Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment • Hacker News Board

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#61

Post by singingtoday » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

honkycat wrote: post #20

netdur wrote: post #10

why would any software want to have Kubernetes moment? can't count how devop I know that is confused by it

Recently my company bought another company, and we kept zero of the original engineers, we just had to run the ghost ship. We walked in, and it was fine. Because it was all kubernetes and laid out like every other app for the most part. The kube hate is just sad at this point. You need to know like 15 concepts that are all applied in the same way. It mostly just works.

I ported my company over to k8s to solve a concurrency and scaling issues.

What 15 concepts? You're making me worry that I missed something. It was straight forward: pods, nodes, hw type, lifecycle, deployment. They run almost the same docker as the old ec2s used.

What did I miss? Is there something important I need to read?

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#62

Post by danny_codes » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

kalu wrote: post #56

The sentiment in this article is nice. But open source software is a weak analogy for frontier models. Principally because software requires zero capital investment (actually zero) while frontier models demand billions. Open models can only survive in the long run if they can (eventually) generate significant cash flows or if they are paid for by governments. Now China essentially has a monopoly on open weight models…

Hilariously bad take. Open weight models can be retrained of fine-tuned, that's the entire point. The idea that the "Chinese government controls your intelligence" is laughable in the case of open weight models. Once the weights are released you can do whatever you want with them. The idea that there's economic capture by the Chinese for products they're literally giving away is stupid to the point of inanity.

I can only assume this account is pure shilling for the closed-source AI labs.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#63

Post by singingtoday » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

eigenspace wrote: post #45

jumpkick wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are weights stolen from the frontier model developers? What is that actual mechanism?

The weights themselves aren't stolen. The claim is that Chinese companies are using VPNs and proxies to buy massive amounts of Claude Pro and Codex subscription accounts, and then selling usage on those subscriptions as cheap white-label LLM API usage. While selling that LLM API usage, they then capture all the prompts, outputs, and intermediate thinking the LLM does, and then sell those logs to the companies making…

Fantastic, thank you for the explanation!

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#64

Post by RussianCow » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #27

spicyusername wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You... don't know what Kubernetes is... pretty impressive, honestly. Its 2026 and its the de facto method of deploying software basically everywhere. You gotta really work for it to not know what its for by now.

2026 is the year for vercel and Render.

I haven't used them but aren't they basically modernized Heroku? What's different?

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#65

Post by singingtoday » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

noncoml wrote: post #58

kalu wrote: post #56

The sentiment in this article is nice. But open source software is a weak analogy for frontier models. Principally because software requires zero capital investment (actually zero) while frontier models demand billions. Open models can only survive in the long run if they can (eventually) generate significant cash flows or if they are paid for by governments. Now China essentially has a monopoly on open weight models…

Open Source is free as in speech Open Weights is free as in beer

Ah, a true scholar!

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#66

Post by RussianCow » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

honkycat wrote: post #21

Pxtl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's for running a massive number of docker containers and automatically managing them and scaling them up and down on demand. It is also so famously brutally complex that basically you need a dedicated Kube expert to handle it.

to be fair, at any large scale you need infra people.

The problem is that companies tend to exaggerate their own scale and think they need k8s and dedicated infra people when they could get by with a handful of beefy VMs or dedicated servers.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#67

Post by pianopatrick » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

kalu wrote: post #56

The sentiment in this article is nice. But open source software is a weak analogy for frontier models. Principally because software requires zero capital investment (actually zero) while frontier models demand billions. Open models can only survive in the long run if they can (eventually) generate significant cash flows or if they are paid for by governments. Now China essentially has a monopoly on open weight models…

"Open source" open models can also survive if they are seen as a necessary cost of doing business. Same logic as tech companies working together on Linux. "We need an operating system. But an operating system is expensive to make on our own and does not really provide an edge. So let's just work on and use the open source one."

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#68

Post by petilon » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #49

eigenspace wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weights themselves aren't stolen. The claim is that Chinese companies are using VPNs and proxies to buy massive amounts of Claude Pro and Codex subscription accounts, and then selling usage on those subscriptions as cheap white-label LLM API usage. While selling that LLM API usage, they then capture all the prompts, outputs, and intermediate thinking the LLM does, and then sell those logs to the companies making…

...good for them? We used to call that competition. Imagine making this argument with a straight face in any other industry: "The claim is that Japanese car companies are buying Ford vehicles, and then leasing them to American consumers at cut-rate prices. In return for the cheap cars, the customers are letting the Japanese observe their driving behavior, studying how they use their F-150 and then the Japanese car co…

> observe their driving behavior

That's not what they are observing, it is the behavior of the engines.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#69

Post by airstrike » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #16

Is anyone using open weight models for agentic coding? What is your stack (harness, model) and how much do you pay per month? How would you compare your experience to a typical subsidized plan like Claude Code + Pro plan? I’m asking because i keep hearing that open weight models are cheap and efficient - is that really the case in practice?

> I’m asking because i keep hearing that open weight models are cheap and efficient - is that really the case in practice?

I think that's the case for people who compare it to proprietary models paid via API—which I think is irrelevant given the majority of people daily driving AI coding are doing on a subscription plan.

The better analysis then is not about AI coding, since there's no subscription plan for Kimi K3.

Instead, compare the cost of running some agentic _task_ that isn't coding which can only be done via API. Think of all the startups wrapping around ChatGPT and Claude to provide some additional set of tools, context, data and hoping to turn it into a profitable service.

To those companies, which are many, open models are the difference between the math working out today vs. praygeing they can scale fast enough to find profitability.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#70

Post by mjhay » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #53

ncallaway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government backed monopoly to ensure that supply remains artificially restricted to ensure that the market will support the higher prices is

Drug companies have a portfolio of compounds they research. Most don’t pay off, so R&D costs make their way into the pricing of those superstar and other drugs that do work. Also, timelines are pretty long.

Drug companies spend more on marketing than R&D