Not to be that guy, but the correct term is Open Weight LLM. And I’d argue it already has. Many open models are already very competitive with closed models at a fraction of the cost.
Labs can and do open source more than the weights
Open source AI must win
201–210 of 538 posts
Re: Open source AI must win
#202Well, the crazy thing I'm working on (100% self-funded thus far): https://trivyn.io. The main idea is moving most of the reasoning to the symbolic layer so the "neuro" piece can be a small model able to be self-hosted on reasonable hardware.
Re: Open source AI must win
#203I agree with sentiment and mission, but the goal is inseparable from politics at this point. Being Open Source (tm) will not protect you from the government/others imposing controls on your silicon or what it is allowed to do, which is already happening around the world. Even having the models be open source won't fix the regulation or economic incentives. Which is not something you can compress into a couple of para…
Monopoly capitalism and finance capitalism took reigns of markets more than a century ago. The state serves these huge interests. Everybody knows AI firms pirated to train, nothing will come of it. A plain example of classist application of law. The reason for the willy nilly application of their own laws will always be 'national security', of course, since they own infrastructure their interests are a national secur…
No state, anywhere, has the right to rule or even exist.
All states are terroristic parasite gangs, all states [no exceptions].
Your state exists because there is no one else capable of challenging it [no outsider or internal armed militia].
Your state is merely the gang which reigns supreme in your territory - constitutions, democracy, and other grievance pressure relief systems be damned.
You don't get to vote or serve as juror because the system is somehow moral or holy, you get to vote because in historical systems lacking those pressure relief measures the aristocracy tended to be [literally] decapitated on a regular basis.
Democratic measures exist to bribe and persuade your acquiescence so you don't get together with your aggrieved neighbours and go lop heads off ["it's just the rules of the game, you can try again in 2/4/6 more years :^)"].
Seeing politics from this lens should demystify so many seemingly confusing actions and outcomes, it's why no matter how much you vote you never actually "win" and even if you do... it's in such impotent and monkey's paw ways.
Re: Open source AI must win
#204Where does Anthropic or OpenAI winning leave us? Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work? It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc. Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.
> Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work? It's worse than this, it's more like our thinking. There's already plummetting math grades [1], handing over our thinking to AI megacorps where there's likely to be a monopoly or duopoly is an incredibly dangerous thing for humanity as a whole. [1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...
A few confounding factors come up right away: one of professors removed final project which increased grades; due to less appealing CS career, you do not get the best students anymore: another professor is not a fan of curving so perhaps he just accidentally gave harder tests; math prep for CS courses happened over the last 15 years not last 2 where LLMs have become ubiquitous; many failed because they were caught using LLMs when not allowed...
So really, two professors' gut feel about what the reasons are and not backed by much.
Re: Open source AI must win
#205Not to distract from the message, but I appreciate that this is largely plaintext not React vibeslop.
Re: Open source AI must win
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who funds Semiconductor fabs
When Jensen (Nvidia) was doing interviews at his recent public talks, he was asked something along the lines of: "Why release these new laptops which are a low margin market, if your other businesses are vastly more profitable?" and his answer was basically that if they can build the coolest and best technology and push the frontier, they will do it. It's not all about making tons of money. He seemed genuinely excite…
Amazing that anyone in 2026 still can believe in "don't be evil" marketing from multibillion dollar corporations.
Re: Open source AI must win
#207what is Open Source AI even? to me Open Source, like Free Software, is something i can run on my own computer. any AI system that runs on a computer that i do not control is by my definition not Open Source. so how then can Open Source AI win? it can't even compete. even if we collect enough money and create a dedicated Open Source organization to build and run a community owned AI datacenter, how does that help? so…
> any AI system that runs on a computer that i do not control is by my definition not Open Source. This is not true at all. It would be open source if you could download it and run it anywhere that is capable, and are free to move it and modify it as much as you want. Just because you don't have a computer at home powerful enough doesn't mean it isn't open source.
I think he means theoretically in possibility space, without relying on a based insider leaking a 'closed' frontier model to bittorrent or hyphanet.
Re: Open source AI must win
#208I've been contemplating a decentralized model training system for some time using volunteer machines that we all contribute. But, it is astronomically difficult. The communication speeds are untenable. And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datu…
Well, I suppose it is understandable why you want to attack the most obvious problem with such a scheme: obtaining sufficient compute.
That does mean you are actually neglecting the more difficult issues.
Re: Open source AI must win
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Jensen (Nvidia) was doing interviews at his recent public talks, he was asked something along the lines of: "Why release these new laptops which are a low margin market, if your other businesses are vastly more profitable?" and his answer was basically that if they can build the coolest and best technology and push the frontier, they will do it. It's not all about making tons of money. He seemed genuinely excite…
Nvidia and "open source" is like opposite things. Nvidia only ever opened stuff that helps their bottom line or improve vendor lock-in. But yeah they are good shovel seller and competitor to actually evil companies that literally wants to eat all the world chips and energy supply.
In the open source space, the Nemotron models from nVidia are quite real. Including a Nemotron Ultra variety meant to be large enough for near-SOTA.
Re: Open source AI must win
#210Open-source AI can, by definition, never "win". AI is just hillclimbing today, and closed labs can always absorb everything the open world does and build upon it. It doesn't really matter for most use cases, because the way AI is working is capability saturation. https://www.delanceyukschoolschesschallenge.com/the-rising-t... The only exception to this is fields that are inherently adversarial (to nature or others) a…
Open source models don't need to be anywhere near as good as Claude Mythos or even Claude Sonnet to 'win'. Open source 'winning' just means that there exists at least one open source alternative to closed models which is as good as, say, GPT 4... I mean, we're essentially there already with Google Gemma models. As a software engineer, I didn't notice any difference in my productivity since Sonnet. Of course Opus is b…
The Gemma models are tiny, not really comparable to DeepSeek Pro, Kimi or GLM. But the broader point stands.