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by floathub 82 days ago
Free software has never mattered more.

All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.

Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.
5 comments
CobrastanJorji 82 days ago
It's not just that open source code is useful in an age of AI, it's that the AI could only have been made because of the open source code.
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TacticalCoder 82 days ago
> All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.

Exactly.

> Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc.

It wouldn't even work. It's constantly using those.

I remember reading a Claude Code CLI install doc and the first thing was "we need ripgrep" with zero shame.

All these tools also all basically run on top of Linux: with Claude Code actually installing, on Windows and MacOS, a full linux VM on the system.

It's all open-source command line tools, an open-source OS and piping program one to the other. I'm on Linux on the desktop (and servers ofc) since the Slackware days... And I was right all along.

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gesis 82 days ago
The primary selling point of unix and unix-like operating systems has always been composability.

Without the ability to string together the basic utilities into a much greater sum, Unix would have been another blip.

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PaulDavisThe1st 82 days ago
> Free software has never mattered more.

But the Libre part of Free Software has never mattered less, at least so TFA argues and while I could niggle with the point, it's not wrong.

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pwdisswordfishy 82 days ago
Wow, some corps could offload some of their costs to "the community" (unpair labor), while end users are as disenfranchised as ever! How validating!
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andoando 82 days ago
Why isnt LLM training itself open sourced? With all the compute in the world, something like Folding@home here would be killer
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DesaiAshu 82 days ago
data bandwidth limits distributed training under current architectures. really interesting implications if we can make progress on that
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dogcomplex 82 days ago
Limits but doesn't prohibit. See https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-3 - still useful and can scale enormously. Takes a particular shape and relies heavily on RL, but still big.
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andoando 81 days ago
What bandwith limits? Im assuming the forward and backward passes have to be done sequentially?
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DesaiAshu 80 days ago
Yes also passing data within each layer
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mike_hearn 81 days ago
It is in some cases. NVIDIA's models are open source, in the truest sense that you can download the training set and training scripts and make your own.
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throwaway27448 81 days ago
It's either illegal or extremely expensive to source quality training material.
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m4rtink 81 days ago
Yeah, turns out if you want to train a model without scrapping and overloading the whole of Internet while ignoring all the licenses and basic decency is actually hard & expensive!
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doctorwho42 81 days ago
Well it is, it's in the name "OpenAI". /S
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