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The state of open source AI

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Re: The state of open source AI

#111

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> 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.

More like if you could have a 1.25x more powerful model that you could only access through some weird surveillance megacorps aggressive monetization scheme, or choose from 100 others running open models and accessible through 100 different interfaces pandering to every taste.

Normies will choose the megacorp every time, because that was the one in the tv commercial, and within six months will have left for one of the others in a rage.

The only corporate hope is that the government steps in to ban their competition.

Re: The state of open source AI

#112

Post by figassis »

mft_ wrote: post #33
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…

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 would definitely pay a monthly subscription to help fund a non profit compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. I already pay subscriptions for myself and 2+ other people. It's a non brainer to be able to pay for the training of better models that I can then run myself for many more. I hope someone starts this, I think this model would work. I'd start it today if I had the team and initial capital to bootstrap the infr. I know VCs won't fund it, but we definitely will, enthusiastically and continually.

Re: The state of open source AI

#113

Post by GuB-42 »

Catloafdev wrote: post #63
inigyou wrote: post #61

There isn't any open-source AI. There is Open AI (not to be confused with the closed company called OpenAI, which was unable to trademark its name). There's no open source AI both because the open source community doesn't have the resources to train a useful AI and because AI doesn't have source code.

This is just wrong on multiple levels, the open source model ecosystem is very much a thing.

I don't know of any useful model that would match the usual definition of "open source". That is, where everything needed to build the thing is provided, such as the training data and code. Not that it would be tremendously useful anyways considering how expensive training a model is.

I much prefer the "open weights" term. It is not open source in the sense that you only get the finished product, not the actual source, but it is still open in the sense that it is not only accessible as a service.

For an analogy, take Quake for instance. When it was launched, its game server was available as an executable, so you could run it your machine, but that didn't make it open source. Only much later it was released as true open source software.

Re: The state of open source AI

#114

Post by cyanydeez »

kurthr wrote: post #60
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'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 co…

not really a feeling; if you listen to ed zitron and strip out the vitriol, you still get the fact that the VCs are looking for some 5 trillion dollars in 5 years.

The onlly way that happens is if America turns into zimbawe.

Re: The state of open source AI

#115

Post by SubiculumCode »

Gemini had a pop-up on my phone today, asking me if I wanted to "bring Gemini up to speed" by importing conversations from my other AI apps. This tells me that Google is threatened, or data hungry as always, or both. Open source AI, Anthropic, and OpenAI, knocking on doors.

Re: The state of open source AI

#116

Post by drschwabe »

brunooliv wrote: post #23

This is really insane to me. There's nothing practical about open-source models yet that makes them even remotely comparable to closed frontier models. All the hype around GLM, Qwen, now Kimi.... Are people really this naive that they believe these reports or, more worringly, are people NOT using these models and seeing the HUGE gap that still exists? Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd tru…

Have you really given GLM 5.2 an honest go ?

Re: The state of open source AI

#117

Post by mrandish »

inigyou wrote: post #93
LunaSea wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So VC-funded.

The company was VC-funded as a search engine but by the time they made significant investments in AI (DeepMind etc) they'd been a publicly held company earning multiple billions a year from advertising for a decade.

Re: The state of open source AI

#118

Post by [deleted] »

silverlimetea wrote: post #69
latexr wrote: post #19

Quick fix for the font, which many people are (rightly) complaining about. Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName("quote")).forEach(p => { p.style.marginTop = "20px"; p.classList.remove("quote", "reveal") }) The issue is that all of the text is a quote, and that renders enormous. That’s probably fine for a tiny quote amongst more text, but here it is jarring.

querySelectorAll('.quote')

[deleted]

Re: The state of open source AI

#119

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

If consumers ever have enough VRAM for it locally, sure, otherwise nowhere near close.

Nvidia is looking like they are ditching consumer markets in favor of enterprise GPUs since nobodys heard a peep about the next iteration of RTX cards. The 60xx series is postponed till 2028.

Nvidias playing a dangerous gamble, in my eyes I see all the frontier labs eventually just only buying Nvidia chips for training and building custom ASICs for a fraction of the cost, longer lifespan and cheaper to host.

This will eat their 5 year gravy train for GPUs vs the 10 to 15 for ASICs.

Re: The state of open source AI

#120

Post by afavour »

gallerdude wrote: post #109
afavour wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 happ…

The original comment was “open models are what kill OpenAI and Anthropic”, which to me is as silly as saying “Android is what killed Apple”

Well I think a critical difference is that, unlike Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic have taken on so much VC funding that a 20-something % market share is not going to be enough for them. So open models could kill them, not because of the techonology but because of the way they're financed.
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