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Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

nytimes.com

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

#111

Post by pornel »

intrasight wrote: post #89
theseamusjames wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they're all converging on capability. Do I care if it's a 72% or 74% on SWEBench? Practically, probably not. And if I'm not paying per token locally, then if it takes a tiny bit longer to get to the result, I don't care.

Smartphones and laptops are also "converging", but Apple is always a year or two ahead so it doesn't matter. "Converging" is a meaningless term when things move quickly and cost billions to develop.

Apple would have probably lost more customers if it didn't also create a hard-to-leave lock-in ecosystem.

Lots of people use old iPhones and don't care about some "up to" benchmark bumped every year, but are stuck with iMessage contacts, their stuff in iCloud, Apple Watch or apps that are not allowed by Apple to even mention they have Android versions.

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

#113

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

r_lee wrote: post #39
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 knew that there was no real moat from the very start, I mean, these things were close enough from the very start, how could it not result in a race to the bottom, especially as you can't really prevent distillation reliably?

A race to the bottom is where you lower standards, wages, or regulations to cut costs and attract business. What's actually happening is the opposite: a race to the top. Every model is trying to get better. Simultaneously they also happen to be getting more cost effective, but it's sort of a coincidence. Companies still require very good models, but they are not picking the "absolute best at any cost" anymore, because it turns out "any cost" isn't worth it.

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

#114

Post by blmarket »

cmiles8 wrote: post #54
intrasight wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!”…

I argue there's no difference. At least OpenAI/Anthropic can be considered premium like Octane 93 while OSS ones are 87.

I agree 90% of the world can work with 87 gas, but there's always niche/luxury market where 93 can make small difference.

(edit: typo)

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

#115

Post by kittikitti »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #60
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?

I'm not sure why someone hasn't developed a company offering services that distributes AI across all idle or under-utilized VM's and PC's for enterprises in order to serve open sourced models. Outside of the electricity bill, there's no additional expenditure and you get the AI.

We've all seen the office spaces where there's 200 empty computers on a floor. Combined, it's something like 500 cores at ~3 Ghz each and around 3 TB of RAM. The networking is already there and software like exo already exists.

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

#116

Post by overfeed »

manyatoms wrote: post #96

My long term guess: A&OAI will move away from being interference providers to just training models and then licencing the models for local use

> licencing the models for local use

Who's going to be the new Bill Gates, with a vision for "a GPU cluster in every home?"

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

#117

Post by senordevnyc »

techpression wrote: post #76
simianwords wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, may I ask where you host it? Do you have trusted hosting companies that respect data privacy or do you host them yourselves?

If you use OpenAI or Anthropic trust were never a requirement in the first place.

There’s zero evidence that OpenAI or Anthropic has ever violated their enterprise agreements and trained on data they agreed not to, and that’s what these big companies care about. They don’t care that you hate Sam and Dario.

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

#118

Post by pianopatrick »

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…

Maybe open AI and Anthropic could just license their models to run on your own hardware. So a fixed cost instead of per token pricing or subscription with limits

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

#119

Post by SSLy »

pianopatrick wrote: post #118
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…

Maybe open AI and Anthropic could just license their models to run on your own hardware. So a fixed cost instead of per token pricing or subscription with limits

But think about the safety!! (/s)

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

#120

Post by jimbokun »

euroderf wrote: post #63
cmiles8 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!”…

So the business challenge is to balance sizable investments and relatively small marginal costs. Not so different from other digital goods.

With other digital goods the distribution and operating costs have been essentially free. No business worried that much about the cost of running Microsoft Office on the PCs they already distributed to their employees. They were only concerned about the licensing costs. And Microsoft didn't worry about the cost of printing CDs or the costs of serving Office online. It wasn't zero, but again negligible compared to the cost of development and the licensing costs.

For LLMs the costs of training and inference are a very significant part of the overall costs.

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