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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#821

Post by guitarlimeo »

ab5tract wrote: post #486
causal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Open weights" is a more appropriate term but I'll point out that these weights are also largely inscrutable to the people with the code that trained it. And for licensing reasons, the datasets may not be possible to share. There is still a lot of modifying you can do with a set of weights, and they make great foundations for new stuff, but yeah we may never see a competitive model that's 100% buildable at home. Edit…

If you can’t share the dataset, under what twisted reality are you fine to share the derivative models based on those unsharable datasets? In a better world, there would be no “I ran some algos on it and now it’s mine” defense.

Yeah was gonna say exactly the same thing. Weird how the legislation allows releasing LLMs trained on data that is not allowed to be shared otherwise.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#822

Post by sensanaty »

baby wrote: post #380
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…

Meta does a good thing HN spends a day figuring out how it’s actually bad

By virtue of it being Meta, it's automatically bad.

If we lived in a sensible world we'd have nuked Meta into a trillion tiny little pieces some time around the Cambridge Analytica bullshit.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#823

Post by guitarlimeo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38
candiddevmike wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of Meta's models are "open source" in the FOSS sense, even the latest Llama 3.1. The license is restrictive. And no one has bothered to release their training data either. This post is an ad and trying to paint these things as something they aren't.

> no one has bothered to release their training data If the FOSS community sets this as the benchmark for open source in respect of AI, they're going to lose control of the term. In most jurisdictions it would be illegal for the likes of Meta to release training data.

> In most jurisdictions it would be illegal for the likes of Meta to release training data.

How come releasing an LLM trained on that data is not illegal then? I think it should be.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#825

Post by krisoft »

piperswe wrote: post #625
verdverm wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analogies are always going to fall short. With LLM weights, you can modify them (quant, fine-tuning) to get something different, which is not something you do with compiled binaries. There are ample areas for collaboration even without being able to reproduce from scratch, which takes $X Millions of dollars, also something that a typical binary does not have as a feature.

You can absolutely modify compiled binaries to get something different. That's how lots of video game modding and ROM hacks work.

And we would absolutely do it more often if compiling would cost as much as training of an LLM costs now.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#826

Post by sensanaty »

xvector wrote: post #652
advael wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a dilemma at all. If Facebook can't release data it trains on because it would compromise user privacy, it is already a significant privacy violation that should be a scandal, and if it would prompt some regulatory or legislative remedies against Facebook for them to release the data, it should do the same for releasing the trained model, even through an API. The only reason people don't think about it thi…

> If Facebook can't release data it trains on because it would compromise user privacy, it is already a significant privacy violation that should be a scandal Thousands of entities would scramble to sue Facebook over any released dataset no matter what the privacy implications of the dataset are. It's just not worth it in any world. I believe you are not thinking of this problem from the view of the PM or VPs that wo…

> I feel the world is too hostile to big tech

Lmao what? If the world were sane and hostile to big tech, we would've nuked them all years ago for all the bullshit they pulled and continue to pull. Big tech has politicians in their pockets, but thankfully the "populist techno-pessimist" (read: normal people who are sick of billionaires exploiting the entire planet) are finally starting to turn their opinions, albeit slowly.

If we lived in a sane world Cambridge Analytica would've been the death knell of Facebook and all of the people involved with it. But we instead live in a world where psychopathic pieces of shit like Zucc get away with it, because they can just buy off any politician who knocks on their doors.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#827

Post by ygjb »

Geezus_42 wrote: post #614
hluska wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it from the perspective of an elected official: If it succeeds, you were ahead of the curve. If it fails, you were prudent enough to fund an investigation early. Either way, bleeding edge tech gives you a W.

Or you wasted a bunch of tax payer money on some over hyped and over funded nonsense.

Yeah. There is alot of over hyped and over funded nonsense that comes out of NASA. Some of it is hype from the marketing and press teams, other hype comes from misinterpretation of releases.

None of that changes that there have been major technical breakthroughs, and entire classes of products and services that didn't exist before those investments in NASA (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies for a short list). There are 15 departments and dozens of Agencies that comprise the US Federal government, many of whom make investments in science and technology as part of their mandates, and most of that is delivered through some structure of public-private partnerships.

What you see as over-hyped and over-funded nonsense could be the next ground breaking technology, and that is why we need both elected leaders who (at least in theory) represent the will of the people, and appointed, skilled bureaucrats who provide the elected leaders with the skills, domain expertise, and experience that the winners of the popularity contest probably don't have.

Yep, there will be waste, but at least with public funds there is the appearance of accountability that just doesn't exist with private sector funds.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#828

Post by shinycode »

cpursley wrote: post #805
shinycode wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a law or something that impose platforms to label any text that is only AI and text reworked by AI. And the possibility to filter both (we did this with industrial products). Then let humanity decide what it wants to feed itself with. I prefer to give up completely internet if it would only be filled with generated content. I gladly let it to people who enjoy that. Maybe a platform that label this and allows…

Can we do that for the mountains of ghost-written content and books as well?

My take is to explicitly mark a difference between human generated content and AI generated content. Not to label one superior to the other. It’s just to let people choose what they prefer. Like in chat bots for some companies they let you know you don’t talk to a human. Would you blindly accept a medical prescription generated by an AI ? Some people might even prefer the prescription made by the AI. All I’m saying is to inform people. After they make their choice.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#829

Post by oersted »

sharpshadow wrote: post #760
oersted wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an exciting concept, there's a huge wealth of gaming hardware deployed that is inactive at most hours of the day. And I'm sure people are willing to pay well above the electricity cost for it. Unfortunately, the dominant LLM architecture makes it relatively infeasible right now. - Gaming hardware has too limited VRAM for training any kind of near-state-of-the-art model. Nvidia is being annoyingly smart about th…

Couldn’t VRAM be subsidised with SSDs on a lower end machine? It would make it slower but maybe useful at last.

Perhaps, the landscape has improved a lot in the last couple of years, there are lots of implementation tricks to improve efficiency on consumer hardware, particularly for inference.

Although it is clear that the computing capacity of the GPU would be very underutilized with the SSD as the bottleneck. Even using RAM instead of VRAM is pretty impractical. It might be a bit better for chips like Apple's where the CPU, RAM and GPU are all tightly connected on the same SoC, and the main RAM is used as the VRAM.

Would that performance be still worth more than the electricity cost? Would the earnings be high enough for a wide population to be motivated to go through the hassle of setting up their machine to serve requests?

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