[george_max]

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.

[thewebguyd]

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.

[cocoa19]

We already have this. We don't need Mythos to categorize images on my phone. A small dedicated model would do.

[george_max]

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.

[thewebguyd]

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.

[WASDx]

I think this is inevitable. Sooner or later, model-specific ASIC's will make economical sense. We're already seeing it happening with Taalas/Cerebras so I think it's sooner than 5 years. And inference is order of magnitude faster which is amazing.

[kelnos]

Yeah I think that's a decent analog (Photoshop & GIMP). We're in a sort of "rapid expansion" phase right now, but unless the tech behind "AI" really evolves, better and better models will be harder to come by, with diminishing returns.

Even if the GIMP of LLMs is only 80% as good as the VC-funded stuff, that will still be plenty useful for lots of people.

And I think just having the option to use open source models is a win, even if it turns out to be true they'll never be quite as good as the proprietary ones.

[pennomi]

Perhaps, unless there is a way for users to donate compute to training, folding@home style. I don’t see how that could be practical though.

[hirako2000]

Zoom out. It's a matter of time the trillion valuations will be deemed senseless, only once it will prove inpossible to extract trillions from consumers.

In the meanwhile, and regardless, software optimisations coupled with hardware continuing to scale, we will end up, soon enough, with some open weight that run on a mobile device with greater capabilities than Fable.

[rustcleaner]

>only once it will prove inpossible [sic] to extract trillions from consumers.

I am spreading a message of peace and sovereignty:

Never subscribe. Never. Subscribe. Ever.

Starve them out. Make their lenders take 95% haircuts.

Just don't subscribe, whatever you do!

[aerhardt]

This is utopian thinking. The products are way too useful to not subscribe. The argument presupposes the worst-case negative-utility in the long-term scenario (AI companies will create a totalitarian nightmare) and pits it against the radical usefulness that the products are creating right now.

[hirako2000]

They aren't too good to not subscribe.

I've used over a trillion tokens in the last few years with zero subscription. In fact I have one with deepseek, spend 13 cents to test some automation. The rest is consumed free of charge to bleed the bleeders.

If/when they ALL enforce paid subscriptions, I will only run inference locally. By then consumer hardware will equal frontier models in term of speed and performance.

[zozbot234]

> 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.

There's a more fundamental reason for this: some AI models are large enough that they can plausibly only be reasonably run in a state-of-the-art hyperscale datacenter. Open sourcing such models would be largely pointless. Note that this would be a significantly larger scale than even the largest open models available today, one that precludes even doing inference slowly on a small-scale, cheap makeshift cluster. But it's plausible that Fable is there already.

[bbor]

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?

[mufufu]

Lives of trillions?

[reilly3000]

Current and possible future populations?

[LPisGood]

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

[george_max]

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.

[kelnos]

In a way that's ok, though? I run Linux on my laptop, and in some ways it's better than Windows or macOS, and in other ways it's lacking. But that's fine; the existence of Windows and macOS doesn't mean I can't run Linux, and doesn't mean I have a worse experience.

(Yet; I do worry about future required hardware attestation for basic things, but that's another issue.)

[tonyhart7]

the moat is in hardware, without capital intensive acquisition how tf they going to get that money ?????

I learn it hard from prusa 3d printer open model

[intothemild]

Well. Right now buying hardware to run your own models tops off at about 32gb VRAM at any price point that's not insane. Sure you can get a Mac mini, or a PC equivalent. But the problem is RAM.

More RAM means bigger models, which means smarter models.

Which is why Qwen and Gemma have been so interesting to a lot of us who run our own... Now 32gb VRAM isn't so bad, as these models can be run on that with decent results.

Where this gets interesting is in a couple years, when all the A100, etc, all the Enterprise hardware hits eBay.