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Who keeps open source projects maintained and what incentive do they have?
by cruzcampo 1y ago
Who keeps open source projects maintained and what incentive do they have?
- jsheard 1y agoMost open source projects don't need the kinds of resources that ML development does. Access to huge GPU clusters is the obvious one, but it's easy to forget that the big players are also using huge amounts of soulcrushing human labor for data acquisition, cleaning, labeling and fine tuning, and begrudgingly paying for data they can't scrape. People coding in their free time won't get very far without that supporting infrastructure. I think ML is more akin to open source hardware, in the sense that even when there are people with the relevent skills willing to donate their time for free, the cost of actually realizing their ideas is still so high that it's rarely feasible to keep up with commercial projects.
- cruzcampo 1y agoThat's a fair point. I think GPU clusters are the big one, the rest sounds like a good fit for volunteer work.
- wg0 1y agoOr sharing GPU compute. Crowd sourcing.
- cruzcampo 1y agoOoooh I can see a Seti@Home setup working
- jsheard 1y agoEasier said than done, training is usually done on "big iron" GPUs which are a cut above any hardware that consumers have lying around, and the clusters run on multi-hundred-gigabit networks. Even if you scaled it down to run on gaming cards, and gathered enough volunteers, the low bandwidth and high latency of the internet would still be a problem.
- simiones 1y agoFor the bigger open source projects, companies who use that code for making money. Such as Microsoft and Google and IBM (and many others) supporting Linux because they use it extensively. The same answer may end up applying to these models though - if they really become something that gets integrated into products and internal workflows, there will be a market for companies to collaborate on maintaining a good implementation rather than competing needlessly.