gemini has the best position for one simple reason: model maintenance. Accurate information is a moving target. Open models are indeed very capable, but they will eventually become more specialized to the application to keep an edge. It makes perfect sense that the future shape of AI conforms to the landscape it was born out of.

Grok has the biggest advantage in current events knowledge because it's integrated with X, which enough people still use even though it isn't Twitter.

Re: The state of open source AI

#85

Post by LunaSea »

inigyou wrote: post #77
afavour wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not exactly sure on the “how” but it only makes logical sense for (non-AI) companies to band together to fund the training of a shared model. Apple is a great example, AI is not their core business but they still require it. The only thing that took us down a different path is the vast sums of VC funding pumped into the AI companies.

If not for VC-funded LLMs there wouldn't be any LLMs.

Most of the innovations needed for LLMs came from people at Google.

Re: The state of open source AI

#86

Post by inigyou »

fnord77 wrote: post #29
babblingfish wrote: post #6

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…

Just like opensource search engines killed google oh wait

Marginalia already gives me better results for many queries than Google. Because Google has sunk so low.

Re: The state of open source AI

#87

Post by Vespasian »

wosk wrote: post #73
goolz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. Once I can reliably get open models doing what I am on Fable ultra I imagine I will switch for good. I am fortunate to have access to a decent bit of local RAM, 192GB of DDR5 at an OK speed. It is not enough and costs are well past absurd. In a few years time I envisage a setup that is sub $10k which can accomplish such tasks. The pace so far has been breakneck. That is all I personally need. That m…

This is easier to say as Fable is good (even SOTA). But people have been were saying this continuously for the current model and for now the improvement are still coming. A better question is would you settle for o3 now or pay 20$ or 200$/month for fable ? Because o3 quality is available OSS. It is like the new IPhone, in some sort. At some point come a feature many would like to have, despite diminishing returns. We…

I think there is also the case were companies will simply use different tiers for different tasks.

While the engineering team might need a cutting edge model (with the associated costs), the marketing department will be fine by something that can grammar correct or turn a few bullet points into prose. Likewise you already don't need Fable for Ticket -> RAG -> Reply with Faq knowledge or escalate workflows

That's already the case with other very expensive software like CAD packages were oftentimes you have different feature sets enabled for different employees.

Re: The state of open source AI

#88

Post by inigyou »

khurs wrote: post #47
gallerdude wrote: post #43

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…

There were many smartphones before both iOS and Android.

Re: The state of open source AI

#90

Post by doodlesdev »

longitudinal93 wrote: post #64
bityard wrote: post #37

It sure is nice to see that Mozilla is still doing all that they can to keep on top of current trends, except developing a decent privacy-focused web browser for developers and power users.

But they supply all the source for those projects to flourish and have an ecosystem of their own: Librefox, Iceweasel, Reynard, etc, etc.

That's a very low bar, though. Chromium is open-source too and has a bunch of privacy-focused forks such as Ungoogled Chromium, Brave and Chromite.
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