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Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

nytimes.com

221–230 of 300 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is non-negotiable for corporate. Even without considering costs or country of origin, we've seen from OpenAI that claims of AI safety are worth less than the (virtual) paper they're printed on. All it takes is one incident, and all your company's internal data will start showing up in public users' chats. You can rely on a contract to prevent this, or you can guarantee it by using a locally hosted model you f…

Is this not true for everything then? All cloud services, all Internet providers, everything within M365, OneDrive and Databricks?

I have never heard of a cloud service of ISP actively taking corporate data and shoving it into other users inbox. If my company has a proprietary solution to a math problem that nobody else knows about but the AI service that we have been working with has access to it and Billy Main Competitor ALSO has that service and asks "how would one solve this math problem" the second the AI spills the beans, the suits in the c-suit would lose it and sue the AI.

If however, our internal IT group didn't read the manual correctly and set up our cloud service access parameters incorrectly so that anyone who was trying to probe our defenses could access the formula, Jim from IT is looking for a new job.

See the difference?

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

#222
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To whoever downvoted this, it would be helpful if you actually reply with something substantive. The post I'm responding to makes sweeping characterizations, and I challenge it with a relatively good heuristic and indirect evidence, and only get downvoted?

Because it's evident you didn't engage with the last sentence I wrote properly. "Citation needed" in more words is not a sufficient response. > 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 othe…

My point is simply this: Chinese labs going to great lengths to distill Claude is evidence that distillation is useful but not that that is what makes them so good. That one doesn't even need them to admit it.

Nathan Lambert has made this distinction explicitly: he thinks Chinese labs likely innovate heavily on distillation, while saying he wouldn't call it a crucial factor in their post-training capabilities, in part because the RL work still has to be done by the lab itself -- just like what I said above.

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-much-does-distillation-re...

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic, OpenAI, GDM, and Meta spend more on training than other labs by an order of magnitude. If they felt safe reducing this spend they would. These labs fear getting outcompeted.

Again, I am talking about inference, not training. Please read.

How do you think they fund training? This is just as asinine as insisting that drug manufacturers only price medications based on production costs.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However the cold reality for both is that there is zero moat to a model anymore. The moat right now is a) the hardware, b) the electricity, c) the intelligence, and d) scalability. On hardware, it's very expensive to purchase anything which can provide a fraction of the performance of a subscription. Traditional accounting depreciation would imply that purchasing local hardware is a terrible financial decision. On…

You’re missing the point that 98+% of the use cases for AI don’t require the latest greatest model and are far better positioned to use the fast-follow distilled cheap models. OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting to win a race (build the biggest baddest model) that has no prize. The prize is mass adoption at scale at the best price, which is why companies are rapidly shifting to open model. They don’t need to pay 10x fo…

Yea, they're really hoping that the 2% will help make up an outsized share of the revenue and that brand recognition will keep them going with the plebs.

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

#225
post #174
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…

Do the western labs not train on the open weight models? Is it a one way distillation?

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I am talking about inference, not training. Please read.

How do you think they fund training? This is just as asinine as insisting that drug manufacturers only price medications based on production costs.

Less opex = more profits. They can use that money to fund training. I don't see how that could possibly be a bad thing.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However the cold reality for both is that there is zero moat to a model anymore. The moat right now is a) the hardware, b) the electricity, c) the intelligence, and d) scalability. On hardware, it's very expensive to purchase anything which can provide a fraction of the performance of a subscription. Traditional accounting depreciation would imply that purchasing local hardware is a terrible financial decision. On…

You’re missing the point that 98+% of the use cases for AI don’t require the latest greatest model and are far better positioned to use the fast-follow distilled cheap models. OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting to win a race (build the biggest baddest model) that has no prize. The prize is mass adoption at scale at the best price, which is why companies are rapidly shifting to open model. They don’t need to pay 10x fo…

I think Google realized this first.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is non-negotiable for corporate. Even without considering costs or country of origin, we've seen from OpenAI that claims of AI safety are worth less than the (virtual) paper they're printed on. All it takes is one incident, and all your company's internal data will start showing up in public users' chats. You can rely on a contract to prevent this, or you can guarantee it by using a locally hosted model you f…

Is this not true for everything then? All cloud services, all Internet providers, everything within M365, OneDrive and Databricks?

Encryption?

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

#230
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…

I know a few Australian devs who work at places also moving, or already have, from Anthropic… and not because of cost but because of Trump’s edicts to ban non-nationals using AI.

Think about how crazy it is for non-US companies to use American AI providers - their marketing boasts that you can treat their models as co-workers, assign tasks, invite them to slack annd video calls, etc. Taken at face value, would you hire someone remote who lived in a country that commonly does random shit like deciding whether or not remote workers aren’t allowed to go to work?

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