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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#231

Post by diggan »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #222
diggan wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the EU, I'm guessing you're talking about the EUPL, which is FSF/OSI approved and GPL compatible, generally considered copyleft. For the CH Open, I'm not finding anything specific, even from Swiss websites, could you help me understand what you're referring to here? I'm guessing that all these definitions have at least some points in common, which involves (another guess) at least being able to produce the output…

> For the CH Open, I'm not finding anything specific, even from Swiss websites, could you help me understand what you're referring to here Was on the HN front page earlier [1][2]. The definition comes strikingly close to source on request with no use restrictions. > all these definitions have at least some points in common Agreed. But they're all different. There isn't an accepted defintiion of open source even when…

> Agreed. But they're all different. There isn't an accepted defintiion of open source even when it comes to software; there is an accepted set of broad principles.

Agreed, but are we splitting hairs here and is it relevant to the claim made earlier?

> (The way open source software, today, generally means source available, not FOSS.)

Do any of these principles or definitions from these orgs agree/disagree with that?

My hypothesis is that they generally would go against that belief and instead argue that open source is different from source available. But I haven't looked specifically to confirm if that's true or not, just a guess.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#232

Post by jvanderbot »

CardenB wrote: post #22
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7

“The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1].…

Doubtful that GPUs purchased today would be in use for a similar time scale. Govt investment would also drive the cost of GPUs up a great deal. Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants.

A much better investment would be to (somehow) revolutionize production of chips for AI so that it's all cheaper, more reliable, and faster to stand up new generations of software and hardware codesign. This is probably much closer to the program mentioned in the top level comment: It wasn't to produce one type of thing, but to allow better production of any large thing from lighter alloys.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#233

Post by ninininino »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #48
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7

“The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1].…

The problem is that any public cluster would be outdated in 2 years. At the same time, GPUs are massively overpriced. Nvidia's profit margins on the H100 are crazy. Until we get cheaper cards that stand the test of time, building a public cluster is just a waste of money. There are far better ways to spend $1b in research dollars.

What about dollar cost averaging your purchases of GPUs? So that you're always buying a bit of the newest stuff every year rather than just a single fixed investment in hardware that will become outdated? Say 100 million a year every year for 20 years instead of 2 billion in a single year?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#234

Post by jdminhbg »

diggan wrote: post #218
jdminhbg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do people keep mislabeling this as Open Source? The whole point of calling something Open Source is that the "magic sauce" of how to build something is publicly available, so I could built it myself if I have the means. But without the training data publicly available, could I train Llama 3.1 if I had the means? I don't think not releasing the commit history of a project makes it not Open Source, this seems lik…

> I don't think not releasing the commit history of a project makes it not Open Source, Right, I'm not talking about the commit history, but rather that anyone (with means) should be able to produce the final artifact themselves, if they want. For weights like this, that requires at least the training script + the training data. Without that, it's very misleading to call the project Open Source, when only the result…

> Right, I'm not talking about the commit history, but rather that anyone (with means) should be able to produce the final artifact themselves, if they want. For weights like this, that requires at least the training script + the training data.

You cannot produce the final artifact with the training script + data. Meta also cannot reproduce the current weights with the training script + data. You could produce some other set of weights that are just about as good, but it's not a deterministic process like compiling source code.

> That's like saying that Slack is Open Source because if I want to, I could patch the binary with a hex editor and add/remove things as I see fit? No one believes Slack should be called Open Source for that.

This analogy doesn't work because it's not like Meta can "patch" Llama any more than you can. They can only finetune it like everyone else, or produce an entirely different LLM by training from scratch like everyone else.

The right to release your changes is another difference; if you patch Slack with a hex editor to do some useful thing, you're not allowed to release that changed Slack to others.

If Slack lost their source code, went out of business, and released a decompiled version of the built product into the public domain, that would in some sense be "open source," even if not as good as something like Linux. LLMs though do not have a source code-like representation that is easily and deterministically modifiable like that, no matter who the owner is or what the license is.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#235

Post by simonw »

kart23 wrote: post #5

> This is how we’ve managed security on our social networks – our more robust AI systems identify and stop threats from less sophisticated actors who often use smaller scale AI systems. Ok, first of all, has this really worked? AI moderators still can't capture the mass of obvious spam/bots on all their platforms, threads included. Second, AI detection doesn't work, and with how much better the systems are getting, i…

"AI detection doesn't work, and with how much better the systems are getting, it's probably never going to, unless you keep the best models for yourself"

