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Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

nytimes.com

21–30 of 293 posts

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#21
post #5

How is the NYT's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI going and why have you abandoned your start witness Suchir Balaji? Have you been brought into line? Open source AI also violates copyrights.

Most open source fans are also hostile to copyrights existence and are openly IP abolitionists. As such, they collectively respond with "good." This is actual communism, and the fact that Bernie Sanders and every other member of the DSA isn't actively fighting for open source and is often fighting against all AI shows how fake their purported movements are and have always been.

Anti-capitalism does not automatically qualify as communism. Notably, if IP were to be abolished, it doesn't belong to anyone. The expectation that open anything includes some sort of DRM-like content gating is counterproductive.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#23
post #7

> Some U.S. firms remain reluctant to use Chinese A.I. models because of concerns over regulation and data privacy. AT&T researches Chinese models but is not using them, Mr. Markus said. Instead, it is working with popular alternatives made by American companies such as the Gemma A.I. model from Google and the Llama A.I. models from Meta. This makes sense since corporations require legal certainty, and using an open…

The current U.S. regime is also replacing some amount of that legal certainty with regime fealty. Picking Chinese options over American ones probably runs a risk of upsetting their leader. I've got to imagine American companies are weighing this factor in their decisions.

That's certainly one factor, yes. But even before getting to that part I think the bigger issues for Big Corp legal teams is mostly around the legal ambiguity of the models themselves. What representations are made about the training data? What jurisdiction governs the license? If somebody alleges that the model infringes their IP, what rights does AT&T have?

Counterparty risk is a lot more straight-forward to evaluate when dealing entirely within the US, with US companies.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#24
post #5

How is the NYT's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI going and why have you abandoned your start witness Suchir Balaji? Have you been brought into line? Open source AI also violates copyrights.

Most open source fans are also hostile to copyrights existence and are openly IP abolitionists. As such, they collectively respond with "good." This is actual communism, and the fact that Bernie Sanders and every other member of the DSA isn't actively fighting for open source and is often fighting against all AI shows how fake their purported movements are and have always been.

> Most open source fans are also hostile to copyrights existence and are openly IP abolitionists.

Open source licenses are only enforceable because of copyright law. How are you going to enforce GPL3 when you have no legal authority to say what people are allowed to do with your code?

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#25
post #5

How is the NYT's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI going and why have you abandoned your start witness Suchir Balaji? Have you been brought into line? Open source AI also violates copyrights.

Most open source fans are also hostile to copyrights existence and are openly IP abolitionists. As such, they collectively respond with "good." This is actual communism, and the fact that Bernie Sanders and every other member of the DSA isn't actively fighting for open source and is often fighting against all AI shows how fake their purported movements are and have always been.

If IP were entirely abolished tomorrow with no other change to our economic system, you would still not have universal Healthcare (maybe drug prices would be lower, though), Elon Musk could still donate however much he wants to get his preferred politicians elected, fossil fuels would still be used in amounts that destroy the world, etc. Very importantly, AI would still be used to try to manipulate and control the public.

The fact they prioritize other fights more than OSS, and have a rather dim view of AI, is hardly proof that they are fake.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#26
Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical.

Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any hope at a successful IPO.

However the cold reality for both is that there is zero moat to a model anymore. It’s a pure commodity. Those selling compute and access to open models are gearing up to wipe the floor with Open AI and Anthropic.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#27
post #7

> Some U.S. firms remain reluctant to use Chinese A.I. models because of concerns over regulation and data privacy. AT&T researches Chinese models but is not using them, Mr. Markus said. Instead, it is working with popular alternatives made by American companies such as the Gemma A.I. model from Google and the Llama A.I. models from Meta. This makes sense since corporations require legal certainty, and using an open…

Exactly. See TikTok trouble as example and quite honestly, try a local open source LLM and ask it to use profanity, paint nudes - the LLM doesn’t answer the question of it is from OpenAI or Google.

The thing is that needs more attention is reverse engineered a LLM which is highly fascinating. I tried it, but it seems I am not there yet to put it mildly. It requires serious effort.

I am just speculating but can LLMs be sleepers? You write software and it seeds traces here and there under certain conditions that pose a serious security risk.

Or a kill switch?

I don’t know. I distrust Chinese LLMs but even more due to training data.

It is after all not a Western model. Different biases and the might be subtle but nevertheless substantial.

In short: no open source LLM may be usable without additional Finetuning for certain valid use cases.

The real value is versioning and autonomy as well as lot more stable answering despite model rot.

Also testing and the supporting systems are easier to maintain.

It is mainly an infrastructure challenge.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#30
post #29

I'm not seeing it. Corporate America needs someone they can sue if anything goes sideways with AI given the rate of change and legal ambiguities. It took years/decades for actual, real, open source to be widely adopted in corporations for the same reasons.

Corporate America has been using open source for decades, and it wasn’t anywhere as slow as you portray. This argument simply doesn’t hold water.

Besides, in their present rather dire financial state there isn’t much to sue these companies for anyway cash wise. NYTimes is suing on IP grounds.

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