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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#721

Post by sumedh »

Havoc wrote: post #543
light_triad wrote: post #354

They are positioning themselves as champions of AI open source mostly because they were blindsided by OpenAI, are not in the infra game, and want to commoditize their complements as much as possible. This is not altruism although it's still great for devs and startups. All FB GPU investments is primarily for new AI products "friends", recommendations and selling ads. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy…

> they were blindsided by OpenAI Given the mountain of GPUs they bought at precisely the right moment I don't think that's entirely accurate

> Given the mountain of GPUs they bought at precisely the right moment I don't think that's entirely accurate

If I remember correctly, FB didnt buy those GPUs because of Open AI, they were going to buy it anyway but Mark said whatever we are buying let's double it.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#722

Post by tessellated »

codemusings wrote: post #341
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ever heard of SETI@home? https://setiathome.berkeley.edu

Followed the link and got two, for me, new infos: both the project and Drake are dead.

Used to contribute in the early 2000s with my Pentium for a while.

Ever got any results?

Also, for training LLMs, I understand there is a huge bandwith problem with this approach.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#723

Post by rocgf »

sensanaty wrote: post #718

Meanwhile Facebook is flooded with AI-generated slop with hundreds of thousands of other bots interacting with it to boost it to whoever is insane enough to still use that putrid hellhole of a mass-data-harvesting platform. Dead internet theory is very much happening in real time, and I dread what's about to come since the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap. And people on this site a…

I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's is not necessarily the case that "the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap". You only need a relatively small number of bad actors for this to be the case.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#724

Post by [deleted] »

sebastiennight wrote: post #525

I've summarized this entire thread in 4 lines (didn't even use AI for it!) Step 1. Chick-Fil-A releases a grass-fed beef burger to spite other fast-food joints, calls it "the vegan burger" Step 2. A couple of outraged vegans show up in the comments, pointing out that beef, even grass-fed beef, isn't vegan Step 3. Fast food enthusiasts push back: it's unreasonable to want companies to abide by this restrictive definit…

[deleted]

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#725

Post by saurik »

llm_trw wrote: post #694
Phelinofist wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they not run on a computer?

So does a video. Is a video open source if you're given the permissions to edit it? To distribute it? Given the files to generate it? What if the files can only be open in a proprietary program? Videos aren't software and neither are llms.

If a video doesn't have source code, then it can't be open source. Likewise, if you feel that an LLM doesn't have source code because of some property of what it is -- as you claim it isn't software and somehow that means that it abstractly removes it from consideration for this concept (an idea I think is ridiculous, FWIW: an LLM is clearly software that runs in a particularly interesting virtual machine defined by the model architecture) -- then; somewhat trivially, it also can't be open source. It is, as the person you are responding to says, at best "open weights".

If a video somehow does have source code which can "generate it", then the question of what it means for the source code to the video to be open even if the only program which can read it and generate the video is closed source is equivalent to asking if a program written in Visual Basic can ever be open source given that the Visual Basic compiler is closed source. Personally, I can see arguments either way on this issue, though most people seem to agree that the program is still open source in such a situation.

However, we need not care too much about the answer to that specific conundrum, as the moral equivalent of both the compiler and the runtime virtual machine are almost always open source. What is then important is much easier: if you don't provide the source code to the project, even if the compiler is open source and even if it runs on an open source machine, clearly the project -- whatever it is that we might try to be discussing, including video files -- cannot be open source. The idea that a video can be open source when what you mean is the video is unencrypted and redistributanle but was merely intended to be played in an open source video player is absurd.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#726

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

sensanaty wrote: post #718

Meanwhile Facebook is flooded with AI-generated slop with hundreds of thousands of other bots interacting with it to boost it to whoever is insane enough to still use that putrid hellhole of a mass-data-harvesting platform. Dead internet theory is very much happening in real time, and I dread what's about to come since the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap. And people on this site a…

I think there's room for a middle-ground. I agree that there's a lot of slop being generated and shared around. Part of it is due to the initial excitement over these AI tools. Part of it is that most AI tools still kinda suck at the moment. In the long term I expect tools to get way better, which I'm hopefully could help enable smaller teams of people than ever before to execute on their creative vision.

Personally I have tons of creative ideas which I think would be interesting and engaging but for which I lack the resources to bring into this world, so I'm hoping that in the long term AI tools can help bridge this gap. I'm really hopeful for a world where people from all over the world can share their creative stories, rather than being mostly limited to a few rich people in Hollywood.

Unfortunately I do expect this to end up being the minority of content, especially as we continue being flooded by increasing amounts of trash. But maybe that's just opening up the opportunity for someone to develop new content curation tools. If anything, even before the rise of AI stuff there were mountains of content, and we saw with the rise of TikTok that a good recommendation algorithm still leaves room for new platforms.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#727

Post by sumedh »

mesebrec wrote: post #72
redleader55 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Use it for whatever you want(conditions apply), but not if you are Google, Amazon, etc. If you become big enough talk to us." That's how I read the license, but obviously I might be missing some nuance.

You also can't use it for training or improving other models. You also can't use it if you're the government of India. Neither can sex workers use it. (Do you know if your customers are sex workers?) There are also very vague restrictions for things like discrimination, racism etc.

> You also can't use it if you're the government of India.

Why is that?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#729

Post by have_faith »

sensanaty wrote: post #718

Meanwhile Facebook is flooded with AI-generated slop with hundreds of thousands of other bots interacting with it to boost it to whoever is insane enough to still use that putrid hellhole of a mass-data-harvesting platform. Dead internet theory is very much happening in real time, and I dread what's about to come since the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap. And people on this site a…

The feed certainly is, but I suspect most activity left on Facebook is happening in group pages. Groups are the only thing I still log in for as some of them, particularly the local ones, have no other way of taking part. They are also commonly membership by request and actively moderated. If I had the time (and energy) I might put some effort into advocating to moving to something else, but it will be an uphill battle.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#730

Post by ChanderG »

I think all this discussion around Open-source AI is a total distraction from the elephants in the room. Let's list what you need to run/play around with something like Llama:

1. Software: this is all Pytorch/HF, so completely open-source. This is total parity between what corporates have and what the public has.

2. Model weights: Meta and a few other orgs release open models - as opposed to OpenAI's closed models. So, ok, we have something to work with.

3. Data: to actually do anything useful you need tons of data. This is beyond the reach of the ordinary man, setting aside the legality issues.

4. Hardware: GPUs, which are extremely expensive. Not just that, even if you have the top dollars, you have to go stand in a queue and wait for O(months), since mega-corporates have gotten there before you.

For Inference, you need 1,2 and 4. For training (or fine-tuning), you need all of these. With newer and larger models like the latest Llama, 4 is truly beyond the reach of ordinary entities.

This is NOTHING like open-source, where a random guy can edit/recompile/deploy software on a commodity computer. Wrt LLMs, Data/Hardware are in the equation, the playing field is complete stacked. This thread has a bunch of people discussing nuances of 1 and 2, but this bike-shedding only hides the basic point: Control of LLMs are for mega-corps, not for individuals.

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