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The state of open source AI

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Re: The state of open source AI

#161

Post by foolswisdom »

brunooliv wrote: post #31
foolswisdom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd trust to give to Sonnet to finish without a hitch. Now give it to ANY open-source frontier model and watch them struggle and go in circles while failing tool calls and randomly assuming things. Claude used to be much worse than it is now, just as bad the open weights models are. And the open weights were worse. The labs will also try to keep the lead, b…

I hope you're right and I want you to be right, but, even seeing the current hype around local models, etc... and open-source models, I think the industry is currently under a big confusion where they see the benchmarks of things like Kimi, GLM, Qwen, they play with it via opencode, and they think like: "Wow this is pretty good, I want to deploy this". But they don't understand how the KV cache grows over time and ca…

It sounds like you're focusing on the problems of running local models, or running models yourself, but I don't think that many people seriously expect near term improvement on that, it's definitely more just hopeful thinking there. That's not what I meant to address, and I also am in more of a "wait and see" mode.

But at this point we do expect that open weights _hosted_ options become feasible for the tasks they're using the frontier models for. And because of the lack of "legal monopoly" (intellectual property of whatever kind), they're way cheaper, not mention more flexible.

The launch of the tinker platform from Thinking Machines is an example of the "more flexibility" part that people want (and they chose to make their model open weights, maybe because this is the angle they want to push).

At this point I think it's realistic enough that the ball is in OpenAI / Anthropic's court to figure out how to respond to this threat to their business model.

That said, I think it's concerning that there are apparently only a couple of providers of hosted open weights inference, due to the complexities of doing so (per Dax from OpenCode's tweets).

Re: The state of open source AI

#162

Post by newswasboring »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #143
ofjcihen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the frontier AI companies think you're missing key details: - they can still discover entire new untapped markets for AI (that, potentially, only their models can unlock) - they can find (novel, unique to them) ways to drive down the cost of running their models - they can provide other ancillary value (e.g. write better harnesses) because of their expertise, and then charge for that value I'm probably missin…

> The frontier AI companies are betting "the house" on them, and if they pay off they could, hypothetically, make them financially competitive.

They are not betting the house, they are betting the American economy on it. When this crashes it will take everyone down.

Re: The state of open source AI

#163

Post by Cyberdog »

inigyou wrote: post #157
Cyberdog wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a subjective question, so I'll give a subjective answer. The browser, for better or worse, was a lot less dumbed down for mobile than competitors, the stylus-less touch interface reduced UI friction and the odds that you'd lose a critical (if inexpensive) component, and the slew of contemporary iPod users could easily migrate their libraries over.

Re: The state of open source AI

#164

Post by mrandish »

sph wrote: post #58
mft_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> releasing them for 'free' is a powerful geopolitical weapon...

I agree that, currently, the Chinese govt is not only allowing but tacitly encouraging open weight model releases. However, I don't see it as an attack. I think it's more of a strategic delaying move to slow the revenue to frontier models while China works to catch up. This strategy will likely change over time.

> Will the West make open models illegal?

In the U.S. this seems highly unlikely due to the current administration's generally laissez-faire approach to tech as well as the U.S. constitution severely limiting the government's latitude to constrain economic activity.

As we saw with the temporary Mythos restriction, there are legal mechanisms to limit tech on certain grounds, but over time such limits are subject to close judicial and constitutional review. The Mythos embargo was also likely driven in part by the administration's anger at Anthropic for choosing to block the DoD from using their products for mass domestic surveillance and warfighting. I doubt we'll see any meaningful restrictions on OAI or other large companies. It'll be nearly 3 years before a different admin is in office and could enact serious limits and by then it will be too late for fundamental bans.

There are vested interests in most governments, such as intelligence agencies, law enforcement and the military, who would prefer to restrict some AI from broad use. As we saw with strong encryption, they'll only be able to delay and constrain, not stop, such a broadly useful dual-use tech. The geopolitical, economic, competitive and civil liberty interests are similar between strong encryption and AI, setting up a similar game theory dynamic. While it can be argued AI poses some potential danger, the specter of any such threat is abstract and not immediate.

