[deleted]
The state of open source AI
131–140 of 379 posts
Re: The state of open source AI
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
My prediction is that hardware costs will make open source models impractical for the foreseeable future. Yes, tinkerers and enthusiasts will continue to make use of them, but frontier companies will maintain near total dominance because they will be the only ones with access to the hardware.
There will be plenty of model providers with prices that undercut Anthropic/OpenAI's prices.
Doubtful for the same reasons. The frontier providers are working at a hardware scale that will make it impractical to undercut them.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility completely, but it won't be very common.
Re: The state of open source AI
#133Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…
There is a massive difference when you zoom in close or take an angled perspective. You can manufacture uniqueness. The issue is when it comes to every day use for every day people there is no differentiation.
Re: The state of open source AI
#134Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…
>open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI
i doubt it. it cost money to train a model. we can see that with the price increase for Kimi3. Chinese AI companies is leaving a lot of money on the table for third party providers. you think they going to let go of those money that they can make. sooner or later they will want to collect. after all, none of Chinese open weight model is release by a none profit. its all for-profit companies that is releasing open weight model.
Re: The state of open source AI
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
My prediction is that hardware costs will make open source models impractical for the foreseeable future. Yes, tinkerers and enthusiasts will continue to make use of them, but frontier companies will maintain near total dominance because they will be the only ones with access to the hardware.
Meta is selling their now excess compute, other compute has been on the market for a while. The current hardware cost bubble is temporary, especially once people are forced to pay the real inference price instead of majorly subsidized subscriptions.
Lowering the cost of hardware still won't solve the issue. HBM and DDR5 was never cheap, even before the shortages, so selling a full inference system is beyond the acceptable price range for most casual customers.
We're going to see Apple and Google compete over services and AI/OS integration instead, it will probably be years before your OEM takes local models seriously.
Re: The state of open source AI
#136It sure is nice to see that Mozilla is still doing all that they can to keep on top of current trends, except developing a decent privacy-focused web browser for developers and power users.
Yes, Firefox itself is a “general purpose” browser, and that’s probably for the best in terms of wide market appeal. Other developers have taken the engine and made power-user-focused browsers with it. Lately I’ve fallen in love with Zen (though after 2 months of use its pinned tabs features still confuse me a bit).
Re: The state of open source AI
#137Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…
My prediction is that hardware costs will make open source models impractical for the foreseeable future. Yes, tinkerers and enthusiasts will continue to make use of them, but frontier companies will maintain near total dominance because they will be the only ones with access to the hardware.
For the near future it seems that the new models will consume whatever improved hardware capacity we have. Competing with that is challenging, but I also think there will be strong economic incentives towards cheaper but adequate models on other providers.
I don't think we'll see home users being able to match even the low end clouds for a long time.
Longer term I think we'll see these uses of AI cluster into a few groups:
- maximal code / reasoning quality, at high prices (Fable)
- typical code / agents (sub-Opus, Terra)
- cheap but decent enough quality (think Deepseek / GLM / Luna)
- so cheap I don't care about utilization (Deepseek, and friends)
And also more niche ones:
- ultra fast with high quality answers (typically sub-SOTA). Cerebras / dedicated silicon type approaches, expensive.
- ultra fast with mostly-adequate answers, and an openness to retries, moving up to better models
I think the open models will dominate (not with individuals, but low cost providers) all except the top 1-2 of those categories, and there will be a continuous erosion on the big player's moats. The top categories are also where all the money is, but I'm not sure it can justify those investments long-term. I also think they will have to squeeze more money out of them to justify the investments, which will also drive people down the list.
Edit: clarifications.
Re: The state of open source AI
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open models are probably also comparatively astronomically expensive to train - just less so than the frontier models because they’re somewhat smaller, +/- the creators are more incentivised to focus on getting more from less compute because they’re have to, +/- they rely on distillation of the frontier models and this is more efficient. But efficiencies aside; creation of open models still requires a lot of money an…
Yes, the problem with comparing open models to open source is that open source requires humans to volunteer their time. Open models requires humans to volunteer their money. These two types of contributions have very different behavioral profiles, and it doesn't obviously follow that the historical success of getting people to collaborate socially on building software for fun and for the benefit of the community will…
The biggest hurdle is whether humans volunteer their expertise. Not time or money. We need top talent to make the open models. Sponsorship is plentiful. Open source volunteers are less critical with LLM doing the grunt work. Its about talent contributing to the open
Re: The state of open source AI
#139Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…
The real moat aren't the models, but the tooling around the models that allow them to perform specific tasks/goals. That's what really sets apart frontier vs open. Open only has the model itself, closed have the tooling to enhance the model.
> The real moat aren't the models, but the tooling around the models that allow them to perform specific tasks/goals. That's what really sets apart frontier vs open. Open only has the model itself, closed have the tooling to enhance the model.
As these frontier companies have been boasting, writing software is now a negligible cost because the LLM can do it.
IOW, no, their software can't be a moat, because, according to their own arguments, you can use their LLM to trivially clone their software.
Re: The state of open source AI
#140Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…
>open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI i doubt it. it cost money to train a model. we can see that with the price increase for Kimi3. Chinese AI companies is leaving a lot of money on the table for third party providers. you think they going to let go of those money that they can make. sooner or later they will want to collect. after all, none of Chinese open weight model is release by a none profit. its…
I can't take anybody seriously when they keep declaring open models is beating frontier models. What they don't understand is that besides the huge capex to train and run inference, the real gold is in the human response to the prompt results, this is what all the Chinese companies are making their open models dirt cheap and distilling american frontier models via scraping.
The idea that we can out-parameterize frontier models is a common misconception, the true moat that Anthropic and OpenAI is why Chinese model providers are open sourcing and making it dirt cheap to keep pace through its "proxy chain operators"