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Open source AI must win
131–140 of 538 posts
Re: Open source AI must win
#132[dead]
Re: Open source AI must win
#133Who is going to fund it? Training is unfathomably expensive. You have either VC funded models looking for a return on investment, or CCP funded models looking to solidify authoritarian "model Chinese society". Maybe there are some university 4B models, but I doubt those will carry far.
I share your concerns, although we still see pretty similarly large and complex things that remain open source today. 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. Also, if DeepSeek is truly putting out models with 1/10th the cost of Western compe…
Software is "free" though, which is why it has such a vibrant open source scene. One guy can code for a weekend and fill the screens of 5 million with something fun by Monday.
However, Once real costs are involved, participation tanks. Open source hardware, because it actually requires money to realize, has 1/10,000 the depth of open source software, if that.
Obviously everyone wants an open source AI, but virtually no one wants to fork over money, especially when the end result is others getting it free. A proper training run would require millions of people donating hundreds of dollars. Its not something one guy over a weekend can do...
Re: Open source AI must win
#134This should be the top post. Not Anthropic or OpenAI marketing plots. This is existential.
It's too late.
You can one-shot a port of Linux to Rust and stop contributing to open source.
The value of software is going to tend towards zero. The value of the software developer the same.
Anthropic is now a kingmaker. It gets to decide which businesses get the expensive private model that can generate entire business functions at the drop of a hat. If you can't afford the price tag, then competition in the market is not for you.
Computing is no longer "personal". It's for big biz only.
Re: Open source AI must win
#135Who is going to fund it? Training is unfathomably expensive. You have either VC funded models looking for a return on investment, or CCP funded models looking to solidify authoritarian "model Chinese society". Maybe there are some university 4B models, but I doubt those will carry far.
Ever calculate the cost of a computer in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation? Training is unfathomably expensive right now . What if a bunch of universities pooled their money? Or a bunch of nations pooled their money? Breakthroughs will eventually happen, optimization will occur, etc. People questioned whether there could ever be a viable open source operating system, yet Linux has been a viable option for a desktop e…
Yes,
You have to start some where. Im guessing, making progress also brings in new ideas how to move further.
Re: Open source AI must win
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I share your concerns, although we still see pretty similarly large and complex things that remain open source today. 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. Also, if DeepSeek is truly putting out models with 1/10th the cost of Western compe…
> 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…
There’s a lot of merit to what you’re saying, but I don’t share that high level of pessimism.
The scenario you describe is basically that software is free as in beer now. We as a corporation don’t really need to bother using GPL/Apache licensed software because we can one-shot something of our own and not deal with with giving back contributions to the open source community.
But that highway goes both directions. That means that the open source community can also one-shot their software, build more with fewer resources, or it might even just devalue proprietary software even further.
If software is so easy to make, what’s the point of keeping it proprietary? I can’t charge you $100/year for Microsoft Word if I can tell Claude Opus 9.0 to clone it with $100 worth of tokens.
Re: Open source AI must win
#137Where does Anthropic or OpenAI winning leave us? Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work? It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc. Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.
One of the usual claimed benefits of open source software, is that if you find a bug, you can fix it.
Would be nice if someone figured out how to properly debug a model. Without that? OK, so you have your own open source base model trained on your preferred document set that excluded whatever you think is propaganda, and your own open source RLHF training set based on the judgement of whoever you think is a good egg, and so on.
Last I checked, nobody yet knows how to define a precise rule for automatically checking which of two models made this way is aligned better with whatever your standards are.
The metaphor would be like if we knew what a CPU was but had no idea how to do either chip design or formal verification, and instead randomly mutated the connections between transistors until our test set of 2^16 randomly selected pairs of 32-bit numbers only had one error under addition and two under multiplication.
Worse, because we're making them this way, you have to be a fairly big corporation even when you take shortcuts like DeepSeek did.
And note that I'm not disagreeing about the systemic risk that comes if these models become dictators: people are currently demonstrating they're very eager to outsource their own thinking to these models even when they ought to know better, and corporations are currently demonstrating they're very eager to force workers to use them even when they're mediocre and workers spend half the time they might save from a more competent model just fixing the damage done by their current meh-ness: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/10/brit-worker...
Re: Open source AI must win
#138I have been working on this exact problem, and I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about it.
To make any agent "good", there are two components: the model and the harness. Very few companies can train models, but anyone can build a harness. How much does the harness matter? Can I build a harness that's good enough that I can use open source models with opus level performance? That's the question I've been trying to answer by building better harnesses. None of the existing frameworks have the functionality I need to build a good harness. The features I need are language-level... and so I started building a language called Agency[0].
It's been six months and its going well. Some of the things Agency can do are wild:
- It can pause and serialize execution at any point, making HITL easy
- It has some neat safety capabilities such as handlers[1] and PFA[2]
- You can bundle up any agent as an HTTP or MCP server[3]
- I'm now working on a built-in optimizer to optimize agents (think DSPy).
Obviously, it's a huge undertaking, but having worked with the Agency for six months, I can't imagine going back to another framework. It makes things so easy. I'm working on its built-in agent now [4]. My goal it to get it to be as good as Claude Code, but using open source models. It's still early days, lots of rough edges, but if this sort of thing interests you, I'd love to have a few more people test it out.
[1] https://agency-lang.com/guide/handlers.html
[2] https://agency-lang.com/guide/partial-application.html
[3] https://agency-lang.com/cli/serve.html
[4] https://github.com/egonSchiele/agency-lang/blob/main/package...
Re: Open source AI must win
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who funds Semiconductor fabs
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 excite…
That's not really the impression I get from Anthropic, but if you have the links to back it up, I'm always willing to change my mind.
Compared to bizes like Oracle, Microsoft, or Facebook, I felt that Anthropic was more interested in progress (not to the neglect of business―AI training is expensive at the end of the day), but maybe I've just not seen what you've seen.
Re: Open source AI must win
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who funds Semiconductor fabs
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 excite…
Nvidia and "open source" is like opposite things. Nvidia only ever opened stuff that helps their bottom line or improve vendor lock-in.
But yeah they are good shovel seller and competitor to actually evil companies that literally wants to eat all the world chips and energy supply.