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Open source AI must win

opensourceaimustwin.com

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Re: Open source AI must win

#291

Post by logicchains »

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…

>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.

It is already possible: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08163 . You don't need to sync so frequently, so it can be done over normal internet, it's just less efficient (takes longer to converge).

Re: Open source AI must win

#292

Post by eunos »

jmyeet wrote: post #160

So I've long said that the valuation of OpenAI at a trillion(ish) dollars depends on OpenAI "winning" and "owning" AI and there being a sufficient moat to stay ahead of competition. Without that, the company is worth a fraction of that. Anthropic is probably positioned better here actually but it's still kinda true there too. Ever since a Chinese firm released DeepSeek I immediately came to the realization that any U…

Latest deepseek was trained with Huawei chips I think that's why the development velocity was rather slow from V3.2 onwards.

Unfortunately General Secretary Xi isn't as AGI pilled as Amodei.

Re: Open source AI must win

#293

Post by sschueller »

WarmWash wrote: post #75

Who is going to fund it? Training is unfathomably expensive. You have either VC funded models looking for a return on investment, or CCP funded models looking to solidify authoritarian "model Chinese society". Maybe there are some university 4B models, but I doubt those will carry far.

The internet, the world wide web, etc. and much of the research into new medical tech. All public money.

The fully open model Apertus (although not the frontier) was fully fundend by public Swiss institutions and a strategic national partners. I would not consider Switzerland to be a communist or totalitarian state...

Re: Open source AI must win

#294

Post by logicchains »

FabCH wrote: post #273

While it is not at all practical to train an LLM with tens or hundreds of billions of parameters on hobbyists hardware, what if there are other architectures that perform just as well but are easier to train by 1000 volunteers? I always wondered if 1000 1M parameter models fine-tuned to specific tasks with a small router could perform as well as 100B models. And I know this is roughly how MoE works, but current MoE m…

It is practical, albeit not as efficient: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08163 . But organizing enough people with decent-enough GPUs is the challenge.

Re: Open source AI must win

#295

Post by zozbot234 »

eunos wrote: post #290

My grim view is that it's just one incident away from some evil freaks to use ablated offline model for some nasty acts to have lawmakers lose their mind and try to regulate open source models and even consumer GPU. Think the latest 3d printers restriction.

> some evil freaks to use ablated offline model for some nasty acts

If this is a serious concern, why hasn't some red teaming effort demonstrated this possibility already? The fact of the matter is that ablation can't give a model world knowledge it doesn't have as part of training, it can only make the model confabulate. The "nasty" areas of concern are most notable for their world-knowledge requirements, which is where local models are at their weakest anyway.

Re: Open source AI must win

#296

Post by intothemild »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #42
george_max wrote: post #2

With open-weight AI, there might not be an incentive to put large sums of capital towards training / research. There might be a donation fund of some sorts, but it certainly won't reach the level of fundraising that the frontier labs are receiving. Because of this, I think it might not be possible to have AI *only* open-weight; major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google will likely stay for good, with better models…

the moat is in hardware, without capital intensive acquisition how tf they going to get that money ????? I learn it hard from prusa 3d printer open model

Well. Right now buying hardware to run your own models tops off at about 32gb VRAM at any price point that's not insane. Sure you can get a Mac mini, or a PC equivalent. But the problem is RAM.

More RAM means bigger models, which means smarter models.

Which is why Qwen and Gemma have been so interesting to a lot of us who run our own... Now 32gb VRAM isn't so bad, as these models can be run on that with decent results.

Where this gets interesting is in a couple years, when all the A100, etc, all the Enterprise hardware hits eBay.

Re: Open source AI must win

#297

Post by rsanek »

WarmWash wrote: post #75

Who is going to fund it? Training is unfathomably expensive. You have either VC funded models looking for a return on investment, or CCP funded models looking to solidify authoritarian "model Chinese society". Maybe there are some university 4B models, but I doubt those will carry far.

Perhaps an idea that could work is that if you're a lab that is releasing closed source models, you have to also release open source ones. gpt-oss is now old but was decent when it came out. Nemotron is solid, especially the recent ultra release. And Nvidia especially has a much better story vs Chinese models around releasing all parts (including pre and post training data), not just the model itself.

Re: Open source AI must win

#298

Post by esde »

WarmWash wrote: post #133
Grombobulous wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your concerns, although we still see pretty similarly large and complex things that remain open source today. I am astonished on a daily basis that my Linux computer is so close to the same experience as two operating systems put out by trillion dollar companies. It even does things that those commercial alternatives don’t do. Also, if DeepSeek is truly putting out models with 1/10th the cost of Western compe…

Software is "free" though, which is why it has such a vibrant open source scene. One guy can code for a weekend and fill the screens of 5 million with something fun by Monday. However, Once real costs are involved, participation tanks. Open source hardware, because it actually requires money to realize, has 1/10,000 the depth of open source software, if that. Obviously everyone wants an open source AI, but virtually…

[flagged]

Re: Open source AI must win

#299

Post by incrudible »

sho wrote: post #197
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…

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…

> 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 first part is not really true though, the chips are not that much faster, the DRAM is not that much faster, and in aggregate it does not matter because there is just so much more consumer hardware out there (although perhaps that is changing as supply shifts toward datacenters).

The interconnect and data locality is the problem. If you could train it like e.g. you can render a scene with monte carlo ray tracing, any result from any node could be merged with any other and the combined result would have converged closer to the limit. I am sure research in that direction exists, it just has not proven effective within the scales it has been attempted.

Re: Open source AI must win

#300

Post by dakolli »

sho wrote: post #157
dakolli wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I don't think insulting people is a great way to contribute. Not everyone who sees things differently than you has "psychosis". Your reflexively negative comments on anything relating to AI are as insight-free as they are numerous; it's all just vague shitting-on without even a hook or argument that could be engaged with and debated. It's pretty tiring, honestly. If you really think your point of view is valuable and…

I'll do better fo sho
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