Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#171

Post by nutjob2 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

calebkaiser wrote: post #126

r_lee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew that there was no real moat from the very start, I mean, these things were close enough from the very start, how could it not result in a race to the bottom, especially as you can't really prevent distillation reliably?

I support and use open models as much as possible, but I'm not totally convinced that OAI or Anthropic have no moat, even as open models catch up to the frontier. Serving and inference are still hard problems when you're talking about a 2 trillion parameter model. Fine-tuning, if that remains a realistic need for businesses, is also a difficult infra problem at that scale. In the most bearish case, where there is no…

OK, but somehow there won't be companies who will sell you appropriate hardware and a turnkey system to serve inference? Or companies that will help you fine tune popular models?

It's not about money, it's about control. Companies have lots of money and want control over their key technology.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#172

Post by dboreham » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #29

I'm not seeing it. Corporate America needs someone they can sue if anything goes sideways with AI given the rate of change and legal ambiguities. It took years/decades for actual, real, open source to be widely adopted in corporations for the same reasons.

Not seeing it either. I do see a torrent of astroturf saying everyone is using self hosted LLMs, but in reality nobody I know is.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#173

Post by disdegeneration » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

cmiles8 wrote: post #26

Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical. Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any ho…

[dead]

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#174

Post by novok » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

cmiles8 wrote: post #26

Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical. Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any ho…

The open models are good because of distillation, which the US labs are actively working against via not revealing CoT ever and now you can see with OpenAI Astra 6 not even having a lot of CoT equivalents being emitted as tokens. Once the anti-distillation stuff is in place the open distillation models will probably start having larger and larger gaps.

If the companies survive the next few years, which they probably will because they represent too much of US economic growth to allow them to fail, this gap will keep on expanding.

Starting from zero without distillation is a lot harder, a lot more expensive and a lot more work. OSS models is what a laggard does to get adoption. China's gov't might keep on sponsoring it as a counter GPU embargo thing, but when gov't get involved, usually the other side gets involved too.

As for people asking where is the evidence for half of this, you will never have public evidence for most of this, but deduce what the partly hidden parts reveal about the whole and it is fairly obvious, especially if you look at the past behaviors of the governments and other actors.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#175

Post by lenerdenator » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

cmiles8 wrote: post #26

Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical. Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any ho…

The schadenfreude is that, at least for OpenAI, they were originally set up to make open models.

They were set up as a public benefit company and their returns were capped at 100x. They (well, Sam) went out of their way to put themselves in this death march to the IPO. If they had just done what Mark Zuckerberg did with Muse, they're not in this position.

Do you know how bad you have to be at the tech business to make Mark Zuckerberg look like a prudent-yet-visionary leader?

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#176

Post by alexashka » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

lenerdenator wrote: post #175

cmiles8 wrote: post #26

Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical. Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any ho…

The schadenfreude is that, at least for OpenAI, they were originally set up to make open models . They were set up as a public benefit company and their returns were capped at 100x. They (well, Sam) went out of their way to put themselves in this death march to the IPO. If they had just done what Mark Zuckerberg did with Muse, they're not in this position. Do you know how bad you have to be at the tech business to ma…

Yes, but also remember what happened to Mark trying to do a currency?

You're giving him too much credit if you think he figured anything on his own - this is the guy who thought 'metaverse' was a good idea.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#177

Post by lenerdenator » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #176

lenerdenator wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The schadenfreude is that, at least for OpenAI, they were originally set up to make open models . They were set up as a public benefit company and their returns were capped at 100x. They (well, Sam) went out of their way to put themselves in this death march to the IPO. If they had just done what Mark Zuckerberg did with Muse, they're not in this position. Do you know how bad you have to be at the tech business to ma…

Yes, but also remember what happened to Mark trying to do a currency? You're giving him too much credit if you think he figured anything on his own - this is the guy who thought 'metaverse' was a good idea.

Exactly.

Even that guy could read the situation.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#178

Post by mudil » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

It's possible that LLMs will be a commodity in the future. Just like airline industry, AI will be tremendously important for society, but AI companies will not be making lots of money. It will be Nvidia, Micron, Dell and others shovel makers making money.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#179

Post by achrono » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:40 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #174

cmiles8 wrote: post #26

Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical. Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any ho…

The open models are good because of distillation, which the US labs are actively working against via not revealing CoT ever and now you can see with OpenAI Astra 6 not even having a lot of CoT equivalents being emitted as tokens. Once the anti-distillation stuff is in place the open distillation models will probably start having larger and larger gaps. If the companies survive the next few years, which they probably…

Yes, evidence is needed but especially for the claim that distillation is what makes these open models good. Serious citation needed.

Think about it: even if they distill the shit out of frontier models, the model still gotta learn, right?

If anything, as you can see from the K2 Horizon release, aggressive (self-proclaimed) reliance on distillation does not result in a model that has remotely any frontier capability. Try asking K2 Horizon to write iambic pentameter for instance, or even give it the car wash prompt. I tried both these on the Q8 quant for the 7B model and the results were depressing.

Re: Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

#180

Post by overfeed » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

motbus3 wrote: post #43

I had a conversation with a large group of friends and we independently came to the conclusion that Openai/Claude does not deliver more than a open source model. It takes about the same and the quality is about the same, and this does not mean it is good

I'm just glad the dweebs who were parroting "OMG, Distillation attacks!!1!" have been empirically proven wrong, and discussion around open-weight models are more rational now.