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U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

genesisopenmodels.anl.gov

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Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#101

Post by ericmay »

dgellow wrote: post #92
boc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese open weight models are great for this turn, but American private models generate orders of magnitude more cashflow. This cashflow = investment in training future models. It's unclear how Chinese open weight companies are going to compete in future rounds if they can't raise the same capital for training runs. The American business model is exceedingly efficient at building large businesses from zero. I wouldn…

It’s unclear where American labs future capital will come from. They pretty much exhausted private options at that point and it’s not clear how successful an ipo would be at the current time

> It’s unclear where American labs future capital will come from.

It’s unclear to you, perhaps? But they’ll raise funds and/or debt as needed in the US capital markets as they have been doing.

> They pretty much exhausted private options at that point

I don’t think this is true. The evidence is that they keep raising funding for build.

> it’s not clear how successful an ipo would be at the current time

It’s always unclear, but also IPO success doesn’t necessarily translate into long term business success.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#102

Post by frumiousirc »

rsfern wrote: post #99
Alien1Being wrote: post #85

Would you trust a LLM produced by Trump's government employees from Trump's dystopic America ?

Let’s distinguish a bit. There are political appointees (Trump’s government employees as you say) who are mostly upper management, and there are career civil servants (all the government scientists are under this category) who have a strong culture of apolitical dedication to the mission of their agency and to the American people and Constitution, regardless of who the current president is. And in the DOE labs in par…

> and there are career civil servants (all the government scientists are under this category)

US national lab scientists are not even civil servants. The labs themselves are run by a corporation under contract to the DOE and the scientists work for that corp. The managing corporation changes from time to time and the scientists transparently start working for whatever assumes the replacement. The land, the hardware, the buildings and any physical products are owned by the US gov't. To a very large extent, the intellectual output is set free to the world in the form of papers, presentations and to some small extent (eg compared to CERN) in the form of software.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#103

Post by frumiousirc »

There's no mention of "LLM" nor "language". It does mention "foundation model" which includes LLMs but that also includes non-LLM architectures and non-text data. Many of the Genesis Initiative proposals answer "foundation model" call with non-LLM systems. All the FM's I know about currently in this sphere are non-LLMs. The "about gs1" page also does not mention "LLM" but does talk more about agentic harness and workflows. That description certainly sounds LLM'ish but describes a more rich system. I don't mean to suggest that LLMs will not be part of these "genesis open models" but as described, this will not result in a replacement for the "claude" or "codex" commands.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#105

Post by embedding-shape »

CMay wrote: post #79
firasd wrote: post #8

Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess? Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0 But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC

LiquidAI LFM models are amazing, but very situational. IBM Granite series are also unique and interesting for trying to reduce liability and extend local context size. Nvidia ships some and there was also that Inkling model recently. Poolside just released theirs. Meta might release something this year. X AI's Grok is still due to release a model, if Elon keeps to his word even if they only release a distilled versio…

> but it's more like we're being careful

What? US laboratories are currently unable to contain their agents while doing security testing, and besides that, time and time again US labs seem to put short-term money above long-term safety.

Wasn't that literally why they tried to oust Altman from OpenAI, as he basically was 100% focused on profits and tried to cut down on safety across the board and lied to get his way?

> If you host a model in China, it has to be censored and downloading any models requires you to provide your identity.

I'm not disagreeing with that first part (obviously that's about inference hosting, not creating/training weights or hosting those weights), but the second part I'm not so sure about. AFAIK, ModelScope (which is the Huggingface in China) seems to allow downloads without verifying any identity and also hosts a bunch of abliterated weights.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#106

Post by s1artibartfast »

anon373839 wrote: post #63
dmix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because it's generally a bad idea for government to try to compete with a brand new tech industry with hundreds of billions in private capital developing commercial models. If the American private industry does actually wash out vs Chinese open models there might be talent available for them to put money into, so maybe they are just preparing for that scenario in the meantime.

Commoditizing AI models serves the interests of just about everybody except for a relative handful of people in San Francisco. The more decentralized control of the technology is, the more its benefits can be realized by businesses and individuals rather than becoming a black hole of monopolistic rent seeking.

Sure, but it shouldn't be government operating on the frontier of new technology

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#107

Post by petcat »

firasd wrote: post #8

Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess? Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0 But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC

Not only are there many American open weight models as others have mentioned, but Americans are the only ones doing actual open source models [0]. Not just distributing binary blobs and calling them "open".

[0] https://allenai.org/

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#108

Post by Robdel12 »

firasd wrote: post #8

Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess? Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0 But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC

Poolside.ai as well

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#109

Post by anon373839 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #106
anon373839 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commoditizing AI models serves the interests of just about everybody except for a relative handful of people in San Francisco. The more decentralized control of the technology is, the more its benefits can be realized by businesses and individuals rather than becoming a black hole of monopolistic rent seeking.

Sure, but it shouldn't be government operating on the frontier of new technology

I don’t quite understand what the argument is. Government does as a matter of fact operate on the frontier of new technology. (It’s how we got the web.) Why shouldn’t it, exactly?

Also, the US has been involved in AI research since the 1940s. So it’s not exactly a new thing.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#110

Post by solenoid0937 »

Laurel1234 wrote: post #89
no-name-here wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the FUD happening from 1 frontier lab?

He's referring to weirdo freak Dario's school shooter manfiesto tier ramblings on open weights I imagine.

Dario doesn't have a problem with open weights, he just thinks that open weights should be tested prior to release so you aren't giving everyone a zero-day button or a "make a virus" button.

That's it. That's the whole stance. Most sane normal people agree with this stance, the techno-libertarian crowd find it egregiously offensive.

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