I don't think that's true. I don't think even the best privately held models will be able to detect AI text reliably enough for that to be worthwhile.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#236

Post by gpm »

whimsicalism wrote: post #219
gpm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think these private entities are willing to invest the massive capital it takes to keep the frontier advancing at that rate? Because whether they make 100x or 200x they make a shitload of money. > Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record? The problem isn't who is the steward of the capital. The problem is that economically efficient thing to do for a single company…

> Because whether they make 100x or 200x they make a shitload of money. It's not a certainty that they 'make a shitload of money'. Reducing the right tail payoffs absolutely reduces the capital allocated to solve problems - many of which are risky bets . Your solution absolutely decreases capital investment at the margin, this is indisputable and basic economics. Even worse when the taking is not due to some pre-exis…

You can't just look at the costs to an action, you also have to look at the benefits.

Of course I agree I'm going to stop marginal investments from occurring into research into patent-able technologies by reducing the expect profit. But I'm going to do so very slightly because I'm not shifting the expected value by very much. Meanwhile I'm going to greatly increase the investment into the existing technology we already have, and allow many more people to try to improve upon it, and I'm going to argue the benefits greatly outweigh the costs.

Whether I'm right or wrong about the net benefit, the basic economics here is that there are both costs and benefits to my proposed action.

And yes I'm going to marginally reduce future investments because the same might happen in the future and that reduces expected value. In fact if I was in charge the same would happen in the future. And the trade-off I get for this is that society gets the benefit of the same actually happening in the future and us not being hamstrung by unbreachable monopolies.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#237

Post by MisterPea »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #185
mattnewton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think this is one of the rare times where the small guys interests are aligned with Meta. Meta is scared of a world where they are locked out of LLM platforms, one where OpenAI gets to dictate rules around their use of the platform much like Apple and Google dictates rules around advertiser data and monetization on their mobile platforms. Small developers should be scared of a world where the only competit…

> I actually think this is one of the rare times where the small guys interests are aligned with Meta Small guys are the ones being screwed over by AI companies and having their text/art/code stolen without any attribution or adherence to license. I don’t think Meta is on their side at all

That's a separate problem which affects small to large players alike (e.g. ScarJo).

Small companies interests are aligned with Meta as they are now on an equal footing with large incumbent players. They can now compete with a similarly sized team at a big tech company instead of that team + dozens of AI scientists

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#238

Post by Zambyte »

the8thbit wrote: post #12

"Eventually though, open source Linux gained popularity – initially because it allowed developers to modify its code however they wanted ..." I find the language around "open source AI" to be confusing. With "open source" there's usually "source" to open, right? As in, there is human legible code that can be read and modified by the user? If so, then how can current ML models be open source? They're very large matric…

> If so, then how can current ML models be open source?

The source of a language model is the text it was trained on. Llama models are not open source (contrary to their claims), they are open weight.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#239

Post by Nesco »

ketzo wrote: post #127
rybosworld wrote: post #54

Huge companies like facebook will often argue for solutions that on the surface, seem to be in the public interest. But I have strong doubts they (or any other company) actually believe what they are saying. Here is the reality: - Facebook is spending untold billions on GPU hardware. - Facebook is arguing in favor of open sourcing the models, that they spent billions of dollars to generate, for free...? It follows th…

Meta is, fundamentally, a user-generated-content distribution company. Meta wants to make sure they commoditize their complements: they don’t want a world where OpenAI captures all the value of content generation, they want the cost of producing the best content to be as close to free as possible.

Especially because genAI is a copyright laundering system. You can train it on copyrighted material and none of the content generated with it are copyright-able, which is perfect for social apps

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#240

Post by simonw »

Oras wrote: post #13

This is obviously good news, but __personally__ I feel the open-source models are just trying to catch up with whoever the market leader is, based on some benchmarks. The actual problem is running these models. Very few companies can afford the hardware to run these models privately. If you run them in the cloud, then I don't see any potential financial gain for any company to fine-tune these huge models just to catc…

"Very few companies can afford the hardware to run these models privately."

I can run Llama 3 70B on my (64GB RAM M2) laptop. I haven't tried 3.1 yet but I expect to be able to run that 70B model too.

As for the 405B model, the Llama 3.1 announcement says:

> To support large-scale production inference for a model at the scale of the 405B, we quantized our models from 16-bit (BF16) to 8-bit (FP8) numerics, effectively lowering the compute requirements needed and allowing the model to run within a single server node.

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