Open source AI must win

Ya that'd be an awesome project, the only issue is how do you verify it's not being poisoned? To actually validate it would require more analysis than the training took to run. It would require a trusted network, not an open one, unless that can get solved somehow.

The first half of your comment is unnecessarily aggressive and dismissive to op.

> I am astonished on a daily basis that my Linux computer is so close to the same experience as two operating systems put out by trillion dollar companies. It even does things that those commercial alternatives don’t do.

We live in a world where you can "port" open source software to a new language (Rust) and close it up.

Linux will be ported to Rust and closed. It'll probably also be put under MIT/BSD because nobody cares anymore, but the companies will have their own internal private variants. And these will be the ones that see corporate development.

The value in open source is that it was a lot of concentrated value that was hard to copy, clone, or rip off. Now you can one shot a replacement with a few hundred bucks in tokens.

The economic value of Linux used to be billions of dollars. Soon it'll probably be closer to $0.

It's over.

> Meta “gives away” React for similar reasons: it’s more beneficial for them to have it be a standard and be able to hire people who already know it.

Nah, now you just one shot your thing. And you do it fast enough and with distribution and you win. Eventually human devs can't afford to keep competing and launching startups slower than a hyperscaler's own massively funded efforts.

This is the end of open source and the end of solo developers.

And when the ruthlessly effective models that can one shot entire business functions cost $1,000,000 per invocation. Oracle can afford to press the button to create, say, a new smartphone. But you cannot.

Just wait until devices start requiring trusted computing attestation. The ladder is going to be pulled up.

When Jensen (Nvidia) was doing interviews at his recent public talks, he was asked something along the lines of: "Why release these new laptops which are a low margin market, if your other businesses are vastly more profitable?" and his answer was basically that if they can build the coolest and best technology and push the frontier, they will do it. It's not all about making tons of money. He seemed genuinely excited about the tech.

It highlights the difference between companies like Nvidia and Anthropic to me, where one is clearly all about the money and power, and the other is doing it because they genuinely want to accelerate progress and make cool stuff as the driving factor. It's no surprise therefore, that Nvidia is the worlds largest open-source contributor to AI, with over 800 open-weight models.

Of course, these models run on Nvidia hardware, so they benefit from it as a company. But with that healthy mindset, they found a way to contribute that not only benefits everyone, but also benefits themselves.

Contrast to Anthropic, who has gone the complete opposite direction. Closed off everything, restricting everything, fearmongering progress, regulatory capture attempts, the list goes on. I mean, they won't even agree on using AGENTS.md as a standard because CLAUDE.md is free marketing for them. That's the level of disgusting greed we are dealing with...

From a game theory perspective, the cooperative strategies tend to win. As a result, Nvidia has set themselves up for a lifetime. Anthropic however, is playing a strategy of winner takes all, and they're happy to see the world and the entire AI industry collapse in the process.

> Technology is deflationary.

Not anymore! Well, if you're like Elon and already taking down the bottle of Cuatro Comas from the high shelf, the economies of scale will continue to work in your favor.

But one of the really neat things about AI is that there is no limit in sight to the scaling incentive. More compute will always get you more: more training, more inference, more parameters, more capacity to build more and better models, more spare capacity to run the slop your models have already built to generate the slop that will succeed it. Back in the dot-com days, or even the "big data" days, you wanted to scale up rapidly but there was a limit: there were only so many customers and they could only produce so much data you could only ingest so fast. In the late 90s, one of the world's most trafficked sites, ftp.cdrom.com, ran on a (single!) dual-processor Pentium Pro system. That was just serving files, and there was certainly room for more CPU oomph to provide more sophisticated services to a huge customer base. But once those customers were served, more compute, storage, and network capacity didn't buy you enough to justify the capex. That is emphatically not the case with AI, and so the incentives for the AI companies are to buy as much compute as they possibly can. What this means in practicing is pre-purchasing capacity at the semiconductor fabs to manufacture chips exclusively for you, and there's only so much of that capacity in the world. Trillion-dollar companies can easily outbid the entire consumer market, and so the incentives for the fabs are now to sell to AI companies at the expense of the consumer market. That's why you're seeing memory prices go through the roof. Modularized RAM for end-user PC builds will soon go the way of the CRT: it will cease to exist as a market product, it won't be manufactured anywhere by anyone. GPUs, CPUs, and storage will soon follow. The only devices end users will be permitted to purchase are all-in-one integrated devices, with CPU, RAM, GPU, storage, and networking either integrated in-chip or soldered on, and they will have just enough capacity to connect to the cloud services the user wants most to use. Most likely, you will be permitted a subscription to such a device, with automatic hardware upgrades at periodic intervals supplied by the manufacturer. If your subscription lapses the device bricks itself. Almost certainly, the OS will be locked down, with no end-user option to install a different one or even run unapproved software.

If reasonably powerful computer hardware for end users exists in this future, it will be available from a single company: Apple. Only they have the leverage to prevent ~100% of manufacturing capacity from going to high-roller, big-tech firms.