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Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

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71–80 of 134 posts

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps they realised it’s not a good policy? Citation needed that it's not a good policy. Parent comment explained why it was good, and your reply is "or perhaps it was actually bad". There's a simpler explanation as to why it was rolled back: the people with the most money and power didn't like it and wanted it gone, and worked over time to accomplish this.

so it could be two reasons 1. 90% tax is a net good for society but big bad capitalists colluded to reduce it in every country independently or 2. 90% is actually a bad policy and every country independently adopted against it including Nordic countries, China, India, USA you decide which one is more likely.

It's not "90% tax" it's 90% or similar tax rate at the highest band, which most people will never reach.

Despite you showing your bias by phrasing option 1 to look childish, I think it's more or less what happened, actually. It doesn't take much "collusion", just greed and short-sighted self-interest from greedy, short-sighted self-interested people with influence to wield.

And you till haven't cited how that 1) this definitely didn't happen and 2) high tax rates in the highest band is a bad idea.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#72
post #20

They already invest in open-source AI, but nothing is truly free. Commercial AI will usually dominate because devs are paid to make it their primary effort. Goodwill and part-time contributions cannot reliably compete with livelihood and profit incentives.

That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS

I think the main problem in LLM models is that you can not make a PR to an open source project to tweak some training parameters, prove it is an improvement and merge it.

If you can not run the training yourself you can not contribute. So open source contribution model does not work. All examples you gave have a fairly low threshold of capital expenditure required to be a contributor (basically a laptop).

Even back in the 90s a person could get a standard, but powerful, PC to do these things. The one exception was 3d graphics which took quite some time to become affordable and even there it was a single one-time expenditure (a workstation) per contributor.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#73
post #8

We really need to band together to fund / sponsor targeted inducement prizes (a la Nobel laureate Michael Kremer) for open models. Every 6-12 months, give out $200K to the first model to hit a min threshold on a set of ~5-10 hard benchmarks (+ perhaps one secret benchmark) using a total of 16GB / 32GB / 64GB / 128GB of VRAM (at a min context length of 200K), then move the threshold up. Quantization etc. is dealers ch…

Not sure that would even cover power for training

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#74
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS

I think the main problem in LLM models is that you can not make a PR to an open source project to tweak some training parameters, prove it is an improvement and merge it. If you can not run the training yourself you can not contribute. So open source contribution model does not work. All examples you gave have a fairly low threshold of capital expenditure required to be a contributor (basically a laptop). Even back i…

For normal OSS the only competition between contributors was for attention of maintainers to review and accept patches.

In an open-source LLM model contributors would compete with each other for computing resources for model tweaks and changes. The alternative model is that the contributor pays for the compute, but that increases the bar really high for contributions.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#75
post #20

They already invest in open-source AI, but nothing is truly free. Commercial AI will usually dominate because devs are paid to make it their primary effort. Goodwill and part-time contributions cannot reliably compete with livelihood and profit incentives.

That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS

all those have either a consulting company around it or few big corporate contributors

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#76
No, I want govt to tax themmore. So far frontier AI companies produce negative value to near everyone (by sheer power cost increase it adds essentially tax to every other business) but themselves economy wise.

Yeah, wooho, new model found a bunch of bugs, now the bad guys can do it too so security expenses spiked! It's only good for shovel sellers.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#77

They already invest in open-source AI, but nothing is truly free. Commercial AI will usually dominate because devs are paid to make it their primary effort. Goodwill and part-time contributions cannot reliably compete with livelihood and profit incentives.

[dead]

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#78

Just because a software is closed-source doesn't mean the knowledge can't be shared. You don't need to see the underlying code to explain to someone architectural patterns or best practices. The library analogy in the scenario would hold true if LLM providers refused to answer any questions about RL or Transformers. I am a big proponent of open-source open-weight models, but mostly because I think it's just a better…

I would not count on the market alone. Like customers do not always choose the technically best or cheapest option

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#79
Let me re-iterate the main lesson of decades of FOSS work: the advantages of open collaboration and knowledge-sharing are so enormous that FOSS software wins out eventually even if financial interest are stacked against it.

I fully agree with this article - please let's skip the chapter of closed and enshittified AI and go for the good stuff directly!

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#80
FOSS is the wrong analogy. Building frontier LLMs isn’t primarily an engineering discipline, it’s a scientific research program.

Of course we do have basically open source research programs, including most universities and big projects like CERN. But AI grew up in universities until it transpired that sufficient capital could only be found in the private sector.

It would be possible to make a decent publicly funded AI research program. But it would look more like the Manhattan or Apollo projects (which frontier labs already model themselves after) than some extra research grants for universities.

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