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Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

nytimes.com

271–280 of 302 posts

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

#271
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…

This is exactly true, I get annoyed by Claude one day and switch to something else, and the only thing that's ever keeping me tied towards Claude is the ability to search my old chats easily. But Claude also makes it really hard to do that, so what am I even really paying for? Time to extract all my data, put it into a sqlite with FTS5 and make sure I never rely on the overly-opinionated, low-thinking PMs from these…

> search my old chats easily

Don't rely on chat history. Have it write and maintain summary files that you can import into different sessions, at least for anything important.

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

#272
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…

> 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…

I think you went from one extreme to another.

OpenAI and Anthropic rent their compute from AWS & friends. When we say large enterprises are moving to open weight models it means they are cutting out the middleman and renting the compute directly from AWS instead of giving OpenAI and Anthropic a margin.

> they have at least a 3-6 month head start

This is a moat of nothing. Our company still hasn’t gotten access to Fable so switching to open weight models would mean getting access to similar quality models. In some orgs they are still on 2025 models.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe open AI and Anthropic could just license their models to run on your own hardware. So a fixed cost instead of per token pricing or subscription with limits

This would require them to give you a copy of their models, which would quickly be leaked on the internet, and they know that, so it won't happen.

Google is already doing that since last year and the models where never leaked, so I don't think that would even be a problem.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/gemini-is-...

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe code that app and business. It’s a great idea like a kind of SETI@Home for business but I’m not sure the compute and latency will really be good enough unless you’re talking about a business with literally thousands of machines sitting half idle and always on, or always mostly on. i imagine it would take maybe 50-100 MacBook Pros running such a service to get to Claude level performance for one or two people.

Is there some mock input one could calculate to actually verify that? That many modern Mac Pros is no small potatoes when it comes to compute power. Someone must have a pre made formula anyone can use to do closer estimates?

Really not sure, the numbers aren’t too hard to run. GPUs in particular are really not doing very much most of the time. But spinning them up does max out the machine and make it hot and increase the power consumption quite a lot so it would be obvious the machine is getting stressed out all the time compared to its quiet idle background which is where it’s at for most browsing and basic stuff.

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

#275
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…

> 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…

"Traditional accounting depreciation would imply that purchasing local hardware is a terrible financial decision."

Depreciation is designed to _encourage_ purchasing of useful local tools, by incrementally matching fractions of the cost of the tool to the revenue it generates over its useful life. The fact that a graphics card might have a book value of $0 after five years of depreciation is a feature, not a bug.

Since the invention of corporation tax it has also had the benefit of offsetting tax over the same period, instead of just one big offset in the first year.

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

#276
post #246

Spent most of today reworking a rack and rig of gpus for all of our internal ai work… our big server is 8 rtx 6000 pro and 3 psu, I definitely feel I made a mistake not upgrading our wall power to 240v but so far we have multiple 30amp 120v and with 3 PSU uninterrupted power we have been very stable. My big upgrade will be moving to epyc motherboard from threadripper so we get gen5x8 with bifurcation instead of what…

What kind of cost are you looking at and how many people could use it? I’d be interested to know what the payback period is like, because Claude code is getting ridiculously expensive.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Privacy is non-negotiable for corporate. Corporate doesn't care at all about privacy. It's why the run outlook and windows and let Microsoft scoop up all of their company secrets. It's why they hand every scrap of data they have on their customers to salesforce and surrender their data to Atlassian and use Confluence and JIRA over countless alternatives. All companies care about is that when data breaches happen pu…

Ah, Jira, the urinal of corporate cyberspace. You would literally be better off divining with some bunches of reeds than trying to figure out what the hell is going on with some stupid upside down Austrialian trash software.

Your welcome to use the wonderful BMC Helix remedyforce platform we are forced to use at work... I'll take jira any day over this pile of expensive, Gartner recommended garbage of a product.

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

#278

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…

"Traditional accounting depreciation would imply that purchasing local hardware is a terrible financial decision." Depreciation is designed to _encourage_ purchasing of useful local tools, by incrementally matching fractions of the cost of the tool to the revenue it generates over its useful life. The fact that a graphics card might have a book value of $0 after five years of depreciation is a feature, not a bug. Sin…

With all due respect, it sounds like you believe that when an asset is depreciated, it means the company gets to claim back the pro rata capex amount in tax. That's not remotely how it works. It's a business cost. Revenue minus costs equals profit, and that is taxable. Depreciation allows the business to declare lower profit (and thus pay less tax), but note that *the business is making less profit.* That's bad.

I'm not challenging the concept of depreciation. It's a necessary tax function. I'm explaining the business case for local LLMs is poor.

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

#279
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I have never heard of a cloud service of ISP actively taking corporate data and shoving it into other users inbox. You'd never hear about if it the cloud service was taking your corporate data and using it for countless other things though. Insider trading, selling leads to your competitors, pushing ads to your clients/customers with offers of their own products, using trends in what your company and others are doi…

The burden of proof is on you.

I doubt they want to risk their reputation, trust and agreements to make money in the ways you describe.

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

#280
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…

Even if I pay for a true large model, I am going to prefer an open model hosted in Europe/my country, not them.
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