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U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

genesisopenmodels.anl.gov

161–170 of 185 posts

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#161
post #151

Why is this a DOE thing?

They have an insane amount of compute at their disposal.

The reason why is interesting. Since the test ban treaty of the early 1990s, the US can no longer test its nuclear weapons by exploding them. Thus they have to simulate them exploding, nanosecond by nanosecond, to be assured the bombs will work if they are ever needed.

This requires an enormous amount of computer power, and it's the reason why the US DOE labs have for the last few decades had several of the top supercomputers in the world on http://top500.org.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#162
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the China model is working in China is because their economy is booming. As soon as it slows down, which it will, they're going to be in for chaos. This is also very historically precedented, where China has always gone through dynastic cycles of flourish, stagnate, decline, chaos, reset. China isn't doing well because of their model, they're doing well because of their economy. Their success is in spite o…

Disagree. I think with modern tech China has built a surveillance panopticon that will continue to ensure social harmony through any economic downturn, and this is precisely the model that is appealing to so many other countries now.

Also scarcity isn’t what it once was. The biggest internal social problems were often scarcity induced.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#163
post #107
post #8

Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess? Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0 But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC

Not only are there many American open weight models as others have mentioned, but Americans are the only ones doing actual open source models [0]. Not just distributing binary blobs and calling them "open". [0] https://allenai.org/

I never understood this criticism. Any good data set contains copyrighted data so any "open source" model will be crappy, most of the price is in training these models (if you have the compute, why would an "open source" model be helpful anyways), and you can already modify a model from just it's weights. Why should we want an "open source" model. Just give me the weights.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#164

It would be extremely interesting to me if the usgov produces a model which honors copyright and is also useful. This would give them extreme leverage over the labs, who may be violating copyright in significant and obvious ways.

Honestly the battle for copyright with models is lost. The takeaway is copyright applies to you as a small user and not to billion/trillion dollar companies. Same as any other US law, really.

Yeah, I felt this way too, and it's probably beyond the capacity of the federal government to organize in this way - but it is theoretically possible that the DOE could build a copyright respecting model (which it seems like they are doing here) and then a like minded DoJ could come a calling for the Labs. It may never happen, but something to ponder.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#165
post #148
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes more sense is to do something like deepseek at one of the major universities put those bright computer science young minds to work, in the good old days almost every major university would have done that has any major US university done that? Stanford Harvard Berkeley if the Chinese can put together a team like deep seek why can’t that be done at a major university in the United States? https://www.interco…

University of Washington does what you are describing. https://www.cs.washington.edu/research/artificial-intelligen... I'm sure there are several other universities doing the same.

I will look them up thank God I hope many more American universities will do the same.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#166
post #74
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot smaller, and runs (quantized) on a 3090 quite well. Ds4 flash 0731 you're talking about? It's great but it's much harder to run locally.

Are you talking about S or XS? S is too large for a 3090 at 118b parameters.

S, I'm running one of the unsloth quants. Q4 something K_XL I think?

I don't think it's all resident in memory on the 3090 but it runs fast enough for use, I'd have to check but it's like 30 t/s or so, fast enough that it doesn't bother me.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#167
i need some experience from anyone. which model is good for local usage. i prefer moe models, since im only running 4gb vram. i used to play around with qwen 3.6 35b a3b with 17/tps. its been few months since i last play around with local LLM. is there any improvement on local ai development?

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#168
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an insane amount of compute at their disposal.

The reason why is interesting. Since the test ban treaty of the early 1990s, the US can no longer test its nuclear weapons by exploding them. Thus they have to simulate them exploding, nanosecond by nanosecond, to be assured the bombs will work if they are ever needed. This requires an enormous amount of computer power, and it's the reason why the US DOE labs have for the last few decades had several of the top super…

I wonder if eventually we (globally) could test on the dark side of the moon or something in the future

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#169
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the China model is working in China is because their economy is booming. As soon as it slows down, which it will, they're going to be in for chaos. This is also very historically precedented, where China has always gone through dynastic cycles of flourish, stagnate, decline, chaos, reset. China isn't doing well because of their model, they're doing well because of their economy. Their success is in spite o…

Disagree. I think with modern tech China has built a surveillance panopticon that will continue to ensure social harmony through any economic downturn, and this is precisely the model that is appealing to so many other countries now.

Mass surveillance is nothing new. The USSR had an absurdly wide surveillance net paired with endless on-the-ground informants making people terrified to speak pretty much anywhere, yet as soon as things started slowing down the entire system collapsed with a shocking rapidity, because these things don't create social harmony, they create a dystopic nightmare that people want to overthrow.

However, people are willing to tolerate dystopia when real wages are skyrocketing, your nation is doing wild things (like radically advancing human spaceflight), and more. But as soon as all of this slows down you're left with the same uninspiring directionless stagnation that plagues all nations eventually, and a dystopic social system on top.

Re: U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

#170
If you’re in the weird position of knowing more about the national labs than the AI lab scene (like I am), link to a TechCrunch profile:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tiny-startup-arcee-ai-buil...

My question is: why is this being run out of Argonne? Why not NERSC proper?

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