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by aspenmartin 27 days ago
I agree with everything you're saying. And I would also agree if you can run your business adequately on OSS models you should absolutely do that for exactly the reasons you say. All I mean is: frontier models will always have their place and I don't see a way for OSS to ever change that picture. I also worry that the economics that makes meaningful open weights model development possible may break someday but I don't really see a mechanism for this at this point.

I don't actually have a use case in mind where you would _need_ or get a substantial competitive advantage of the absolute frontier in some sort of workflow or whatever load bearing DAG there is for your business. But if there are cases like this, that will suck.
1 comments
digitaltrees 27 days ago
Red hat did it for Linux. Someone needs to do the same for AI. Make money on the implementation and maintenance not the api tokens. Tech companies have gotten fat and Happy on recurring revenue. But they are abusing the trust users have placed in them. I feel a back lash in a way I’ve never experienced.

I think AI labs are assuming that if they build and serve intelligence every one will want it. I think the last month has resulted in a lot of people saying “f u I would rather fail in life than serve you”. I personally went from feeling excited and optimistic about building amazing things on top of the models to hell bent on being self reliant and lots of my friends are doing the same.

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aspenmartin 26 days ago
I think the problem is whether you're for or against local models, the training strategies etc are roughly the same.

> I think the last month has resulted in a lot of people saying “f u I would rather fail in life than serve you”.

I agree a lot of people are saying this and doing this but this won't last long. People do not want to suffer or fall behind their peers. At some point not using AI for anything will not be a feasible option. Unless you operate from an incredibly uncommon and privileged financial position, you don't really even have a choice.

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digitaltrees 26 days ago
The thing the overlords are forgetting is they need customers and users.

You are right that the temptation to use the asymmetric advantage AI gives will be intense. But banks felt that temptation in 2008 in with cheap capital and 40x leverage. Some banks resisted. Which ones do you think survived in 2010? Business and technology moves in cycles. Optimize for longevity and let your competitors go out of business

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