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by OldGreenYodaGPT 683 days ago
Regulating open-source AI will only help giants like Google and OpenAI, stifling innovation. It creates barriers only they can afford, limiting competition and diversity. Open-source fosters transparency and rapid progress. We do not need government regulations, or we'll end up like Europe with China leading.
4 comments

The problem is that the OSI's definition of "Open Source" AI doesn't match their definition of "Open Source" software, or really anything.
I think all of the hand-wringing about open weights vs. open source, and which term to use, is an ideological point people are getting stuck on. I don’t think it’s a real problem.
> It creates barriers only they can afford, limiting competition and diversity.

I would argue this is inherent to the training and compute cost of all large language models.

Quantized Llama 3.1 can run on an Amazon GPU instance for $32/hr now
That's still prohibitively expensive for anyone that doesn't intend to make their money back. For training it's even more outrageous.
$64K isn’t even one developer’s salary.
And how many people can afford to pay a developer's salary after utilities and mortgage?
I think you’re missing my point: hiring someone is not that costly relative to training a billion-dollar model from scratch, so the barrier is definitely getting lower. An individual proprietor with a moderately successful business (or just business loans, let’s face it) can hire at least a couple of employees.
Small models can be fine-tuned to perform specific tasks with similar accuracy to large models. Small models can be served for internal use with a VERY modest hardware outlay.

There are also providers now that will let you upload low-rank adapters you have trained in top of open foundational models, so that you can use their efficient serverless infrastructure with your fine-tuned models. This requires even less capital.

None of this would exist had OpenAI’s vision of centralized, locked-down API access become the reality.

Comrade, open source is the wellspring of communism!

(As Microsoft explained years ago)

that doesn't explain why the white house doesn't see the need to regulate it - if anything it gives them more reason to.