Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work?
It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc.
Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.
> Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work?
It's worse than this, it's more like our thinking. There's already plummetting math grades [1], handing over our thinking to AI megacorps where there's likely to be a monopoly or duopoly is an incredibly dangerous thing for humanity as a whole.
If humanity is over-reliant on frontier labs' models to perform work, the result is a dependence on the actual intelligence of these models -- not on human intelligence. This could be a small reason, on top of many others, why investors are throwing billions of dollars a bit "carelessly" to these labs -- they might know how easily people can get hooked. It's a bit like drugs, seeing the models do the "hard work" (the deep, challenging thinking) for you.
The conundrum which tricks me though - is this a net negative or a positive? If humans are less intelligent, but their output is 2-3 times more intelligent (with AI), what's the result? At what point do we, as humans, stop comprehending anything and give all intelligent work to the neural nets?
And if that does happen, could we live in a society where no work is needed? To me, it seems like a dystopian net positive. But, at the same time, it feels surreal.
It might seem far-fetched to ask these, but I think these questions are getting more prevalent by the day.
I've been contemplating a decentralized model training system for some time using volunteer machines that we all contribute. But, it is astronomically difficult. The communication speeds are untenable.
And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datum.
But, I'm just one person with an idea and I don't have infinite funds to make this happen. This isn't a small project.
Maybe now there would be interest in something like this, now that entire frontier labs are being banned from making further progress.
The total power of all GPUs on the planet dwarf the capabilities of all existing data centers, if we had a way to harness them in a distributed way efficiently. We wouldn't be able to train a Fable as fast as them, but eventually having access is better than never having access.
With open-weight AI, there might not be an incentive to put large sums of capital towards training / research. There might be a donation fund of some sorts, but it certainly won't reach the level of fundraising that the frontier labs are receiving.
Because of this, I think it might not be possible to have AI *only* open-weight; major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google will likely stay for good, with better models than open-source versions.
I think it might look something like Photoshop & GIMP, with Photoshop being a frontier lab, and GIMP being the open-weight model. GIMP is decent for many different image editing workflows, but Photoshop is just better.
I would definitely prefer to have an open-weight model better than frontier labs'. Though I don't think it's possible.
I think the same, but I also think that local AI is actually inevitable, even if not open source models. I wouldn't be surprised to see OpenAI and others release an on-prem product. Whether that's effectively an appliance rack, or some other form, people (large companies) are going to want to run inference locally for data sovereignty & cost controls. Especially if we get to a point where companies want AI integrated into manufacturing and other air-gapped networks.
I do believe that if OpenAI and others release an open-weight model that is better or on par with their frontier variants, it might ruin their primary business model.
That is, of course, unless they develop their own hardware specifically to run this open model. But, that does ruin the point of open models.
When/if gains slow down, I can definitely see branching out into hardware to sell for on-prem inference once the models can be etched into the silicon with hard wired weight chips. I'd guess maybe at least 5+ years away from that though.
That is fantastic news then, if commercial product products will always be better than open source, and open source products will continue to get better
Agreed. The only "issue" is that commercial products will always be ahead, with less friction for most users. This ultimately results in most people using these over open-weight variants. Users might not even be aware that the open-model variants exist. Similar to Windows / MacOS and Linux.
Which is the nearterm future that we must demand: a stop to the amounts of capital flowing to ASI research. Join me, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI’s-founding-charter in saying the obvious, y’all; Pause AI, now.
It should be clear by now that there’s a whole universe of work to do with the models we have today, from studying to securing to ‘harness’ing. There are tons of economic benefits to be reaped already, if applied carefully. Doesn’t that sound nicer than rolling the dice with the lives of trillions?
to me Open Source, like Free Software, is something i can run on my own computer. any AI system that runs on a computer that i do not control is by my definition not Open Source.
so how then can Open Source AI win? it can't even compete. even if we collect enough money and create a dedicated Open Source organization to build and run a community owned AI datacenter, how does that help?
When kubernetes was released there were very few people who could run it, and even less that could run it usefully.
