Live data from Hacker News

Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

nytimes.com

211–220 of 291 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really answer the question. What they do internally for training the next model is a separate issue. I'm talking about the models they offer publicly. Per the article, companies are dropping OpenAI+Anthropic (partly) because of costs. If distilling is so simple and easy, why doesn't OpenAI take this "quick shortcut" and serve a self-distilled model externally, so they can charge reasonable prices and sto…

Anthropic, OpenAI, GDM, and Meta spend more on training than other labs by an order of magnitude. If they felt safe reducing this spend they would. These labs fear getting outcompeted.

Again, I am talking about inference, not training. Please read.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly true, I get annoyed by Claude one day and switch to something else, and the only thing that's ever keeping me tied towards Claude is the ability to search my old chats easily. But Claude also makes it really hard to do that, so what am I even really paying for? Time to extract all my data, put it into a sqlite with FTS5 and make sure I never rely on the overly-opinionated, low-thinking PMs from these…

Just use a proxy and log everything.

A proxy only catches stuff going forward and it doesn't provide me chat search and chat viewing.

What I'm doing instead: syncing coding agent sessions to a central backup location, and for cloud LLM chat providers I'm occasionally exporting data.

Still need something to automate that syncing, and provide search and viewing.

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

#213
post #3

I'd love to! For real coding though, SOTA models barely get the job done. It wasn't until Opus 4.5 that you could really get decent results. I'm sure this will change (and I can't wait for it!) but as of today, open models might be fine for summarizing and writing docs, but you need SOTA to work on code if you want to be competitive.

You're not corporate America (and trust me, I mostly mean that as a plus). I also work in software, and while I vaguely disagree that open models can't be used (they absolutely fit into productive niches here, and holy hell are the last generation [ex laguna s1, kimi k3, glm 5.3, etc] actually decent) - I will agree that SOTA are a better fit for software development, especially when used in conjunction with an alrea…

Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux kernel team said recently in a talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MwMLPmMccs) running open models locally is already good enough for finding Linux kernel bugs and generating patches to fix them. He said that the false positive rate he's encountering was only one third to one quarter IIRC. He doesn't provide any details but it didn't sound like he was running some kind of huge server or something either, just a desktop workstation of some sort.

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

#215
post #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.

it holds all the water, to this very day using open source in my client's projects requires approval from legal.

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

#216
Open source does not apply to AI and we should discourage anyone from using that term. All the models are opaque and proprietary. You cannot go into any source code and fix bugs, or add features, or study it to learn more. It's not the same thing at all as open source software.

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

#217

The amount of downtime the big AI companies are showing doesn't help. Do you want your company's sales and customer service to shut down every time OpenAI or Anthropic goes down?

This is a prescient concern and it all came about due to the initial export controls placed on Fable on a Friday afternoon with zero warning. It was partly Anthropic’s fault though. Engaging in criti-hype by going on an advertising blitz explaining how their new model is some kind of genius super hacker didn’t help their case.

Nevertheless, it happened. The problem is that businesses demand stability. Building an application, service, or business process around an API that can be turned off whenever a government demands represents an unacceptable risk.

It’s not a mental exercise when it has already happened once before and likely will happen again. If you control the weights and invest in your own hardware to run them (or rent it from a cloud provider), that risk can be mitigated.

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

#218

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 finan…

How does this compare to being beholden to a single cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud?

Has there been a sea change in how investors view these things in general, or is it only AI?

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

#219

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.

I’ve been using Opencode, but recently migrated to oh-my-pi and have really enjoyed it.

I’ve also had luck with copilot-cli, but find that to be more limiting and it’s only really worth using if you are paying for GitHub Copilot (or your company pays for it, as is my case).

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However the cold reality for both is that there is zero moat to a model anymore. The moat right now is a) the hardware, b) the electricity, c) the intelligence, and d) scalability. On hardware, it's very expensive to purchase anything which can provide a fraction of the performance of a subscription. Traditional accounting depreciation would imply that purchasing local hardware is a terrible financial decision. On…

Privacy is non-negotiable for corporate. Even without considering costs or country of origin, we've seen from OpenAI that claims of AI safety are worth less than the (virtual) paper they're printed on. All it takes is one incident, and all your company's internal data will start showing up in public users' chats. You can rely on a contract to prevent this, or you can guarantee it by using a locally hosted model you f…

Is this not true for everything then? All cloud services, all Internet providers, everything within M365, OneDrive and Databricks?
Post reply on HN