191–200 of 264 posts
IMHO, the biggest problem with the future of open weights models is that currently, open weights models are the result of philanthropy by some private org. (e.g. DeepSeek). The spigot can be turned off at any time. Until there's some sort of "community owned hardware", open weights models are always at risk of being discontinued.
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Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever. That can't be said for API-based models where a provider can sunset models whenever they feel like (i.e. gpt5-mini will soon be gone, and replaced by a more expensive 5.4-mini, same for goog, etc). And there will always be in…
> they can never be taken away Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Absolutely everything can be taken away. The simplest way to remove open models is probably to declare them a tool that terrorists could use. Crazy? Yes, the world is totally crazy these days.
But in a free and democratic society, there's an enormous difference between "the democratically chosen state powers may take something from me" and "a private entity takes away something from me on an inscrutable whim with no recourse".
Neither is good if you don't want the thing taken away. But removing the second mechanism is still a laudable goal.
> Now is probably a good time to liquidate your pension, fly to a remote island somewhere, and live out the remaining 6 months or so of civilization in peace. > So maybe the open source apocalypse won’t happen yet. Sorry I wasn't at the last doomer meeting, when did we decide good open source models are a harbinger for the apocalypse?
If anything open-source models are a hedge against the apocalypse. Or at least against the cyberpunk dystopia.
This makes sense, right? Coding is one of the most obvious short-term uses of models, it also has a readymade market willing to pay a lot for tokens, it has a huge corpus to work with, and a significant degree of validation is built into the problem domain...
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100% agree. My impression is that the open-weight models have been drawing close-to-level at coding tasks, while Anthropic and OpenAI have been putting large amounts of effort into developing their models' abilities in other domains: legal, biomedical/science, etc. Anthropic (especially?) has also been putting more obvious resource behind optimising their harnesses - from Code to Cowork (which is kinda Code for normi…
GLM 5.2 has replaced "normie" agentic workflows previously backed by Sonnet and Opus. So I don't know. From my end it seems to me they are perfectly capable of working agenticly.
I'm talking about people who aren't in IT, and who are maybe just learning to use LLMs for aspects of their daily work. These people only know of the big three models, at best - they very rarely know of the open-weight models, and would even more rarely (given their model access is likely determined at a corporate level) be able to access them.
> Now is probably a good time to liquidate your pension, fly to a remote island somewhere, and live out the remaining 6 months or so of civilization in peace. > So maybe the open source apocalypse won’t happen yet. Sorry I wasn't at the last doomer meeting, when did we decide good open source models are a harbinger for the apocalypse?
People becoming more and more neurotic by the day
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever. That can't be said for API-based models where a provider can sunset models whenever they feel like (i.e. gpt5-mini will soon be gone, and replaced by a more expensive 5.4-mini, same for goog, etc). And there will always be in…
> they can never be taken away Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Absolutely everything can be taken away. The simplest way to remove open models is probably to declare them a tool that terrorists could use. Crazy? Yes, the world is totally crazy these days.
> Now is probably a good time to liquidate your pension, fly to a remote island somewhere, and live out the remaining 6 months or so of civilization in peace. > So maybe the open source apocalypse won’t happen yet. Sorry I wasn't at the last doomer meeting, when did we decide good open source models are a harbinger for the apocalypse?
Doomerism is at all time high People becoming more and more neurotic by the day
Interesting to consider this inline with recent us export bans, could the US be squandering its lead by giving the open source, largely Chinese labs catch up (in terms of model quality available to masses), will US labs be able to maintain the lead without users being able to use their latest models?
Why do you think this matters? Not that it does or doesn't but what quality does "US WINS" or "CHINA WINS" bring to the table?
IMHO, the biggest problem with the future of open weights models is that currently, open weights models are the result of philanthropy by some private org. (e.g. DeepSeek). The spigot can be turned off at any time. Until there's some sort of "community owned hardware", open weights models are always at risk of being discontinued.
I am the original author of the post - thanks for reading it! I think the future of open weights models will be similar to fabless chip design companies. There will be companies that can train models and they will licence those models to inference companies that manage the APIs. The inference companies need much less capital and the training companies dont need to divert resources from training to inference. Some of…