The state of open source AI

Post by nonethewiser » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

horsawlarway wrote: post #193

nonethewiser wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frontier models are obviously superior. The question is if progress slows down.

in what context, and at what ROI? Because... I have use-cases where this is true, and use-cases where this falls flat on its face. I don't actually think it's obvious (at all, really) without defining what "superior" means. In the same way that I don't think it's obvious that a plane is superior to a car, or a boat, or a bike. They each do things the others don't, and excel in different spaces.

Post by ButlerianJihad » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

ctkhn wrote: post #352

slashdave wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations don't have armies and prisons. Get a grip.

There are corporations like Blackwater and CoreCivic that subcontract both of these for the US government today or Wagner (RIP) in Russia. The pinkertons and the US state have also both taken on the role of corporate muscle in the past when workers went on strike

Post by antman » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

babblingfish wrote: post #6

Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…

Post by ericd » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 10:07 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #273

ericd wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does. And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happe…

>One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does. Until very recently there would have been little point. What could China do that the US couldnt? I'm sure the US will start to do it in the not too distant future though. China is slowly leapfrogging the US on se…

Post by ericd » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

aeve890 wrote: post #280

ericd wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does. And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happe…

>One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does. From Wikipedia > British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager said in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military an…