Right now there a few people who can run a 1T model at home, even less who can run a 5T model and probably single digits who can run a 10T model.
But if an open source 10T model was available you can be sure people would find new ways to quantize it, new ways to configure hardware and and new ways to think about problems that would make it useful.
1T+ models (Deepseek v4, Kimi K2.6 etc) are available as open weights now, and for ~$5000-$10000 you can run them usefully at home. 2 years ago no on was contemplating that.
$250K to run a 10T model might be possible now. There are many companies that will pay that, and that will push the tools and techniques downwards for the rest of us.
Qwen models are actually very competitive with frontier models, and you can run them on your local computer. Gotta have a decent graphics card and by that time the current cost of the rig may not justify it over paying $100/month for cloud model but it’s all out there.
If RAM prices ever come down, you can have a machine that can run a capable local model.
Qwen 2.5 72B is surprisingly capable, almost on par with GPT-4o if not a little better. You can run it on a 128GB Mac Studio with 8-bit quantization. You need about 77GB for the weights and ~15GB for your context window & cache.
Pricing remains to be seen, but there's also those new nvidia laptops coming out the surface laptop ultra should have 128GB RAM w/ Blackwell GPU, they're saying 1 petaflop of AI compute, if you can tolerate Windows (no idea if it'll boot Linux until the hardware is out).
These models are roughly ~1 year or less behind the frontier models. We really just need hardware to catch up and alleviate the price pressure on RAM.
I agree with sentiment and mission, but the goal is inseparable from politics at this point.
Being Open Source (tm) will not protect you from the government/others imposing controls on your silicon or what it is allowed to do, which is already happening around the world.
Even having the models be open source won't fix the regulation or economic incentives. Which is not something you can compress into a couple of paragraphs.
AI is civilizational infrastructure and it needs civilizational solutions. Not just source.
Available components must win. I’ve often been a critic of open weights and open architectures that give very few normal people access. What’s the point of releasing the plans for a nuclear reactor if no one can have the fuel?
This is not about information but about capital.
Even if we had free access to the weights of the best models in the world: who would be able to run them?
Technology is deflationary. I am holding in my hand a device that would have been a supercomputer 30 years ago. It costed me a couple of hundreds of dollars.
These models and the hardware they are running on will get even more efficient. We are nowhere near the physical limits of what we can achieve.
Well it would be anyone that has access to a datacenter to run them. Which is a ton of companies. And those companies will rent out access to those models. And if they do something stupid to screw over consumers, well the whole point is that there would be a bunch of companies that you could use instead.
Winning is a tall order. I'm just hoping it'll get good enough while allowing us to run it locally with no idiotic "safety" controls or censorship of any sort. Looks like the best open weight models are at Sonnet level, if they get to Opus 4.6 level it's gonna be perfect.
I hope the news moves this debate past "open weights vs. closed APIs" as the only axis. Open weights matter, definitely, but applied AI also needs open infrastructure around the model and it feels a bit like I'm yelling into the abyss highlighting the future we're incentivizing - cognition rented from a few institutions with access changing based on policy, geopolitics and platform incentives like advertising
On this very thread you already have people talking about "open weights" and similar nonsense. What is open about them? They're free to download, but that hardly qualifies as open. Where is the source? Where are the instructions to modify and build your own?
I'd never though I'd have to utter the expression "open as in beer".
The blatant attempt at manipulating vocabulary here is... quite blatant.
Not to be that guy, but the correct term is Open Weight LLM. And I’d argue it already has. Many open models are already very competitive with closed models at a fraction of the cost.
Were it not for China, America would have restricted the most advanced models from being used outside the US. NATO members would have access to GPT-4, with some countries entirely blocked from AI.
Biden's GPU controls should give you an idea. Thank you, China. Open source AI must win.
Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work?
It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc.
Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.
It's worse than this, it's more like our thinking. There's already plummetting math grades [1], handing over our thinking to AI megacorps where there's likely to be a monopoly or duopoly is an incredibly dangerous thing for humanity as a whole.