On the other hand, the tech is obviously too economically essential and competitively vital to risk 'falling behind'. While there will certainly be attempts to ban, limit or constrain AI, the well-funded, highly organized commercial interests and civil libertarians will deploy lobbying, legal challenges and public opinion to ultimately prevail.

Re: The state of open source AI

#165

Post by Cyberdog »

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')

querySelector/querySelectorAll() are great for plucking out deeply nested elements but if all you need is to find all elements of a certain class and the API gives you a tool to do exactly that, why not do that instead of reaching for the general-purpose Swiss army knife? Sure, the execution speed difference may be only measurable in microseconds, but it takes about the same amount of time to type so why not use the specific tool?

Re: The state of open source AI

#166

Post by [deleted] »

surgical_fire wrote: post #121
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?

If by West you mean the USA, maybe. Other countries in the westen hemisphere, probably not.

[deleted]

Re: The state of open source AI

#167

Post by hungryhobbit »

mrcwinn wrote: post #104

Seems quite odd to use OpenRouter as “proof” that open weights models won. If you’re using OpenRouter, you’re already looking to bypass frontier models. To suggest there’s no longer a tradeoff simply isn’t true. But this isn’t the first time I thought Mozilla was a less than trustworthy source of information.

I think "If you’re using OpenRouter, you’re already looking to bypass frontier models." is false. Our company uses both Claude subscriptions and OpenRouter ... and a lot of what we use OpenRouter for is more Claude.

We do a little exploration with other models through it, but it's not at all accurate to say we use it because we are "already looking to bypass frontier models".

... or at least, no more than any other company that doesn't want to overpay for their tooling, but is basically happy (ATM) with the current state of Claude.

Re: The state of open source AI

#168

Post by unethical_ban »

newswasboring wrote: post #162
hungryhobbit wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the frontier AI companies think you're missing key details: - they can still discover entire new untapped markets for AI (that, potentially, only their models can unlock) - they can find (novel, unique to them) ways to drive down the cost of running their models - they can provide other ancillary value (e.g. write better harnesses) because of their expertise, and then charge for that value I'm probably missin…

> The frontier AI companies are betting "the house" on them, and if they pay off they could, hypothetically, make them financially competitive. They are not betting the house, they are betting the American economy on it. When this crashes it will take everyone down.

I've been keeping my cash/stock ratio a bit higher than usual recently because I'm waiting for the bubble to burst. My "stock" side is mostly a company I work for that is riding the wave.

Re: The state of open source AI

#169

Post by [deleted] »

bel8 wrote: post #72
dosinga wrote: post #35

> Mozilla exists because one company tried to own the front door to the web, and an open community rose up to make sure it never could. I'd say that the front door to the web is pretty much owned by Google and Apple at this point given Firefox current marketshare. And maybe that's enough, maybe a future where a low percentage of open models keep the rest of the system honest but that doesn't seem the argument of this…

Mozilla exists because Google gives them billions to keep Google as default search engine.

[deleted]

Re: The state of open source AI

#170

Post by bilbo0s »

mrandish wrote: post #164
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?

> releasing them for 'free' is a powerful geopolitical weapon... I agree that, currently, the Chinese govt is not only allowing but tacitly encouraging open weight model releases. However, I don't see it as an attack. I think it's more of a strategic delaying move to slow the revenue to frontier models while China works to catch up. This strategy will likely change over time. > Will the West make open models illegal?…

In the U.S. this seems highly unlikely

Aren't these the same guys who won't even let us have Chinese cars?

I'm not as confident as you that they will keep allowing us access to technology as strategic as AI models out of China and elsewhere that undercut US models in the market.

To everyone reading, download open models from anywhere as soon as they are released. You really have no guarantee at all that access to those models won't be cut off in the future with the stroke of a President's pen. Those downloads are your insurance policy. You'll always be able to access whatever you've already downloaded.

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