[hereme888]

They already invest in open-source AI, but nothing is truly free. Commercial AI will usually dominate because devs are paid to make it their primary effort. Goodwill and part-time contributions cannot reliably compete with livelihood and profit incentives.

[bloppe]

That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS

[jandrewrogers]

OSS only dominates for software that is commoditized and the published computer science research for that software domain is close to the frontier.

OSS struggles at being relevant when software is non-commodity e.g. office suites. In software domains like databases where the state-of-the-art computer science research is often unpublished, OSS struggles to be relevant at the higher end of the market on technical merits.

When deciding what should be OSS, it is useful to consider the preconditions that have made it successful.

[verdverm]

I personally expect token production to commoditized like mobile data. It's already happening.

See open weights gaining adoption, OpenAi talking about how 5.6 is cheaper than Fable, people are taking multiple approaches to reduce their token spend, expectations for progress in hardware and algos, and certain Ai leaders talking about how token prices should be 10-100x lower than they are.

[ForHackernews]

LLMs are nearly commoditized already. I can switch between a dozen of them from four different providers as easily as flipping a toggle in my VSCode editor.

[keeda]

OSS does not necessarily mean the contributions are from "goodwill or part-time contributions". In fact, I would wager the most widely used OSS software is largely written by contributors paid to do so by corporations. At least for Linux, about 80% - 85% of contributions are from developers paid to do it (https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-buil...)

Corporations have had many reasons to invest their money in open source software -- custom requirements, marketing / developer mindshare, commoditizing complements -- but as cutting edge LLMs get more and more expensive to train, you'd be hard-pressed to find corporations who will put in that kind of money if they cannot recoup their investments.

[DanielHB]

I think the main problem in LLM models is that you can not make a PR to an open source project to tweak some training parameters, prove it is an improvement and merge it.

If you can not run the training yourself you can not contribute. So open source contribution model does not work. All examples you gave have a fairly low threshold of capital expenditure required to be a contributor (basically a laptop).

Even back in the 90s a person could get a standard, but powerful, PC to do these things. The one exception was 3d graphics which took quite some time to become affordable and even there it was a single one-time expenditure (a workstation) per contributor.

[DanielHB]

For normal OSS the only competition between contributors was for attention of maintainers to review and accept patches.

In an open-source LLM model contributors would compete with each other for computing resources for model tweaks and changes. The alternative model is that the contributor pays for the compute, but that increases the bar really high for contributions.

[PunchyHamster]

all those have either a consulting company around it or few big corporate contributors

[lukewarm707]

AGI is not software

on the small chance that the four billionaires who currently have near-exclusive control of closed sota models, (that is altman, amodei, zuckerberg and musk), are not fleecing their investors and actually build AGI, closed source leaves a choice of powerful government or powerful oligopoly/monarchy.

further explanation of this list:

musk - structural command

zuckerberg - structural command

altman - de facto command after purging rivals and privatisation, loyalty of personnel

amodei - influential, could potentially overthrow current governance

[lukewarm707]

if i'm wrong i would like to understand

[hereme888]

It comes off as an "anti-billionaire"/"anti-capitalist" take. We invest money in hopes of ROI. The billionaires are the only ones who can afford to bring the tech to fruition ahead of dangerous adversaries (CCP). It enhances the lives of civilization. Governments try to regulate, and OSS models become available to the public for "free" (most people can't afford hardware to run competitive OS models at home). That's a healthy balance in my playbook. Certainly better than "the people's AI" which would still be stuck at GPT 3.5.

[lukewarm707]

capitalism fails. after the huggingface attack i have nothing but contempt for openai especially.

openai were originally against ai being developed the for profit way. the founding document said that it would not be influenced by roi, verbatim. they lied. let's just say it how it is!

the market is not free anyway because anthropic, openai are hoarding their best models, lending out their 2nd best to cronies whilst the public gets the leftovers at monopoly prices.

this is a dual use product, if not outright weapon. you can make money selling it to the highest bidder. it reminds me of a scene in lord of war as yuri orlov, based on victor bout, negotiates the sale of firearms to a genocidal warlord. the ultimate capitalist cowboy. his brother dies trying to destroy the shipment. knowing he now has no choice he leaves with half of the agreed diamonds and no brother.

does it enhance the lives of civilization?

sackler was the master of growing the business: sell more opioids, sell bigger doses, and sell to more people.

didn't contractors also get rich making napalm? are credit default swaps, flock cameras, cs gas, private prisons, good for us?

is it not profitable to bribe officials and deliver unsafe goods, cut corners, injure and then cheat employees out of compensation. openai is only too keen to know the roi on terrorising foreign countries on the taxpayer's dime.

anthropic said they would stop training at this stage, where openai let a model escape and hack hugging face production servers. they lie, they steal, they fearmonger and live rich in the guise of charity. the capitalist can't stop. they must have more. more. bigger. fuck safety, its too slow, build it anyway. sack risk management, lets get that yield higher. break the law and litigate out, always. mine it until nothing is left, the rivers flow muddy red and the children grow up with cadmium in their bloodstream.

intelligence is fundamental, like land, water, safety. it is not for these companies to control the dignity of humanity.