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

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#191

Post by honkycat » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

RussianCow wrote: post #66

honkycat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you could use hosted k8s and be future proof.

I would take a kube cluster over a bunch of VMs I have to hand wire: wire releasing to, managing processes, restarting crashed processes, log aggregation, load balancing, networking, secret injection, cert management, DNS management, monitoring, etc... Any day of the week.

You just don't know what you're talking about, sorry. Kube is really easy now.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#192

Post by andriy_koval » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:03 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #185

amarant wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's just the thing with open weights: you're not doing any business with company that made the model. They might publish the weights to a, say, European host, and then you download the model from Europe and and run it on your servers in America, and suddenly it's very hard to tell where the model was originally created.

Yep, add a few blank layers, fine tune it a tiny bit and the weight checksums nor parameter counts won't match with anything, while the model will be practically the exact same. Time and time again random startups have tried passing established open models as their own. "You made this? I made this." Of course a conspicuous architecture would still give it away.

someone can run tests and see that models output exactly the same results, and then you are open to criminal investigation.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#193

Post by Geezus_42 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

octopoc wrote: post #100

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

Without temporary monopolies granted by patents, those prescription medications wouldn’t exist in the first place.

Salk didn't need that temporary monopoly to invent the polio vaccine, which has gone on to be one of the biggest success stories of vaccines and modern medicine general.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#194

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #84

spwa4 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as per usual it's silicon valley misunderstanding economics. AI is HPC. And how the HPC market worked before: If you're the best performing "computing cluster" (ie. whatever you call the entity that can complete a massive calculation), you get a blank check from Congress. Why? Because you need those calculations to "pump" nuclear weapons. They are needed to calculate both the geometry to make fusion bombs pos…

> Because you need those calculations to "pump" nuclear weapons. They are needed to calculate both the geometry to make fusion bombs possible at all and to calculate the effect of a given geometry. They are the reason US/Russia/China have the biggest and strongest weapons known to humanity. We have a couple new nuclear weapon designs, but not really going for bigger or stronger. Just packaging. We built the big power…

[deleted]

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#195

Post by stefan_ » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

drnick1 wrote: post #146

> American labs need to release frontier-grade open-weight models under licenses that startups can actually build on. To be fair, OpenAI has released a couple of (then very good) OSS models. I run the 20B version at home and it is excellent for reviewing text and common tasks like drafting bash scripts. There is a larger 120B that you can't realistically run on consumer hardware at reasonable tok/s too. I wish OpenAI…

"We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. [..] one thing we'd like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally [..]. In general, we think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models, and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded." - Sam Altman emails OpenAI board, 2.5 years after GPT-3

Chinese release open models to drive the state of the art, OpenAI and crooked Sam do it to keep you down.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#196

Post by clhodapp » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

andriy_koval wrote: post #192

moffkalast wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, add a few blank layers, fine tune it a tiny bit and the weight checksums nor parameter counts won't match with anything, while the model will be practically the exact same. Time and time again random startups have tried passing established open models as their own. "You made this? I made this." Of course a conspicuous architecture would still give it away.

someone can run tests and see that models output exactly the same results, and then you are open to criminal investigation.

Models don't even agree with themselves in terms of returning identical results

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#197

Post by appplication » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

hackeraccount wrote: post #188

theshrike79 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would ”who won the 2020 election” be a similar canary for American models?

No. There are questions you can ask but that's not it. Don't be political in a way that's toxic to half the country - be political in a way that's toxic to the entire country. I'll leave what those lines of inquiry would be as an open exercise.

It’s funny how asking “who won the 2012 election” and “who won the 2016 election” are not political but suddenly “who won the 2020 election” is. I think that should tell you whoever takes an easily verifiable fact and argues that it is “political” is a raging idiot.

That said, I truly don’t mean that disparagingly. I just mean literally it’s right up there with flat earthers. There is a very low bar for critical thought you have to fail to meet to take a fact and argue it’s actually a belief.

Now, if you did want to get reasonably political you could argue why the candidate who won was good or bad, but there was very clearly only one person who sat in office for the four following years. It is not disputable.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#198

Post by wyrdcurt » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

andriy_koval wrote: post #192

moffkalast wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, add a few blank layers, fine tune it a tiny bit and the weight checksums nor parameter counts won't match with anything, while the model will be practically the exact same. Time and time again random startups have tried passing established open models as their own. "You made this? I made this." Of course a conspicuous architecture would still give it away.

someone can run tests and see that models output exactly the same results, and then you are open to criminal investigation.

Except that even the exact same model won't output the exact same results, that's a fundamental aspect of how LLMs work. They're probabilistic/stochastic, not deterministic.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#199

Post by xprnio » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

andriy_koval wrote: post #192

moffkalast wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, add a few blank layers, fine tune it a tiny bit and the weight checksums nor parameter counts won't match with anything, while the model will be practically the exact same. Time and time again random startups have tried passing established open models as their own. "You made this? I made this." Of course a conspicuous architecture would still give it away.

someone can run tests and see that models output exactly the same results, and then you are open to criminal investigation.

On something that is inherently non-deterministic? Something which is also to a great extent distilled from other frontier models, meaning it has the possibility to generate similar outputs to those meaning that just pattern detection might also not be as effective? Easier to ban everything that’s open, than try to figure out which one of them is Chinese

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#200

Post by distantviewer » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

thisoneisreal wrote: post #123

sschueller wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Model-on-Chip is coming. GPU are for general computing but have a huge bottle neck for doing model inference. Even not being able to significantly update a model that is burned on a chip the performance gains are immense. You also don't need the latest chip fabs to make them drastically reducing the cost.

One thought I had is that you could use FPGAs to get hardware performance but maintain the ability to dynamically update. I don't know enough about hardware to consider trying such a thing but I'm curious if that could be made practical and economical somehow.

Probably not for 2-3 decades unfortunately. The largest FPGAs in the world come out around ~10 million cells (the programmable component of an FPGA). GPT-2 is 1600 million parameters, Qwen 3.5's smallest model is 800 Million parameters.