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The state of open source AI

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Re: The state of open source AI

#251

Post by dmarcos »

pdimitar wrote: post #249
dmarcos wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All countries see AI as a geopolitical concern. An open source strategy is smart. It’s effective and also builds good will / soft power. Many see Chinese AI companies as the good guys and root for them. I’m pro open source and also celebrate but still aware this is most likely just the means to an end. I used to work at Mozilla. I think we are missing a player in the market with a more principled open source approach…

And who might that be, I wonder? The company that seems more worried about executive bonuses than to adhere to its mission, for at least a decade now? Perhaps a certain one whose name starts with M and ends with ozilla? Purely random thought, of course.

I don’t know. thinking machines perhaps?

A lot of things have to come together: talent, capital that is not looking to maximize returns, ambition to compete in the marketplace. At peak Mozilla it was clear to everyone that we needed an undeniably successful product to be able to influence the market. Advocacy alone is not very effective.

Re: The state of open source AI

#252

Post by akrolsmir »

andymatuschak wrote: post #241

The prose is, of course, LLM-generated. https://www.pangram.com/history/29a71663-e6b2-4db6-87bd-b943... I'd be curious to learn more about how/why executives come to sign their names to this kind of writing. Maybe it feels like a natural iteration of the pre-existing experience of signing one's name to an assistant's manuscript, or a press release from staff in Comms? I don't know execs who do this kind of thing, so…

Agreed re: automatically running Pangram, maybe once the articles hit some vote threshold (or just, frontpage) in case cost is a concern.

I think aggregators running AI checks automatically seems quite good, rather than individual readers all doing it on their own sporadically. We recently implemented auto Pangram checks on Manifund, and I think LessWrong has done this for a while now.

Re: The state of open source AI

#253

Post by pdimitar »

dmarcos wrote: post #251
pdimitar wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who might that be, I wonder? The company that seems more worried about executive bonuses than to adhere to its mission, for at least a decade now? Perhaps a certain one whose name starts with M and ends with ozilla? Purely random thought, of course.

I don’t know. thinking machines perhaps? A lot of things have to come together: talent, capital that is not looking to maximize returns, ambition to compete in the marketplace. At peak Mozilla it was clear to everyone that we needed an undeniably successful product to be able to influence the market. Advocacy alone is not very effective.

Definitely. Sadly "capital that is not looking to maximize returns" is a very tall order in the last 20+ years.

Re: The state of open source AI

#254

Post by mossTechnician »

jjordan wrote: post #125
bel8 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you think Firefox development is unsustainable without this substantial stipend?

At their current trajectory, absolutely. But if they focused their development efforts, cut down on careless spending especially to third parties, and looked for alternative sources of funding (it is presently not possible for users to donate to Firefox development, for example), I feel like they could survive without Google for at least a little while. Frankly, I think these things should be started on now, while they still have Google's backing.

Re: The state of open source AI

#255

Post by pclowes »

eitally wrote: post #218
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 think this is possibly true, but the other piece of the equation is tooling. Right now, Anthropic has by far the best tooling around (for both SWEs and non-technical users), and a huge ecosystem of integrated ISVs. I'm not suggesting it will happen, but if Anthropic decided to provide options of using models beyond Claude, they'd still have a significant moat.

I dont know. The tooling feels trivial. I swapped from claude to codex and back with zero friction. If they were very expensive to me personally I would probably just use them to build the harness and then plug Kimi into it etc.

Re: The state of open source AI

#256

Post by yetanotherjosh »

GuB-42 wrote: post #113
Catloafdev wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

Olmo 3? K2 V2? There are definitely LLMs with very compelling capabilities where the dataset, training process, and final weights are all open. There are also initiatives in the EU and various national government levels (e.g. Switzerland) to develop LLMs in an open and transparent way, not just "open weights."

Re: The state of open source AI

#257

Post by root_axis »

tanseydavid wrote: post #152
bigyabai wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But how many years do you guess? I personally do not think it will take even 10 years for the situation to be commonplace.

IMO it won't be possible for the foreseeable future. There's essentially zero possibility that phones will gain the hardware capacity to run today's Kimi, so the only other alternative is to squeeze the power of today's Kimi into something that can fit on a smartphone, which also seems fairly unlikely considering the current rate of progress.

Re: The state of open source AI

#258

Post by yetanotherjosh »

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.

I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. There are projects to train competent modern LLMs in which the entire pipeline (data, training process, final weights) is all completely transparent, shared, and reproducible by anyone with the compute to try it out.

Or is your definition of "open source" mean that a small indie dev should be able to reproduce the entire pipeline? Because that would disqualify more than just LLMs, but also hardware platforms like Arduino where you need to pay for manufacturing to get the underlying stuff built... is Arduino "open source?"

Re: The state of open source AI

#259

Post by JoeAltmaier »

root_axis wrote: post #257
tanseydavid wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But how many years do you guess? I personally do not think it will take even 10 years for the situation to be commonplace. IMO it won't be possible for the foreseeable future. There's essentially zero possibility that phones will gain the hardware capacity to run today's Kimi, so the only other alternative is to squeeze the power of today's Kimi into something that can fit on a smartphone, which also seems fairly u…

A bold prediction. Phones have gigabytes today. There are famous laws of growth that put terabytes at just a few years away - perhaps 10 isn't too bad an estimate?

Re: The state of open source AI

#260

Post by root_axis »

apitman wrote: post #172
program_whiz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Helping people write word docs, recipes, and emails isn't going to justify $15K per month subscriptions either. Those things can all be done today on a $250 used video card and pennies of electricity

Not really. Models that can run on a $250 card may be able to produce a decent word doc sometimes, but the fidelity of such models is so poor that it's no longer very attractive for general use on those types of tasks.
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