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Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

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Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#191

Post by thewebguyd »

adrian_b wrote: post #109
austin-schick wrote: post #33

I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest. It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and t…

Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic. Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories. The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full…

> but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.

Yeah, Microsoft wants to sell Azure compute. They also want to sell their upcoming surface ultra hardware with the Nvidia chip in it. They preached hard on "unmetered intelligence" at this year's BUILD conference, went hard on local AI, and Azure Foundry, Windows Foundry Local, etc.

Copilot, both GH and M365, are also made to be model agnostic. Microsoft sells enterprise services and software, they'd prefer (I'm assuming) to not be locked in and dependent on any 1 or 2 model providers and would prefer plenty of options and competition in that space because they can just easily offer a model agnostic harness, integrated with the rest of their stack.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#192

Post by jackb4040 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #188
jackb4040 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does however totally abandon the question of making a profitable mass-market AI product upon which the scale of those investments was based.

Not entirely, if models become commodity, then Microsoft's play as an infrastructure & enterprise apps company is the better bet. They don't need to make profitable mass-market AI models, they just need the best tooling on top of any model their customers pick, remaining fully model agnostic. "AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commer…

AI services becoming a commodity by definition means that the price will hover around cost to operate. That's just what commoditization means in tech. Free, as in Google creating a free browser for no profit in order to increase the size of their ad market.

The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#193

Post by largbae »

ma2kx wrote: post #77

It would be interesting to know how many optimizations of the Chinese models were incorporated back into Claude and Codex.

I may be remembering wrong, but reasoning was first demonstrated by DeepSeek. Edit: I am indeed remembering wrong, seems o1 was first.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#194

Post by true_religion »

chasd00 wrote: post #66
pegasus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the motivations behind the paper, the fact is that they are right. It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens, and I hope it gets corrected soon. And besides, it seems to me like the ethical choice. Given how these models are, in some very real sense, mechanical plagiators, built on the generosity of creators past and present, some of them now in danger of being replaced by the mac…

well let's be clear, there's nothing open about an open-weight model. To me, "open these models up. " must mean provide all the data and supporting documentation required to reproduce the model. That would be "open". Postgres is open because you can download all the data and supporting documentation and reproduce the binary yourself. However, being able to only download a postgres binary would make it no longer open.…

It's open, with a small 'o', and no moral judgements attached to it.

1. You have the weights, so you can run the model yourself on your own hardware. 2. You have the weights, so you can do post-training and shift those weights for your own purposes. It's not the same as training the model, but for many people its fine as what we want is a quantization, or a fine tune, or to create hybrid models.

What they don't give you are the training data, and reproduction instructions but... the toolchain to create the software has never been a part of 'Open Source'.

Even though it feels like a huge loophole, it's technically open source if you deliver the source code, without having a compiler that's available so you force them to recreate the toolchain from scratch.

To me, though, a better analogy is to research science where you'll be happy when they give you the full result set they compiled even if you don't get the raw data which may have IP or privacy concerns, or their often poorly documented lab notes so you can actually reproduce.

What you want to do is run your own experiment, and get your own results... not duplicate theirs directly. Even if reproduction is your aim in science, being unable to reproduce without copious notes sometimes points out that the original experimental process must have been flawed.

LLMs have the same issue. The creation process isn't entirely well documented, and the raw data can't be released since although the company have the right to use certain sources, they can't transfer those rights to others.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#195

Post by drnick1 »

tentahedronic wrote: post #159
idiotsecant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

55k??

That is a completely normal programmer salary in many countries, Silicon valley wages are just nuts. For example in Finland 55k before taxes is pretty good for ordinary non-wizard guy who can code, if you are a junior 40k is more realistic (and finding job in the first place can be a huge chaĺlenge..).

We are talking about the U.S. here, and no, 40k or 55k are not good salaries at all. It may be OK in Europe with the lower cost of living, etc., but the price of a new car is 50k in 2026, and a basic fast food meal pretty much anywhere is well north of $10.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#197

Post by thewebguyd »

jackb4040 wrote: post #192
thewebguyd wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely, if models become commodity, then Microsoft's play as an infrastructure & enterprise apps company is the better bet. They don't need to make profitable mass-market AI models, they just need the best tooling on top of any model their customers pick, remaining fully model agnostic. "AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commer…

AI services becoming a commodity by definition means that the price will hover around cost to operate. That's just what commoditization means in tech. Free, as in Google creating a free browser for no profit in order to increase the size of their ad market. The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the…

> you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.

I do lean toward them being significantly overvalued at present. OpenAI & Anthropic's valuations assume high margin product pricing on raw intelligence itself. Even if assume the labs will start charging value-based pricing, enterprise buyers will pay that pricing to whoever saves them engineering hours to make any cheap model work inside their compliance boundary, no guarantee that's going to be OpenAI or Anthropic.

Microsoft wins either way, proprietary, expensive models or cheap commoditized inference, because they monetize the workflow on top, not the raw intelligence. I also happen to think it's everything "on top" where a lot of value lives. Plenty of non-tech enterprises and companies out there itching for a ClickOps style AI product, especially if they don't have an engineering team, that they can buy off the shelf, meets all the compliance checkboxes, and does what they need without having to build the agents and harnesses themselves with the APIs.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#198

Post by thedougd »

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #124
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVIDIA sells the tools. The more the better it is for them. Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.

"leveraging their infra" is a pretty solid play, considering the scope of investments these two companies have made thus far.

Isn’t Microsoft perpetually short on capacity?

https://windowsforum.com/threads/azure-capacity-crunch-exten...

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#199

Post by brendoelfrendo »

bee_rider wrote: post #130
petcat wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models. So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they othe…

Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.

It's all things at once. Perhaps it's incentivized the open weight strategy. It's also prompted Huawei to ramp up production of AI chips to try and create a local competitor to Nvidia. It's also also created a grey market for Nvidia chips within China.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#200

Post by lr1970 »

bhelkey wrote: post #155
lr1970 wrote: post #65

The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.

> Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon. Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication. Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)[1]. In case it changes the context of this comment, I am a Meta employee, all opinions are my own. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/mod…

> Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication. Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)

It means Google and Amazon do not care and would not voice their opposition against the government action.

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