Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by unrented7977 » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #16

petcat wrote: 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.

My boss is building out local AI hosting specifically as a hedge against USGov banning access to frontier models for everyone not on the crony list.

Why play ball with a hostile government when you can host your own frontier models?

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

#292

Post by dzonga » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

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…

to me the biggest event more than deepseek launch was when zAI served their latest model on all Chinese chips.

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

#293

Post by genxy » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #292

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…

to me the biggest event more than deepseek launch was when zAI served their latest model on all Chinese chips.

Model serving is trivial, and inference is just memory bandwidth. The cost of serving will be asymptotic to flash read energy.

Having trained on your own chips, that is the impressive part.

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

#294

Post by g8oz » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

genxy wrote: post #293

dzonga wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to me the biggest event more than deepseek launch was when zAI served their latest model on all Chinese chips.

Model serving is trivial, and inference is just memory bandwidth. The cost of serving will be asymptotic to flash read energy. Having trained on your own chips, that is the impressive part.

Model serving and inference will be trivial in the long term, right now it's a real choke point. Being able to do that with domestic chips is an important win.

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

#295

Post by happycube » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

redox99 wrote: post #95

kbwal7 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think there are now open weight models that are on par with (or beating) Opus 4.5 by now (e.g. Kimi K3, GLM5.3). But yeah obviously the frontier closed source models seem to have pulled away once again, so open weight seems to be a few months behind right now (which might be too long to wait for a lot of people!).

Those two you mentioned completely demolish opus 4.5. It's not even close. I'd say they are between opus 4.8 and opus 5. And better in some tasks.

And if you run it yourself, you know it will be generally consistent with no random quality dips.

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

#296

Post by g8oz » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #159

epistasis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post-IPO I'd trust the American models far far less than the Chinese models. The most insidious advertising in the world is about to be surfaced as people use LLMs to look for product recommendations.

It's wild that people are so lost in the sauce of social media that they have no qualms handing over all their data to an authoritarian ethno state with a single ruler who appointed themselves for life with unrestricted unilateral control over every aspect of the state. And here we are calling for collapse because mom might get recommended Gain instead of Tide.

For most people around the world America is more of a threat than China. Heck for most Americans the American government is more of a threat than the Chinese government.

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

#297

Post by happycube » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #180

motbus3 wrote: post #43

I had a conversation with a large group of friends and we independently came to the conclusion that Openai/Claude does not deliver more than a open source model. It takes about the same and the quality is about the same, and this does not mean it is good

I'm just glad the dweebs who were parroting "OMG, Distillation attacks!!1!" have been empirically proven wrong, and discussion around open-weight models are more rational now.

Distilled data or no, the Chinese labs are bringing a lot of solid original work in training and inference efficiency. Deepseek's work has probably made everyone's AI cheaper to run by this point.

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

#298

Post by happycube » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

Quibblingeek wrote: post #217

Animats wrote: post #157

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 app…

Those export controls might have saved the flow of open-weight models from China. There was talk about Qwen moving away from releases... until Xi himself started promoting open weight models!

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

#299

Post by happycube » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

timterim wrote: post #214

Contrary to what is mentioned in the thread there are no seats anymore, it is all raw token usage nowadays.

... and practically nobody's got the money for Fable at API prices. with GLM 5.3 Flash being a Reasonable Opus 4.x Substitute, Anthropic's moat is effectively gone.

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

#300

Post by PhilippGille » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

krupan wrote: post #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.

> Open source does not apply to AI

Isn't that a bit overgeneralized?

There's more than weights for the Olmo models for example: https://allenai.org/olmo

Similar for Nvidia's Nemotron models IIRC.

Artificial Analysis has an "openness" ranking: [1]

[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?model-filters=open-sour...