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The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

jamesoclaire.com

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Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#71

Post by grebc »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #48
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back to the megathreads when this came up. Even here on HN. Plenty of people used the argument that it can't be done, for various reasons. And my point was that at one point or the other there were many "downsides" for all the tech that SpaceX already has. Reusable boosters were seen as "uneconomical" and "pointless unless they can fly 10 times" by industry experts. They're now flying 30+times a booster. LEO const…

Reusable boosters have clear upsides, though. Pretty much everything about data centers in space is worse than having them on Earth. Apart from niche use cases, the only reason you'd talk about data centers in space is if you had a company with rocket ships and needed a story to tie your rocket ships to the current AI craze.

And you had a lot of stock to sell to bagholders.

Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#72

Post by orwin »

RugnirViking wrote: post #55
orwin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mythos was outperformed by small, specific local models in multiple oss project.

i'd love to hear about this! do you have examples?

https://aisle.com/blog/aisle-discovers-6-new-cves-in-curl-in...

Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#73

Post by grebc »

isoprophlex wrote: post #62

Aren't these open models so cheap because they're (partially) chinese gov. sponsored, and because they're stealing and redistributing the IP that comes in?

And the American ones are stealing and redistributing the IP of every single person who authored anything on the internet at some point.

Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#75

Post by [deleted] »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #56
Jackobrien wrote: post #7

The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options: 1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities…

> Be apple where everyone else is Linux. Apple and Linux barely even compete in the same markets. Linux runs on the servers and embedded devices, Apple on the smartphones. Android is technically Linux but not in the "is a good analogy for open weight models" sense because Android is so deeply under the thumb of Google. The main place Linux and Apple actually compete is for PCs and laptops, and that's the market where…

[deleted]

Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#76

Post by clickety_clack »

fredley wrote: post #23
Jackobrien wrote: post #7

The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options: 1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities…

3) Buy all the RAM, increasing the barrier to entry to push back the tide a bit, in time for a juicy IPO.

4) Make it illegal to use anything but regulated models.

Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#77

Post by snootypoot »

i agree with his statement that the big companies and the string pullers in government are inching toward banning open models.allowing the plebs unrestricted access to things seems against the wishes of the "you will own nothing and be happy" / "you will rent everything on the cloud and subscribe to your appliances" crowd such as blackrock and so on.

anyone who disagrees is not seeing the forest, only the trees.

Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#78

Post by juancn »

90% of my model use is on local open-weights models.

The things that I need to automate do not need frontier models. Heck, even a gemma-4-12B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL can deal with a lot of complexity if properly guided (it can run on 16GB of unified memory, for example on a base model Macbook Air).

I've been using it to translate Javascript to a custom scripting language in a product I work for, just by providing a system prompt and an MCP tool to call the target compiler to check for errors.

Sometimes it converges faster than Opus 4.6 (I've tried) because it doesn't over-think stuff.

If it were a person I would say it knows less, but it's still smart.

I mean, you don't need the most powerful tool at all times. We treat AI as one-size-fits-all, and once cost gets in the way, it will matter.

Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#79

Post by Gud »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #56
Jackobrien wrote: post #7

The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options: 1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities…

> Be apple where everyone else is Linux. Apple and Linux barely even compete in the same markets. Linux runs on the servers and embedded devices, Apple on the smartphones. Android is technically Linux but not in the "is a good analogy for open weight models" sense because Android is so deeply under the thumb of Google. The main place Linux and Apple actually compete is for PCs and laptops, and that's the market where…

Apple tried to make servers(they were awesome btw) but lost to Linux.

Linux are on more phones than iOS.

Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

#80

Post by nickthegreek »

dubbie99 wrote: post #44
ForHackernews wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google already owns the app layer, and hardware, and they are a frontier-level AI research firm. I don't see how Anthropic or OpenAI survives being eaten by DeepSeek et al from the bottom of the stack and Google from the top.

The only reason people use google apps is because they are cheap and reliable. The user experience is awful. Have you ever tried to find a document you had open yesterday in drive?

You just got to https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/recent
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