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Open source AI must win

opensourceaimustwin.com

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231–240 of 538 posts

Re: Open source AI must win

#231

Post by rustcleaner »

ramcrissesangry wrote: post #89

As an person whos getting into tech and already developing a game, the fact that laptop prices since 2020 have increased by 20-40% is insane. It's delaying the time to create my game. I researched the reason for the cost spike, and most of it is from the excessive money put in ai Technically, the owners of AI could slow down the amount of GPUs and RAM they buy because AI has almost reached its most usable peak. Every…

They want to corner the compute market and destroy the personal [sovereign] aspect, so that you are forced to subscribe and pay them regularly [indefinitely] and the US security state can surveil you. Never subscribe, and never buy products from companies who subscribe. Starve them, bankrupt them! We do it by not subscribing!

Re: Open source AI must win

#233

Post by rustcleaner »

DonHopkins wrote: post #232
rustcleaner wrote: post #221

[flagged]

Instead, how about an open source robot that happily punches Nazis, drunk drivers, people who want to write racist poems, and unhinged trillionaire ketamine addicts who pee their pants, throw Nazi salutes, and hate their own trans daughters?

[flagged]

Re: Open source AI must win

#234

Post by andai »

palisade wrote: post #44

I'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…

>The communication speeds are untenable.

Can it be parallelized or not?

If you take a model, make two copies, and fine-tune each one on different data, what happens when you merge them? Does it work if you freeze different layers?

I think this works if the steps are small enough. And the transfer should become tenable if the steps are big enough. Where's the cutoff?

Re: Open source AI must win

#235

Post by DonHopkins »

rustcleaner wrote: post #233
DonHopkins wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead, how about an open source robot that happily punches Nazis, drunk drivers, people who want to write racist poems, and unhinged trillionaire ketamine addicts who pee their pants, throw Nazi salutes, and hate their own trans daughters?

[flagged]

Then perhaps it should also punch foaming at the mouth libertarians, too.

A society that maximizes individual freedom with no guardrails also maximizes freedom for fraudsters, polluters, violent extremists, drunk drivers, kiddie-porn-producing social networking xAIs, and people who use power to dominate others. At that point, the liberty of the strongest starts eroding the liberty of everyone else.

Funny how 'current-year ideology' never seems to include libertarianism. Be the fish that notices the unregulated toxic polluted water. Also be the fish that notices it's swimming in libertarian Kool-Aid.

Edit: Speak for yourself about how frustratingly hampered you are by society's guardrails. Stop whining and predictably regurgitating tired meaningless libertarian bullshit slop like a human stochastic parrot, and just write your own racist poetry and photoshop your own kiddie porn without the help of an LLM, if you really must. But restrict your drunk driving to off road, with just your own family in your CyberTruck, so you only cleanse your own genes from the pool.

Re: Open source AI must win

#236

Post by 18al »

What does the author mean by "win"?

Does he mean that the _best model_ should be an open source one (eg: today, something better than Fable 5), or just that open source models should be the default choice for most task?

The former seems an impossibility, closed labs can work off of open and their own closed research. Closed source will always be better. Well, at least until some late-stage enshittification dynamics cause the providers to hobble them.

The latter, becoming a default, not so much. But considering the deep-rooted nature of (for instance) Google, it certainly won't be a walk in the park. This seems to be a similar hurdle as dethroning Chrome as the default browser.

For the average ChatGPT user, I surmise that open-source models are already capable enough. Most people I know who use it (me included) are not paying for it, they are routed to the cheaper models.

What's needed here is everything else other than the model to be in place. Which is to say there isn't a sufficiently good open source ChatGPT app, every open source option requires more fiddling than the ChatGPT app.

No precedent comes to mind for non-tech-user software that is open source and also a default choice. The limitation is rarely from the core-tech capability; core-tech is often the same as what closed source uses.

Re: Open source AI must win

#237

Post by andai »

abhinavsharma wrote: post #69

Open-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…

They win when they hit saturation for a common task, which is already happening. The second big win will be when the average person can run it on their own hardware.

Re: Open source AI must win

#238

Post by sho »

ux266478 wrote: post #213
sho wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I replied to a child comment - this is a nice idea that just isn't tenable in reality. AI hardware isn't just hilariously faster than consumer GPUs, it's also hilariously more power-efficient and has hilariously better connectivity. Every one of these dimensions kills the idea. The far, FAR superior power efficiency means that even if you did harness every public GPU or GPU-like device on earth, you'd end up consu…

AI hardware is for inference, not training. Training uses normal HPC crap. Superpods aren't really power efficient, it's kind of a meme, and it stems from limiting the power draw of other components by having less of them. It's more of a rounding error. > you'd end up consuming so much excess electricity it would be cheaper on net to simply take the money that would have gone to the power bill and spend it on your ow…

> AI hardware is for inference, not training

Not sure what you are referring to, unless you don't think h100/h200/b200 are "AI hardware"

> Superpods aren't really power efficient

Maybe not compared to a specialized rig with multiple 4090s, but that is the best case for consumer hardware - the vast majority will be dramatically less efficient than that

Anyway, I agree the interconnect is by far the biggest obstacle and seems insurmountable, I should probably have led with that.

Re: Open source AI must win

#239

Post by SubiculumCode »

nullbio wrote: post #99
SubiculumCode wrote: post #85

Civilization is at a crossroads, or will be soon. Democratization of AI can be good up to a point, but existential threats can also be real, and democratization of existential threats is not a survivable policy.

It's actually the opposite. Democratization of intelligence is the only way to stop existential threats and render them useless. Right now, and likely forever, because biological threats can be sanctioned at a supply-chain level, the risk of AI is all digital. Fraud, phishing scams, spam, hacks, etc. The only way we harden the worlds infrastructure to the point that it can withstand attack from bad AI is if we have a…

That's a thesis.

Re: Open source AI must win

#240

Post by bitwize »

fluder_tw wrote: post #223
bitwize wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technology is deflationary. Not anymore! Well, if you're like Elon and already taking down the bottle of Cuatro Comas from the high shelf, the economies of scale will continue to work in your favor. But one of the really neat things about AI is that there is no limit in sight to the scaling incentive. More compute will always get you more: more training, more inference, more parameters, more capacity to build more…

> But one of the really neat things about AI is that there is no limit in sight to the scaling incentive. How you can be so confident? I can imagine there is some limit and with each scaling iteration gain you achieved will decrease so that further iterations would be more and more look pointless

I'm sure a limit will come around eventually. But plans are afoot to build city-sized data centers, and even then that's not enough to sate the AI superscalers' ambitions, hence Elon's talk about putting data centers in space. This is a level of compute scaling unheard of in our lifetime, and we're still a long, long way off from AGI. So while the juice may theoretically not be worth the squeeze at some point, with the current capacity we have there is no end within sight to the incentive to build more. It will take a number of years at least, and who knows how much environmental/economic destruction, before the dropoff in return on capex begins in earnest.
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