information wants to be free
And once it leaks, it's permanently in the wild.
Interesting times.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Go ask Claude to criticize Anthropic and see how long your account stays active.
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.
The weights are the useful artifact here. You can modify them, fine tune them and do what you want with them.
Unlike binary software there is nothing limiting that.
It is also useful to have access to the training recipes and to some extent the data. But I'm of the opinion that learning on something is not copyright infringement, so there are many circumstances where distributing the raw training data will not be possible.
For me this is like Open Office: it is open source, and largely inspired by and learned from Microsoft Office. But they don't need to distribute MS Office for Open Office to be Open Source.
In addition there are models that meet the criteria you appear to propose. The AllenAI models are a good example.
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, or at least a significantly less amount of work, is needed? To me, it seems like a dystopian net positive.
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 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 their capabilities, 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.
These things can't even center a div correctly half the time.
Not everything is code. Just because it generates a shitty SaaS clone for you and that seemed magical, it does not mean we are approaching "AGI".
An AGI could design an Oil tanker, manage the project from start to finish, handle all contract negotiations and purchasables, payroll, scheduling. Then it could do that 50x over and start a leading logistics firms.
In reality an LLM can't even complete upwork projects that are worth $20 an hour more than 4% or the time.
Source:
https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard/rli
4% guys, 4%. It cannot complete entry level work on fucking Upwork 96% of the time. Stop falling for the marketing and sorry but an LLM will never be AGI you people are seriously morons.
Its literally just text autocomplete with some RLHF post training, holy shit im losing my mind. I want this hype to end so badly holy shit I need this to end.
It doesn't really matter for most use cases, because the way AI is working is capability saturation. https://www.delanceyukschoolschesschallenge.com/the-rising-t...
The only exception to this is fields that are inherently adversarial (to nature or others) and an edge relative to competition matters.
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.
A friend of mine asked me if I was optimistic about AI. I told him, it depends on who owns it. If the people own it, I'm optimistic. If the oligarchs own it, I'm pessimistic.
Just listen to what the SV ownership class says out loud. They openly discuss how China cannot "win the AI arms race" and how China's development is existential. Existential to who? It's impossible to fully subjugate people with agency.
george_max•1h ago
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.
thewebguyd•1h ago
george_max•1h ago
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.
thewebguyd•1h ago
cocoa19•30m ago
LPisGood•1h ago
george_max•57m ago
bbor•50m ago
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?
mufufu•33m ago
reilly3000•22m ago
tonyhart7•37m ago
I learn it hard from prusa 3d printer open model
pennomi•23m ago