Open source AI is the path forward • Hacker News Board

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#341

Post by codemusings » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:29 PM UTC

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #77

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].…

What about distributed training on volunteer hardware? Is that feasible?

Ever heard of SETI@home?

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#342

Post by CamperBob2 » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:29 PM UTC

1024core wrote: post #40

"open source AI" ... "open" ... "open" .... And you can't even try it without an FB/IG account. Zuck will never change.

It doesn't require an account. You do have to fill in your name and email (and birthdate, although it seems to accept whatever you feed it.)

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#343

Post by sterlind » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:32 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #278

aiauthoritydev wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The American healthcare industry demonstrates the tremendous benefits of rigidly applying this mindset. Why couldn’t law enforcement be private too? You call 911, several private security squads rush to solve your immediate crime issue, and the ones who manage to shoot the suspect send you a $20k bill. Seems efficient. If you don’t like the size of the bill, you can always get private crime insurance.

For a further exploration of this particular utopia, see Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#344

Post by suyash » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:32 PM UTC

Open source is a welcome step but what we really need is complete decentralisation so people can run their own private AI Models that keep all the data private to them. We need this to happen locally on laptops, mobile phones, smart devices etc. Waiting for when that will become ubiquitous.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#345

Post by inetknght » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:33 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #192

rvnx wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of NVIDIA it's even more sneaky. They are an intellectual property company holding the rights on plans to make graphic cards, not even a company actually making graphic cards. The government could launch an initiative "OpenGPU" or "OpenAI Accelerator", where the government orders GPUs from TSMC directly, without the middleman. It may require some tweaking in the law to allow exception to intellectual prop…

y'all really don't understand how these actions would seriously harm capital markets and make it difficult for private capital formation to produce innovations going forward.

> y'all really don't understand how these actions would seriously harm capital markets and make it difficult for private capital

Reflexively, I count that harm as a feature. I don't like private capital markets because I've been screwed by private capital on multiple occasions.

But you are right: I don't understand how these actions would harm. So please do expand your concerns.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#346

Post by ori_b » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:33 PM UTC

advael wrote: post #324

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 way…

> If that ever stops being the case, you should fork rather than trust their judgment.

Fork what? The secret sauce is in the training data and infrastructure. I don't think either of those is currently open.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#347

Post by CamperBob2 » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:34 PM UTC

Flimm wrote: post #164

mkolodny wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Llama’s code is open source: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/llama/model.p...

No, it's not. The Llama 3 Community License Agreement is not an open source license. Open source licenses need to meet the criteria of the only widely accepted definition of "open source", and that's the one formulated by the OSI [0]. This license has multiple restrictions on use and distribution which make it not open source. I know Facebook keeps calling this stuff open source, maybe in order to get all the good wi…

Open source licenses need to meet the criteria of the only widely accepted definition of "open source", and that's the one formulated by the OSI [0]

Who died and made OSI God?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#348

Post by Palomides » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #337

Palomides wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source available is absolutely not the same as open source you are playing very loosely with terms that have specific, widely accepted definitions (e.g. https://opensource.org/osd ) I don't get why you think it would be useful to call LLMs with published weights "open source"

> specific, widely accepted definitions Realistically, nobody outside of Hacker News commenters have ever cared about the OSD. It's just not how the term is used colloquially.

who says open source colloquially? ime anyone who doesn't care about software licenses will just say free (per free beer)

and (strong personal opinion) any software developer should have a firm grip on the terminology and details for legal reasons

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#349

Post by chasd00 » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

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.

All the content generated by llms (good or bad) is going to end up back in Facebook/Instagram and other social media sites. This enables Meta to show growth and therefore demand a higher stock price. So it makes sense to get content generation tools out there as widely as possible.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#350

Post by zoogeny » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

Totally tangential thought, probably doomed to be lost in the flood of comments on this very interesting announcement.

I was thinking today about Musk, Zuckerberg and Altman. Each claims that the next version of their big LLMs will be the best.

For some reason it reminded me of one apocryphal cause of WW1, which was that the kings of Europe were locked in a kind of ego driven contest. It made me think about the Nation State as a technology. In some sense, the kings were employing the new technology which was clearly going to be the basis for the future political order. And they were pitting their own implementation of this new technology against the other kings.

I feel we are seeing a similar clash of kings playing out. The claims that this is all just business or some larger claim about the good of humanity seem secondary to the ego stakes of the major players. And when it was about who built the biggest rocket, it felt less dangerous.

It breaks my heart just a little bit. I feel sympathy in some sense for the AIs we will create, especially if they do reach the level of AGI. As another tortured analogy, it is like a bunch of competitive parents forcing their children into adversarial relationships to satisfy the parent's ego.