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The state of open source AI

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Re: The state of open source AI

#191

Post by dom3k »

braiamp wrote: post #101
babblingfish wrote: post #6

Speculation: 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.

I'm happier with my Opencode Go running with the pi harness than Claude Code at work currently. I'm not sure if this will be that big of a moat, at least in the software dev market.

Re: The state of open source AI

#192

Post by marcosdumay »

afavour wrote: post #36
mft_ wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

I’m not exactly sure on the “how” but it only makes logical sense for (non-AI) companies to band together to fund the training of a shared model. Apple is a great example, AI is not their core business but they still require it. The only thing that took us down a different path is the vast sums of VC funding pumped into the AI companies.

It probably doesn't.

There's a reason we let companies specialize in some kind of service and buy it from them.

LLMs aren't looking like they'll be highly differentiated like software, so their market will probably be competitive. What negates the main reason Open Source software exists.

Re: The state of open source AI

#193

Post by horsawlarway »

nonethewiser wrote: post #186
babblingfish wrote: post #6

Speculation: 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 frontier models are obviously superior. The question is if progress slows down.

in what context, and at what ROI?

Because... I have use-cases where this is true, and use-cases where this falls flat on its face.

I don't actually think it's obvious (at all, really) without defining what "superior" means.

In the same way that I don't think it's obvious that a plane is superior to a car, or a boat, or a bike.

They each do things the others don't, and excel in different spaces.

Re: The state of open source AI

#194

Post by grokcodec »

vitally3643 wrote: post #178
dmarcos wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcome is plausible. Open weights models though look like a tactical more than a principled play by Chinese companies to overcome the disadvantage and difficulties to access western markets. Two issues: 1. If market conditions change they might decide to close down like Meta did. 2. If as you said models keep getting more expensive to train, is an open weights strategy financially sustainable? edit: typo

That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime? China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than Chin…

Define technofascism lol.

Fascism was laid out by Mussolini in the 1920s - it amounts to the idolatry of the state.

"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." B Mussolini

Also defined as Corporatism: the union of state and corporate power.

Which country do you think is closer to Mussolini's model ?

Re: The state of open source AI

#195

Post by dgellow »

jjice wrote: post #174
GodelNumbering wrote: post #45

Exactly 4 months ago, the marketshare on openrouter was 60%-40% in favor of closed models. Now it's 63%-37% in favor of open models. On March 19th, the open models processed 888B tokens in aggregate, yesterday, they processed 4.19T tokens in aggregate. That's almost 5x in 4 months! I can't think of the right intensifier to describe this level of growth. If you are looking for more details (as inferred by openrouter d…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but OpenRouter doesn't tell the whole story. If I'm using OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google models, I'm probably using their API directly, so OpenRouter won't have those stats to compare to. All that said, it is very exciting to see open model usage grow via OpenRouter.

It doesn’t show the whole market of course, but the trend lines are interesting

Re: The state of open source AI

#196

Post by charcircuit »

babblingfish wrote: post #6

Speculation: 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…

You do realize OpenAI survived for years without LLMs, right? There is still more AI research they can do as a lab even if they stop experimenting with LLMs.

Re: The state of open source AI

#197

Post by jjice »

dgellow wrote: post #195
jjice wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but OpenRouter doesn't tell the whole story. If I'm using OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google models, I'm probably using their API directly, so OpenRouter won't have those stats to compare to. All that said, it is very exciting to see open model usage grow via OpenRouter.

It doesn’t show the whole market of course, but the trend lines are interesting

Definitely interesting seeing it grow there. I'm now curious to see if it's overall market usage growing for LLMs (with more OpenAI and Anthopic usage in a similar growth rate), or if it's more heavily weighted towards open models specifically.

With the price to performance of the latest open models, I think most cases for integration into applications would get a best bang for the buck from an open model.

Re: The state of open source AI

#198

Post by asadotzler »

switchbak wrote: post #137
root_axis wrote: post #126

Earlier 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.

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 g…

>For the near future it seems that the new models will consume whatever improved hardware capacity we have.

But they're not. Meta, SpaceX, Microsoft, Amazon, they're all leasing out capacity to others. If they were truly constrained, we wouldn't see that happening.

Re: The state of open source AI

#199

Post by lukan »

inigyou wrote: post #176
lukan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, when compared to all the information people with android devices share with google, or those with gmail, ..

Google wouldn't give Gemini direct access to everyone's Gmail. It would carry far too much risk of being exposed. X can, because tweets are public.

But google can give gemini access to summaries of all the avaiable information google has, including what people look for right now and where and how long.

Re: The state of open source AI

#200

Post by midnightbobarun »

Codefrontier wrote: post #183
babblingfish wrote: post #6

Speculation: 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…

I agree with your speculation to be honest. And yet I’ve tried several local open weights model now and none gives the same quality of answers as Claude gives me on a regular Sonnet model. Mind you: I am “running” 48GB of RAM so I can’t try every model. Where does this difference come from? Can we actually get close locally?

Something I've noticed is that local models are giving better answers these days than they did a year or two ago, even if the size (in parameters and in the amount of RAM used) hasn't increased. I'm not familiar enough with the technical side of model training to explain how they're doing this, but I think in another couple of years, models that use up 48 GB will be able to squeeze out even more incredible performance.

Though on the level of something like Sonnet 5... well, maybe not.

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