Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 301 posts

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

#51

Post by schopra909 »

IMO this will be a blip. There’s a lot of talk in the wake of all the Uber handwringing about token spend. Legacy enterprises want to look innovative to Wall Street without spooking them, so it’s easy to hop on the narrative and “show” that they’re innovating in a cost responsible manner.

This feels reminiscent of the big push to RAG a few years ago. And, more broadly the skunkworks projects that big companies tout in the press before they end up killing, when the operational overhead becomes too much for their liking.

Ultimately, the narrative is good for the consumer and the enterprise. It’ll mean OpenAI and anthropic will have to keep prices low. But ultimately, in the course of the next 10 years, I don’t see enterprises wanting to do this themselves. It’ll just be simpler (and eventually safer in their eyes) to send traffic to the big labs.

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

#52

Post by graemep »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #6
gflh73 wrote: 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.

Wanting to replace monopolies with competitive markets is the strangest definition of "actual communism" I have ever heard.

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

#53

Post by Phemist »

petcat wrote: post #23
Waterluvian wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 evalua…

My knowledge is a few years outdated by now, but I remember digging into this and realizing that most of the chinese open-source libs were license-washing software. E.g. PaddleOCR is licensed under Apache 2.0, a very permissive license, however its models were often-times built on/fine-tunes of less permissively licensed foundation models such as Microsoft's LayoutXLM (Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0). (Which in my laymans understanding is also a kind of viral license in that changes need to be shared back under a similar license?)

The link is annoying enough to find that I can imagine "Mea Culpa" being an effective enough strategy for businesses moving into the ML/AI field, changing their tune after they get caught, but matured their own software to stand on its own feet.

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

#54

Post by cmiles8 »

intrasight wrote: post #44
cmiles8 wrote: post #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 ho…

There are most definitely is a moat - but it works both ways. The railguards in the models create moats keeping customers out. And the cost to build a modern agentic model is in the 10 figure range and growing. This is an expensive arms race that is going to create moats.

But most commodities are the same way. It’s super expensive to drill for oil. I need oil and I’m in no position to mine my own because of the massive capital investment. But it doesn’t stop it from being a pure commodity.

I couldn’t care less which company drilled for the oil… it’s all the same to me. Models are increasingly no different.

OpenAI and Anthropic are a gas station saying “buy our gas for 10x the price!” When the world is looking at them saying it’s just gas, we’ll take the cheaper brand. We’ve tested your gas and it’s really no better than the stuff that’s 1/10th the price.

Thats why their present business plan is screwed.

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

#55

Post by iainctduncan »

The thing is, for big companies (or even small ones owned by PE, which is MOST of them), it's not just about cost. The big thing is risk.

In my experience as a tech diligence assessor for PE firms for the last 7 years, investors really, really don't like companies being beholded to single entities that they don't control. Anthropic and OpenAI have demonstrated that they are not trustworthy, or predicatable, or finanically safe, or even capable of hitting three fucking nines. Investors know they need companies to be on the AI train, but they really don't like vendor lockin to the big AI companies. Every diligence I get asked "how easily can they change models?"

I think when open models reach 80% or 90% capability (or maybe even less!) a whole lot of companies are going to say "almost as good with way less risk is a better deal".

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

#56

Post by hparadiz »

MrResearcher wrote: post #35

What IDE/extensions do you use for open-source LLMs? I tried VSCode with ollama and lm studio, and the experience is very subpar to the built-in copilot. It's not very usable.

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B

No one I know uses the built in VSCode extensions anymore. It's all TUIs now. You can use Opencode as a TUI now for local.

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

#57

Post by chrinic630 »

simianwords wrote: post #50
cmiles8 wrote: post #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 ho…

I know what happens in many big companies and not a single one is moving away from Anthropic/OpenAI/SpaceXAI. > Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble False, they have already done so many times. > 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. False, margins are higher and…

[flagged]

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

#58

Post by makapuf »

intrasight wrote: post #44
cmiles8 wrote: post #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 ho…

There are most definitely is a moat - but it works both ways. The railguards in the models create moats keeping customers out. And the cost to build a modern agentic model is in the 10 figure range and growing. This is an expensive arms race that is going to create moats.

OK but even if F1 teams are a very expensive arms race it doesn't prevent me to bike to shop cheaply. You eed to have a moat around what people need.

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

#59

Post by harrymunro »

chrinic630 wrote: post #57
simianwords wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what happens in many big companies and not a single one is moving away from Anthropic/OpenAI/SpaceXAI. > Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble False, they have already done so many times. > 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. False, margins are higher and…

[flagged]

BS - Grok 4.6 is a legit model.

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

#60

Post by throwitaway222 »

cmiles8 wrote: post #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 ho…

If companies are really doing this, then we're saying they have no problems spending tens of millions to get somewhat decent TPS and then having their employees complain they are timesliced and getting lots of timeouts because their org has 500 employees?
Post reply on HN