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by paxys 3 hours ago
We aren’t going to have Open Source AI without Open Source hardware specs and Open Source manufacturing. Software has been solo driving open computing for far too long, and with AI now the bottlenecks are finally moving up the stack.
2 comments

I don't see any evidence of this. Open source software thrived on proprietary hardware for decades.
What..? We have open weights AI already, and even if we didn't, I don't see how Open Source hardware is a pre-requisite
Weights are meaningless if you can’t run the model from a computer under your desk.
How does that follow? Plenty of open source software runs in a commodity datacenter. This is about the API bottleneck, not the physical location of the GPU.
I don't follow. If weights are open, can't competing providers pop up? Including, e.g., coalitions of anarchists who collectively share compute and collaborate on modifications to the weights.

Even if it's too expensive to run the models on your own personal hardware, open weights may still make it possible to take power back from the big private corporations.

Fine, but I have a computer under my desk. I didn't have to wait for open hardware in order to get it.