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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#321

Post by boringg »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #317
hubraumhugo wrote: post #112

The big winners of this: devs and AI startups - No more vendor lock-in - Instead of just wrapping proprietary API endpoints, developers can now integrate AI deeply into their products in a very cost-effective and performant way - Price race to the bottom with near-instant LLM responses at very low prices are on the horizon As a founder, it feels like a very exciting time to build a startup as your product automatical…

It creates the opposite of a flywheel effect for you. It creates a leapfrog effect.

AI might cannabalize a lot of first gen AI businesses.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#322

Post by spiralk »

pwdisswordfishd wrote: post #311
cs702 wrote: post #74

> We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. Bravo! While I don't agree with Zuck's views and actions on many fronts, on this occasion I think he and the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude. With this release, they have brought the cost of pretraining a frontier 400B+ parameter model to ZERO for pretty much ever…

Makes me wonder why he's really doing this. Zuckerberg being Zuckerberg, it can't be out of any genuine sense of altruism. Probably just wants to crush all competitors before he monetizes the next generation of Meta AI.

Its certainly not altruism. Given that Facebook/Meta owns the largest user data collection systems, any advancement in AI ultimately strengthens their business model (which is still mostly collecting private user data, amassing large user datasets, and selling targeting ads).

There is a demo video that shows a user wearing a Quest VR headset and asks the AI "what do you see" and it interprets everything around it. Then, "what goes well with these shorts"... You can see where this is going. Wearing headsets with AIs monitoring everything the users see and collecting even more data is becoming normalized. Imagine the private data harvesting capabilities of the internet but anywhere in the physical world. People need not even choose to wear a Meta headset, simply passing a user with a Meta headset in public will be enough to have private data collected. This will be the inevitable result of vision models improvements integrated into mobile VR/AR headsets.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#323

Post by wrs »

sailingparrot wrote: post #273
the8thbit wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't "[allow] developers to modify its code however they want", which is a critical component of "open source", and one that Meta is clearly trying to leverage in branding around its products. I would like them to start calling these "public weight models", because what they're doing now is muddying the waters so much that "open source" now just means providing an enormous binary and an open source harness to r…

Feels a bit like you are splitting hair for the pleasure of semantic arguments to be honest. Yes there are no source in ML, so if we want to be pedantic it shouldn't be called open source. But what really matters in the open source movement is that we are able to take a program built by someone and modify it to do whatever we want with it, without having to ask someone for permission or get scrutinized or have to pay…

Calling that “open source” renders the word “source” meaningless. By your definition, I can release a binary executable freely and call it “open source” because you can modify it to do whatever you want.

Model weights are like a binary that nobody has the source for. We need another term.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#324

Post by advael »

cs702 wrote: post #74

> We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. Bravo! While I don't agree with Zuck's views and actions on many fronts, on this occasion I think he and the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude. With this release, they have brought the cost of pretraining a frontier 400B+ parameter model to ZERO for pretty much ever…

Look, absolutely zero people in the world should trust any tech company when they say they care about or will keep commitments to the open-source ecosystem in any capacity. Nevertheless, it is occasionally strategic for them to do so, and there can be ancillary benefits for said ecosystem in those moments where this is the best play for them to harm their competitors

For now, Meta seems to release Llama models in ways that don't significantly lock people into their infrastructure. If that ever stops being the case, you should fork rather than trust their judgment. I say this knowing full well that most of the internet is on AWS or GCP, most brick and mortar businesses use Windows, and carrying a proprietary smartphone is essentially required to participate in many aspects of the modern economy. All of this is a mistake. You can't resist all lock-in. The players involved effectively run the world. You should still try where you can, and we should still be happy when tech companies either slip up or make the momentary strategic decision to make this easier

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#327

Post by lolinder »

JamesBarney wrote: post #259
lolinder wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source versus weights seems like a really pedantic distinction to make. As you say, the training code and training data would be worthless to anyone who doesn't have compute on the level that Meta does. Arguably, the weights are source code interpreted by an inference engine, and realistically it's the weights that someone is going to want to modify through fine-tuning, not the original training code and data. The fa…

https://llama.meta.com/llama3_1/use-policy/ The acceptable use policy is seems fine. Don't use it to break the law, solicit sex, kill people, or lie.

It's fine in that I'm happy to use it and don't think I'll be breaking the terms anytime soon. It's not fine in that one of the primary things that makes open source open is that an open source license doesn't restrict groups of people or whole fields from usage of the software. The policy has a number of such blanket bans on industries, which, while reasonable, make the license not truly open.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#328

Post by cmdrk »

epaulson wrote: post #56
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 National Science Foundation has been doing this for decades, starting with the supercomputing centers in the 80s. Long before anyone talked about cloud credits, NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture. (The office name is from the early 00s) - https://new.nsf.gov/cise/oac (To conn…

Yeah, the specific AI/ML-focused program is NAIRR.

https://nairrpilot.org/

Terrible name unless they low-key plan to make AI researchers' hair fall out.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#329

Post by phyrex »

pwdisswordfishd wrote: post #311
cs702 wrote: post #74

> We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. Bravo! While I don't agree with Zuck's views and actions on many fronts, on this occasion I think he and the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude. With this release, they have brought the cost of pretraining a frontier 400B+ parameter model to ZERO for pretty much ever…

Makes me wonder why he's really doing this. Zuckerberg being Zuckerberg, it can't be out of any genuine sense of altruism. Probably just wants to crush all competitors before he monetizes the next generation of Meta AI.

You can always listen to the investor calls for the capitalist point of view. In short, attracting talent, building the ecosystem, and making it really easy for users to make stuff they want to share on Meta's social networks

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#330

Post by wrs »

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.

I don’t think even that is true. I conjecture that Facebook couldn’t reproduce the model weights if they started over with the same training data, because I doubt such a huge training run is a reproducible deterministic process. I don’t think anyone has “the” source.
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