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Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

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Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#11

Post by moffkalast »

leetharris wrote: post #5
jsheard wrote: post #2

Decentralized inferencing perhaps, but the training is very much centralized around Metas continued willingness to burn obscene amounts of money. The open source community simply can't afford to pick up the torch if Meta stops releasing free models.

There's plenty of open source AI out there that isn't Meta. It's just not as good. The #1 problem is not compute, but data and the manpower required to clean that data up. The main thing you can do is support companies and groups who are releasing open source models. They are usually using their own data.

https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb

The #1 problem is absolutely compute. People barely get funding for fine tunes, and even if you physically buy the GPUs it'll cost you in power consumption.

That said, good data is definitely the #2 problem. But nowadays you can just get good synthetic datasets from calling closed model APIs or just using existing local LLMs to sift through trash. That'll cost you too.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#12

Post by nis0s »

I like the idea of this! But is there any reason to be concerned about walled gardens in this case, like how Apple does with its iOS ecosystem? For example, what if access to model weights could be revoked.

There is a lot of interest in regulating open source AI, but many sources of criticism miss the point that open source AI helps democratize access to technologies. It worries me that Meta is proposing an open source and decentralized future because how does that serve their company? Or is there some hope of creating a captive audience? I hate to be a pessimist or cynic, but just wondering out loud, haha. I am happy to be proven wrong.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#13

Post by riku_iki »

Qshdg wrote: post #6

Great, who gives me $500,000,000, Nvidia connections to actually get graphics cards and a legal team to protect against copyright lawsuits from the entities whose IP was stolen for training? Then I can go ahead and train my open source model.

you can pick existing pretrained foundational model from corp (google, MS, Meta) and then finetune it(much cheaper) with your innovative ideas.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#15

Post by citboin »

leetharris wrote: post #5
jsheard wrote: post #2

Decentralized inferencing perhaps, but the training is very much centralized around Metas continued willingness to burn obscene amounts of money. The open source community simply can't afford to pick up the torch if Meta stops releasing free models.

There's plenty of open source AI out there that isn't Meta. It's just not as good. The #1 problem is not compute, but data and the manpower required to clean that data up. The main thing you can do is support companies and groups who are releasing open source models. They are usually using their own data.

>The main thing you can do is support companies and groups who are releasing open source models. They are usually using their own data.

Alternatively we could create standardized open source training data like wikipedia, wikimedia as well as public domain literature and open courseware. I'm sure that there are many other such free and legal sources of data.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#17

Post by cynicalpeace »

jsheard wrote: post #2

Decentralized inferencing perhaps, but the training is very much centralized around Metas continued willingness to burn obscene amounts of money. The open source community simply can't afford to pick up the torch if Meta stops releasing free models.

One area that's interesting, but easy to dismiss because it's the ultimate cross-section of hype (AI and crypto) is bittensor.

AFAICT it decentralizes the training of these models by giving you an incentive to train models which will mine the crypto if you're improving it.

I learned about it years ago, mined some crypto, lost the keys and now kicking myself cuz I would've made a pretty penny lol

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#18

Post by jsheard »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #17
jsheard wrote: post #2

Decentralized inferencing perhaps, but the training is very much centralized around Metas continued willingness to burn obscene amounts of money. The open source community simply can't afford to pick up the torch if Meta stops releasing free models.

One area that's interesting, but easy to dismiss because it's the ultimate cross-section of hype (AI and crypto) is bittensor. AFAICT it decentralizes the training of these models by giving you an incentive to train models which will mine the crypto if you're improving it. I learned about it years ago, mined some crypto, lost the keys and now kicking myself cuz I would've made a pretty penny lol

Does it actually work? AIUI the current consensus is that you need massive interconnect bandwidth to train big models efficiently, and the internet is nowhere near that. I'm sure the Nvidia DGX boxes have 10x400Gb NICs for a reason.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#19

Post by cynicalpeace »

jsheard wrote: post #18
cynicalpeace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One area that's interesting, but easy to dismiss because it's the ultimate cross-section of hype (AI and crypto) is bittensor. AFAICT it decentralizes the training of these models by giving you an incentive to train models which will mine the crypto if you're improving it. I learned about it years ago, mined some crypto, lost the keys and now kicking myself cuz I would've made a pretty penny lol

Does it actually work? AIUI the current consensus is that you need massive interconnect bandwidth to train big models efficiently, and the internet is nowhere near that. I'm sure the Nvidia DGX boxes have 10x400Gb NICs for a reason.

I have no idea. The idea is certainly interesting but I've never actually understood how to run inference on these models... the people that run it seem to be unable to just talk simply.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#20

Post by naming_the_user »

hyuuu wrote: post #16

the view of the comments here seems to be quite negative for what meta is doing. Honest question, should they go to the route of openai and closed source + paid access instead? OpenAI or Claude seem to garner more positive views than llama open sourced.

The models are not open source, you're getting the equivalent of a precompiled binary. They are free to use.
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