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The state of open source AI

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Re: The state of open source AI

#201

Post by zdragnar »

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…

You're moving the goal post here. The parent never mentioned anything about the Chinese models themselves being dangerous or harmful; that's a totally different topic.

The point they were making was that the most successful open models- those coming out of China- are made my companies that are using those open models to get exposure in Western markets. The goal is to undercut the Western dominant players, not out of any particular "open source" philosophy, so it wouldn't be wise to expect them to continue providing open models long term.

Re: The state of open source AI

#202

Post by w0m »

foolswisdom wrote: post #26
brunooliv wrote: post #23

This is really insane to me. There's nothing practical about open-source models yet that makes them even remotely comparable to closed frontier models. All the hype around GLM, Qwen, now Kimi.... Are people really this naive that they believe these reports or, more worringly, are people NOT using these models and seeing the HUGE gap that still exists? Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd tru…

> Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd trust to give to Sonnet to finish without a hitch. Now give it to ANY open-source frontier model and watch them struggle and go in circles while failing tool calls and randomly assuming things. Claude used to be much worse than it is now, just as bad the open weights models are. And the open weights were worse. The labs will also try to keep the lead, b…

> but everyone sees the writing on the wall

i'm... not sure? This assumes ~stagnation in task-possibility. We've had ~exponential progress for like 3+ years now; I'd have never dreamed the tooling I hammer daily would exist in my lifetime just.. 3? years ago. And it's improving daily.

Maybe Open will win, maybe Closed will keep pushing the envelope. The world here is raw enough i don't think anyone can make any significant claim other than 'holy shit this is useful and moving Fast'.

Re: The state of open source AI

#203

Post by [deleted] »

mft_ wrote: post #33
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: The state of open source AI

#205

Post by cma »

Alpha3031 wrote: post #14
cma wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run the same harness on fable, opus, sonnet, and see a huge difference between them. It is true the harness is important, and openai has begun encryption its instructions to swarmed sub-agents instead of just encrypting the chain of thought, but the model is still important at this stage.

Referent of "the models are meaningfully different" reads as rather than to me, so I'm not sure why we'd be comparing Fable vs Opus/Sonnet or Sol vs Terra rather than the same against Kimi K3.

I was just responding to "The harness is what takes these random and hallucinogenic models and make them into something deterministic and useful."

You can compare Fable vs Sol vs Kimi in the same harness if you want too and there are meaningful big differences. I chose all Anthropic ones to be safe from the they were finetuned on different harnesses complaint that would be made from that comparison.

Re: The state of open source AI

#206

Post by naim08 »

goolz wrote: post #70
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…

Completely agree. Once I can reliably get open models doing what I am on Fable ultra I imagine I will switch for good. I am fortunate to have access to a decent bit of local RAM, 192GB of DDR5 at an OK speed. It is not enough and costs are well past absurd. In a few years time I envisage a setup that is sub $10k which can accomplish such tasks. The pace so far has been breakneck. That is all I personally need. That m…

damn! how muhc you dropped for 192gb?

Re: The state of open source AI

#207

Post by dd8601fn »

smj-edison wrote: post #148
lelanthran wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As these frontier companies have been boasting, writing software is now a negligible cost because the LLM can do it. IOW, no, their software can't be a moat, because, according…

> you can use their LLM to trivially clone their software. Perhaps, but what you can't clone is familiarity, polish, integration, and network effects. These companies desperately need a moat, and so for example all the new additions to Claude's web interface are becoming the products that the vast majority of people will use and be locked into (if it goes according to their plan).

If development is trivial and capability remains the differentiator, then "familiarity, polish, [and] integration" are non-issues.

I'm not sure what network effects even means in the context of llm selection.

Re: The state of open source AI

#208

Post by km3r »

program_whiz wrote: post #153
repeekad wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is selling their now excess compute, other compute has been on the market for a while. The current hardware cost bubble is temporary, especially once people are forced to pay the real inference price instead of majorly subsidized subscriptions.

yep, all those coders paying $200-$500 per day to use claude once subsidy ends will be seriously rethinking how much they really want to vibe-code "rewriting X in rust". Helping people write word docs, recipes, and emails isn't going to justify $15K per month subscriptions either.

The subscription is certainly subsidized but its no where near 100x cheaper than API prices.

Heck, most large enterprise moved to usage based billing and are still happily paying for it. They are force multipliers for your top talent, and when a top engineer is being paid $500k a year, doubling their output for $500/day is a no brainer.

Re: The state of open source AI

#209

Post by sph »

grokcodec wrote: post #194
vitally3643 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Fascism was strongly influenced by Futurism and its optimism for a machine-powered future where technology will bring forth utopia and order.

It’s no wonder than Thiel & co. are rediscovering Futurism, and blind faith in the machine is basically what Silicon Valley is all about.

Re: The state of open source AI

#210

Post by stale2002 »

inigyou wrote: post #158
mrandish wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company was VC-funded as a search engine but by the time they made significant investments in AI (DeepMind etc) they'd been a publicly held company earning multiple billions a year from advertising for a decade.

Google is a VC. Their side projects are VC projects.

If your definition of VC is "Literally anything that requires a long term investment of money" then sure, but I think most people mean something different than that.
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