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

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

#81

Post by ForHackernews »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #30
bloppe wrote: 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

OSS only dominates for software that is commoditized and the published computer science research for that software domain is close to the frontier. OSS struggles at being relevant when software is non-commodity e.g. office suites. In software domains like databases where the state-of-the-art computer science research is often unpublished, OSS struggles to be relevant at the higher end of the market on technical merit…

LLMs are nearly commoditized already. I can switch between a dozen of them from four different providers as easily as flipping a toggle in my VSCode editor.

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

#82

Post by sigmoid10 »

thatguymike wrote: post #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 A…

The Manhatten project cost about $40 billion in total adjusted for inflation. Anthropic's latest funding round alone raised $65 billion.

The entire Apollo project at the peak of the cold war cost about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's approximately what OpenAI and Anthropic have raised together in total until now.

I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and economic climate. The LHC cost less than $10 billion by comparison and it was spread out over a much longer timeframe.

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

#84

Post by pjc50 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #82
thatguymike wrote: post #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 A…

The Manhatten project cost about $40 billion in total adjusted for inflation. Anthropic's latest funding round alone raised $65 billion. The entire Apollo project at the peak of the cold war cost about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's approximately what OpenAI and Anthropic have raised together in total until now. I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and eco…

> I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and economic climate.

I'm a believer in Keynes' "anything we can do we can afford". It could be afforded .. if there was a sufficiently good reason. And there isn't. This is way behind "governments, especially the EU, should have a sovereign cloud". It is also way behind "governments need to keep global warming below 2C by the end of the century" and "governments need to ensure affordable energy", objectives which the current AI buildout is in direct conflict with.

This is before we get into the question of whether AI has net positive social value in non-software use cases. Even in software the case for AI is explicitly job-destroying and raising electricity prices for everyone else.

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

#85

Post by bs87 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #82
thatguymike wrote: post #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 A…

The Manhatten project cost about $40 billion in total adjusted for inflation. Anthropic's latest funding round alone raised $65 billion. The entire Apollo project at the peak of the cold war cost about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's approximately what OpenAI and Anthropic have raised together in total until now. I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and eco…

Govts can take it over. Corporations dont maintain standing armies. So there is a pecking order that corps have never been able to invert. They rely on Govt for their own security.

History is full of these take overs if there is risk(usually happens after some catastrophe). See the finance sector(once upon a time private banks invented and printed money), nuclear industry, febrtilizer industry, crypto, a whole bunch of processes in biotech/synthbio. Classic textbook example is the East India Company. It was much richer that the British Govt or the King.

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

#86

Post by roysting »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #82
thatguymike wrote: post #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 A…

The Manhatten project cost about $40 billion in total adjusted for inflation. Anthropic's latest funding round alone raised $65 billion. The entire Apollo project at the peak of the cold war cost about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's approximately what OpenAI and Anthropic have raised together in total until now. I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and eco…

> I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and economic climate.

You understand how the system works if you’re thinking in terms of government/non-government. The current political and economic state is not a bug, it’s by design which serves a purpose.

Remember, the purpose of a system is what it does

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

#87

Post by sylware »

FOSS is far from enough anymore.

_LEAN_ FOSS, including the SDK then the computer languages too.

All computer languages with an ultra-complex syntax are excluded de facto.

Then there is the stability in time.

developer/vendor lock-in on software, planned obsolescence, are much more common in FOSS nowdays.

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

#88

Post by lukewarm707 »

lukewarm707 wrote: post #43
hereme888 wrote: post #5

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.

AGI is not software on the small chance that the four billionaires who currently have near-exclusive control of closed sota models, (that is altman, amodei, zuckerberg and musk), are not fleecing their investors and actually build AGI, closed source leaves a choice of powerful government or powerful oligopoly/monarchy. further explanation of this list: musk - structural command zuckerberg - structural command altman…

if i'm wrong i would like to understand

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

#90

Post by jleyank »

Listening to those pushing AI, why should we fund open source developers when we can reproduce their work with a few judiciously chosen LLM prompts? Perhaps the AI companies should fund FOSS so as to get more solutions to memorize but normals?
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