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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#281

Post by Melatonic »

goda90 wrote: post #199
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].…

I'd like to see big programs to increase the amount of cheap, clean energy we have. AI compute would be one of many beneficiaries of super cheap energy, especially since you wouldn't need to chase newer, more efficient hardware just to keep costs down.

Yeah this would be the real equivalent of the program people are talking about above. That an investing in core networking infrastructure (like cables) instead of just giving huge handouts to certain corporations that then pocket the money.....

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#283

Post by causal »

mkolodny wrote: post #252
mesebrec wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying any python program is open source because the python runtime is open source. Inference code is the runtime; the code that runs the model. Not the model itself.

I disagree. The file I linked to, model.py, contains the Llama 3 model itself. You can use that model with open data to train it from scratch yourself. Or you can load Meta’s open weights and have a working LLM.

Yeah a lot of people here seem to not understand that PyTorch really does make model definitions that simple, and that has everything you need to resume back-propagation. Not to mention PyTorch itself being open-sourced by Meta.

That said the LLama-license doesn't meet strict definitions of OS, and I bet they have internal tooling for datacenter-scale training that's not represented here.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#284

Post by [deleted] »

yesco wrote: post #256
mupuff1234 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but don't you think the "not getting locked out" is just the pre-requisite for their eventual goal of locking everyone else out?

Does it really matter? Attributing goodwill to a company is like attributing goodwill to a spider that happens to clean up the bugs in your basement. Sure if they had the ability to, I'm confident Meta would try something like that, but they obviously don't, and will not for the foreseeable future. I have faith they will continue to do what's in their best interests and if their best interests happen to align with mi…

[deleted]

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#285

Post by chris_wot »

aiauthoritydev wrote: post #275
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].…

Overall government doing anything is a bad idea. There are cases however where government is the only entity that can do certain things. These are things that involve military, law enforcement etc. Outside of this we should rely on private industry and for-profit industry as much as possible.

That’s not correct. The American health care system is an extreme example of where private organisations fail overall society.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#286

Post by passion__desire »

resters wrote: post #126

This is really good news. Zuck sees the inevitability of it and the dystopian regulatory landscape and decided to go all in. This also has the important effect of neutralizing the critique of US Government AI regulation because it will democratize "frontier" models and make enforcement nearly impossible. Thank you, Zuck, this is an important and historic move. It also opens up the market to a lot more entry in the ar…

Probably, Yann Lecun is the Lord Varys here. He has Mark's ear and Mark believes in Yann's vision.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#287

Post by root_axis »

exe34 wrote: post #71
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one has bothered to release their training data If the FOSS community sets this as the benchmark for open source in respect of AI, they're going to lose control of the term. In most jurisdictions it would be illegal for the likes of Meta to release training data.

the training data is the source.

No. It's an asset used in the training process, the source code can process arbitrary training data.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#289

Post by avivo »

The FTC also recently put out a statement that is fairly pro-open source: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202...

I think it's interesting to think about this question of open source, benefits, risk, and even competition, without all of the baggage that Meta brings.

I agree with the FTC, that the benefits of open-weight models are significant for competition. The challenge is in distinguishing between good competition and bad competition.

Some kind of competition can harm consumers and critical public goods, including democracy itself. For example, competing for people's scarce attention or for their food buying, with increasingly optimized and addictive innovations. Or competition to build the most powerful biological weapons.

Other kinds of competition can massively accelerate valuable innovation.

The FTC must navigate a tricky balance here — leaning into competition that serves consumers and the broader public, while being careful about what kind of competition it is accelerating that could cause significant risk and harm.

It's also obviously not just "big tech" that cares about the risks behind open-weight foundation models. Many people have written about these risks even before it became a subject of major tech investment. (In other words, A16Z's framing is often rather misleading.) There are many non-big tech actors who are very concerned about current and potential negative impacts of open-weight foundation models.

One approach which can provide the best of both worlds, is for cases where there are significant potential risks, to ensure that there is at least some period of time where weights are not provided openly, in order to learn a bit about the potential implications of new models.

Longer-term, there may be a line where models are too risky to share openly, and it may be unclear what that line is. In that case, it's important that we have governance systems for such decisions that are not just profit-driven, and which can help us continue to get the best of all worlds. (Plug: my organization, the AI & Democracy Foundation; https://ai-dem.org/; is working to develop such systems and hiring.)

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#290

Post by mrfinn »

maxdo wrote: post #11

so that North Korea will create small call centers for cheaper, since they can get these models for free?

You guys really need to get over your bellicose POV of the world. Actually, before it destroys you. Really, is not necessary. Most people in the world just want to leave in peace, and see their children grow happily. For each data center NK would create there will be a thousand of peaceful, kind, and well-intentioned AI projects going on. Or maybe more.
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