[jsheard]

> There's plenty of open source AI out there that isn't Meta. It's just not as good.

To my knowledge all of the notable open source models are subsidised by corporations in one way or another, whether by being the side project of a mega-corp which can absorb the loss (Meta) or coasting on investor hype (Mistral, Stability). Neither of those give me much confidence that they will continue forever, especially the latter category which will just run out of money eventually.

For open source AI to actually be sustainable it needs to stand on its own, which will likely require orders of magnitude more efficient training, and even then the data cleaning and RLHF are a huge money sink.

[exe34]

if you can do 100x more efficient training with open source, closeAI can simply take that and train a model that's 100x bigger/longer/more tokens.

[bugglebeetle]

AKA why Unsloth is now YC backed for their even better (but closed source) fine-tuning.