I’m not ready to celebrate the victory of open models just yet considering all the good ones are built by private, VC funded companies. How long will they continue to be charitable? And what’s their actual business model once the money stops and investors start demanding returns?
The state of open source AI
151–160 of 379 posts
Re: The state of open source AI
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meta is selling their now excess compute, other compute has been on the market for a while. The current hardware cost bubble is temporary, especially once people are forced to pay the real inference price instead of majorly subsidized subscriptions.
Lowering the cost of hardware still won't solve the issue. HBM and DDR5 was never cheap, even before the shortages, so selling a full inference system is beyond the acceptable price range for most casual customers. We're going to see Apple and Google compete over services and AI/OS integration instead, it will probably be years before your OEM takes local models seriously.
Apple and Google (via smartphones) are in literally everyone's pocket.
Running KIMI on a phone is not possible today and I agree with you that it will "probably be years before..." it is.
But how many years do you guess? I personally do not think it will take even 10 years for the situation to be commonplace.
Re: The state of open source AI
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
My prediction is that hardware costs will make open source models impractical for the foreseeable future. Yes, tinkerers and enthusiasts will continue to make use of them, but frontier companies will maintain near total dominance because they will be the only ones with access to the hardware.
Meta is selling their now excess compute, other compute has been on the market for a while. The current hardware cost bubble is temporary, especially once people are forced to pay the real inference price instead of majorly subsidized subscriptions.
yep, all those coders paying $200-$500 per day to use claude once subsidy ends will be seriously rethinking how much they really want to vibe-code "rewriting X in rust". Helping people write word docs, recipes, and emails isn't going to justify $15K per month subscriptions either.
Re: The state of open source AI
#154Speculation: 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…
The outcome is plausible. Open weights models though look like a tactical more than a principled play by Chinese companies to overcome the disadvantage and difficulties to access western markets. Two issues:
1. If market conditions change they might decide to close down like Meta did.
2. If as you said models keep getting more expensive to train, is an open weights strategy financially sustainable?
edit: typo
Re: The state of open source AI
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Who says it hasn't already? I've driven in a LOT of the USA. Sure Chicago, NYC, DC, LA, LV... They're all built up and feel modern. Try driving anywhere in the Midwest outside of the big cities. Dilapidated carcas buildings everywhere. Urban and rural blight. Only jobs are low paying service work. Its bleak. Like, really bad poverty as a disease bleak. And its crazy watching it too. They're ignorant (involuntatily),…
>Who says it hasn't already?
Great.
Re: The state of open source AI
#156> The cloud era already ran this experiment: proprietary APIs plus data gravity made exit punitive. The repatriation wave is the receipt. Some sentences smell a lot like AI.
Virtually every article about AI these days is written by AI. It's obvious why, but boy is it nauseating to read
Re: The state of open source AI
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were many smartphones before both iOS and Android.
While that may be technically true for a strict definition of “smartphone,” there’s no denying the iPhone redefined the concept in a way that its competitors were forced to copy to have any hope of keeping up. Nobody hears the word “smartphone” and thinks of a Blueberry or Treo anymore.
What exactly did the iPhone do better?
Re: The state of open source AI
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google is a VC. Their side projects are VC projects.
Re: The state of open source AI
#159It 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.
They get paid half a billion a year to do exactly what they have been doing and keeping FF at <5% of market share on desktop and 0% on mobile.
Re: The state of open source AI
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sourc…
There are fully open models, it's just not as common because that's basically giving away the sauce, which is non-viable for many.