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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

#121
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 un…

Obviously to me, I express things from my point of view.

Raising too much from debt is a bit dangerous if you plan to go public relatively soon and don’t have a good story for it (I don’t believe they have one). You can continue raising from VCs, but at some point the valuation and dilution starts to become a real issue, and will make your ipo even more difficult. Their options are pretty much limited to raising money from hyperscalers (with required compute spending, so more circular funding), which is what they are doing, but you cannot do that infinitely without having a good story to tell Microsoft/Google/Amazon investors. The market is more skeptical than it was a few months ago, I’m not convinced you can do that for years to come

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI's annual profit is $0,000,000,000,000

Expecting profit during hypergrowth is silly

OpenAI's hypergrowth year was 2023, they have steadily been losing market share over the past year while taking record losses.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think I found the item the grandparent commenter was presumably referring to - "Our position on open-weights models", posted by Amodei and dated July 27, 2026 - which includes:

> some people have even accused Anthropic of wanting to ban open-weights models as a means of protecting our business. Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure, but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: *Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.*

However, as you said, it also says "All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing."

https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American attitude is generally to let private companies build up a new industry so it can create jobs and pay taxes. However, in the LLM race, the Chinese open weight playbook pretty much killed that. China has basically commoditized LLMs. Chinese models are good enough, so the race has come down to who can offer the cheapest tokens.

> China has basically commoditized LLMs What do you mean by "basically"? Why are Anthropic's and OpenAI's annualized revenue about $50B each? LLMs need massive amounts of compute to compete, so I wouldn't claim that the great (and leading, and likely to continue to lead) LLMs are commodities end-to-end , even if the non-executing-at-scale LLMs files and IP are commoditized. The execute, the compute, that is what brea…

> Why are Anthropic's and OpenAI's annualized revenue about $50B each?

I too can have $50B revenues by selling dollars for 50 cents each, and in the process I'll make a smaller loss than they do.

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

#125
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's difficult to tell if you are for or against access to open weight models as a general rule, so I am curious to hear your opinion on this. Personally, I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny, the way the second amendment is framed today. Just as encryption has become, which we similarly had to fight for in the 90s. I also understand that…

"I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny." I don't think this kind of rhetoric about individual civil liberties is realistic any more when the next centuries belong to China, and even countries with a liberal democratic tradition are converging towards the Chinese model.

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article posted is basically entirely about that.

It's funny: you can give the link to an LLM an ask it questions about TFA without reading it, but an actual human will go out of his/her way to tell you to RTFA :')

There's no point pasting the contexts of the article into the comments here.

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

#127

I'm interested to see where they want to land performance-wise (i.e. which point they choose on the scaling curve) and the niche they want to carve. They have a decent ways to scale beyond trinity large, in paticular on posttrain/RL before they are competitive with open-weights, especially internationally. Deepseek is explicitly banned [1] at LLNL and I wouldn't be suprised if there's a blanket ban on all Chinese mod…

That's interesting a locally hosted LLM would be banned. I'm assuming locally hosted is included. Do they think it's been trained to sabotage equipment?

Locally running LLM means nothing because "open weight" models are still inscrutable.

It's like bringing a dog home from the rescue and just hoping that it doesn't have the tendency to bite kids in the face. You just can't know. All you can do is try to add some new training telling it not to bite kids.

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

#128
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to tell if you are for or against access to open weight models as a general rule, so I am curious to hear your opinion on this. Personally, I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny, the way the second amendment is framed today. Just as encryption has become, which we similarly had to fight for in the 90s. I also understand that…

"I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny." I don't think this kind of rhetoric about individual civil liberties is realistic any more when the next centuries belong to China, and even countries with a liberal democratic tradition are converging towards the Chinese model.

The thing about inalienable rights is that they are not rhetoric, they are an intrinsic recognition of rights that do not require the recognition of authority: Governments which do not respect these human rights should not be modified; not the other way around.

China is an authoritarian government and its policies have no more bearing on what people settle for than the currently socially unacceptable regime in the US.

In my opinion, if one lacks the motivation or resolve to fight for these rights, they should do so quietly and not attempt to patronize others who still stand by these rights as not being "realistic".

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

#129
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

There are a bunch of them they just don't get the attention because China has flooded the social media channels and is exceedingly good at drowning out the discourse with their benchmaxxed models.

AllenAI and IBM are two companies that release open weight models every couple of months. There are others if you look. OpenAI releases ML models on the regular (not LLMs).

The American open weight and open source AI/ML landscape is very healthy.

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