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It’s the early web all over again. Sun, DEC, Microsoft, etc just assumed they would use their cash and market presence to dominate the web up, down, left, and
by kkielhofner 3y ago
It’s the early web all over again.
Sun, DEC, Microsoft, etc just assumed they would use their cash and market presence to dominate the web up, down, left, and right.
LAMP showed up and ate their lunch. Today open source is the underpinnings for basically every startup over the past 25 years and everything from Android to MacOS to every browser rendering engine. An exclusionary list would be easier.
A 2008 study[0] from the Linux Foundation estimated the development cost of Fedora (at the time) to be almost $11B - in 2008 dollars on a 15 year old codebase. Wonder what it is now?
Point is, OpenAI raising a few billion dollars sounds like a lot of money until you look at the aggregate collective.
FOSS has always had commercial backers, entities with interesting business plans, non-obvious strategy (at the time), etc.
It’s perfectly clear to me why Meta is doing this. It’s also damn near breathtaking to watch the FOSS communities build, build, and build on top of the work of those like Meta as well as each other.
Personally I don’t understand how anyone could think OpenAI, etc vs FOSS is going to be special or unique against what we know to be obvious. I don’t see how this could possibly go any different than the early web. Why, just because it’s “AI” instead of “WWW” this time?
OpenAI will end up like Windows - used by some of the masses and corporate/Enterprise applications, users, etc (think Office integration). Everything else will be a herd (yes, Llama/Alpaca/Vicuna/etc reference.
[0] - https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/linux-foundation-publishes-study-estimating-the-value-of-linux?hs_amp=true https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/linux-fo...
- _boffin_ 3y ago> Personally I don’t understand how anyone could think OpenAI, etc vs FOSS is going to be special or unique against what we know to be obvious. APIs... it's all about APIs and ease of use. Companies have data centers or could have data centers if they wanted, but a lot use AWS, MSFT, GCP, and friends.
- kkielhofner 3y agoThere are a ton of valuable and profitable companies with easy to use API based services used by millions of happy customers built on open source. Let’s say I’m a law firm or a medical group. Do I need ChatGPT to write me a bedtime story or tell me about the Great Chicago Fire, or write code? No, I need it to help me write my briefs, summarize patient notes, whatever. The next crop of startups will be (and already are) LegalGPT and ScribeGPT (or whatever) with fine tuned highly specific, highly curated, regulatory compliant, quality controlled, decision controlled, PHI-scrubbed, tuned on your own data, etc, AI solutions largely based on open foundational models, open serving frameworks, data pipelines, etc. Available via end-user interface and/or API. Then watch LegalGPT be acquired by LegalZoom, LexisNexus, whoever. ScribeGPT by Epic, etc. or vice-versa. ChatGPT is jack of all trades, truly master of none. As I said it will always have its place but it will recede more and more. AI is trying to catch up to human intelligence. Do you go to a mechanic when you should be going to a dentist?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- someidiot123 3y agoDidn’t they say all this about crypto a few years ago?
- kkielhofner 3y agoHah, sort of. The difference is after 15 years the entire crypto ecosystem has somewhere in the range of 50-100m "users" worldwide (at best). ChatGPT alone has an estimated 100m monthly active users after less than a year... You're correct in making the comparison but user adoption is the best metric to separate hype vs utility and AI is already absolutely blowing past crypto (obviously).