[1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...
The conundrum which tricks me though - is this a net negative or a positive? If humans are less intelligent, but their output is 2-3 times more intelligent (with AI), what's the result? At what point do we, as humans, stop comprehending anything and give all intelligent work to the neural nets?
And if that does happen, could we live in a society where no work is needed? To me, it seems like a dystopian net positive. But, at the same time, it feels surreal.
It might seem far-fetched to ask these, but I think these questions are getting more prevalent by the day.
And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datum.
But, I'm just one person with an idea and I don't have infinite funds to make this happen. This isn't a small project.
Maybe now there would be interest in something like this, now that entire frontier labs are being banned from making further progress.
The total power of all GPUs on the planet dwarf the capabilities of all existing data centers, if we had a way to harness them in a distributed way efficiently. We wouldn't be able to train a Fable as fast as them, but eventually having access is better than never having access.
Because of this, I think it might not be possible to have AI *only* open-weight; major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google will likely stay for good, with better models than open-source versions.
I think it might look something like Photoshop & GIMP, with Photoshop being a frontier lab, and GIMP being the open-weight model. GIMP is decent for many different image editing workflows, but Photoshop is just better.
I would definitely prefer to have an open-weight model better than frontier labs'. Though I don't think it's possible.
That is, of course, unless they develop their own hardware specifically to run this open model. But, that does ruin the point of open models.
I learn it hard from prusa 3d printer open model
It should be clear by now that there’s a whole universe of work to do with the models we have today, from studying to securing to ‘harness’ing. There are tons of economic benefits to be reaped already, if applied carefully. Doesn’t that sound nicer than rolling the dice with the lives of trillions?
to me Open Source, like Free Software, is something i can run on my own computer. any AI system that runs on a computer that i do not control is by my definition not Open Source.
so how then can Open Source AI win? it can't even compete. even if we collect enough money and create a dedicated Open Source organization to build and run a community owned AI datacenter, how does that help?
so what exactly is the demand here?
Right now there a few people who can run a 1T model at home, even less who can run a 5T model and probably single digits who can run a 10T model.
But if an open source 10T model was available you can be sure people would find new ways to quantize it, new ways to configure hardware and and new ways to think about problems that would make it useful.
1T+ models (Deepseek v4, Kimi K2.6 etc) are available as open weights now, and for ~$5000-$10000 you can run them usefully at home. 2 years ago no on was contemplating that.
$250K to run a 10T model might be possible now. There are many companies that will pay that, and that will push the tools and techniques downwards for the rest of us.
Qwen 2.5 72B is surprisingly capable, almost on par with GPT-4o if not a little better. You can run it on a 128GB Mac Studio with 8-bit quantization. You need about 77GB for the weights and ~15GB for your context window & cache.
Pricing remains to be seen, but there's also those new nvidia laptops coming out the surface laptop ultra should have 128GB RAM w/ Blackwell GPU, they're saying 1 petaflop of AI compute, if you can tolerate Windows (no idea if it'll boot Linux until the hardware is out).
These models are roughly ~1 year or less behind the frontier models. We really just need hardware to catch up and alleviate the price pressure on RAM.
Being Open Source (tm) will not protect you from the government/others imposing controls on your silicon or what it is allowed to do, which is already happening around the world.
Even having the models be open source won't fix the regulation or economic incentives. Which is not something you can compress into a couple of paragraphs.
AI is civilizational infrastructure and it needs civilizational solutions. Not just source.
information wants to be free
These models and the hardware they are running on will get even more efficient. We are nowhere near the physical limits of what we can achieve.
And once it leaks, it's permanently in the wild.
Interesting times.
Or are we still collectively brainwashed by the strategic false equivalence established by Big AI CMOs?
I'd never though I'd have to utter the expression "open as in beer".
The blatant attempt at manipulating vocabulary here is... quite blatant.
Biden's GPU controls should give you an idea. Thank you, China. Open source AI must win.
Famously, the PowerMac G4 was briefly subject to export controls. Apple turned it into a marketing campaign.