4 ms·

Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be a

Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever. That can't be said for API-based models where a provider can sunset models whenever they feel like (i.e. gpt5-mini will soon be gone, and replaced by a more expensive 5.4-mini, same for goog, etc). And there will always be incentivised parties that release models. Nvda for one has every incentive to keep the nemotron line going, as they're directly profiting from people running this. And the models aren't really far from open SotA anyway. Goog will probably continue to release the small models, since they'll use them for browser stuff anyway, and know that they'll leak. So for them it's a win-win to release the small models and gain some dev market share. And the chinese labs also have incentives to keep releasing models, and will likely continue to get gov support to do so (yay commercial wars between nations).

felooboolooomba 4mo ago
> they can never be taken away Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Absolutely everything can be taken away. The simplest way to remove open models is probably to declare them a tool that terrorists could use. Crazy? Yes, the world is totally crazy these days.
- redox99 4mo ago
  That only affects people in California. Whereas Fable being shut down affects people all over the world.
  - anticorporate 4mo ago
    There's also, importantly, a distinction between what are told we can no longer use, and what can actually be taken away. Open source and open hardware can be called illegal by a government, but, if we collectively invest our energy into open alternatives, they can't be taken away in the same sense. I can build a RepRap printer and I can use a local AI model. It's on all of us to make sure that the open alternatives are viable, maybe in the current global political reality now more than ever. Making something illegal isn't a disincentive for everyone. When they start banning books, some of us start assembling printing presses.
    - echoangle 4mo ago
      Believe me, if the government wants to stop you from having access to something like that, they could do it. Just give people some incentive to report you and make really harsh punishments and everyone will be thinking really hard about how bad they want have access.
      - dvngnt_ 4mo ago
        They can stop piracy or child predators. what makes you think they can prevent access to running models that require no internet access to run
        NemoNobody 4mo ago
        Piracy is in a practical Golden Age rn and the Epstein Files exist - so the Government doesn't really do either of those things very well at all. Plus for a certain type of person "Piracy" is more of a philosophical belief or political position - there are fundamentalist equivalent, very proficient, "Pirates" who will under no circumstances stop and are not doing it for money. There are obviously an enormous amount who are in it for the money - "big brand names" now reportedly comprise as high as 63% of the advertising on illicit piracy sites - I'm too lazy to get the link, that sentence ought to be enough tho if you want to look into that bizarre reality. I'm not certain either of those things are in the Government's direct control - both require society at large to share the belief and essentially choose not to do said activities. (Regarding your second example, unfortunately most abusers are people children know, the Epstein Class was supposed to be just Q Anon crazy conspiracy stuff, none of this is ok in any fashion. Both exist, one local entirely beyond the government - the other appears to have incorporated people from government.) My point is simply this - WE determine what the Government can do. What we believe matters more than anything else. Don't ever discredit The People's ability - we are pretty awesome.
        dvngnt_ 4mo ago
        Typo my mistake
  - felooboolooomba 4mo ago
    > That only affects people in California First they came for the Californians And I did not speak out Because I was not a Californian
    - Y_Y 4mo ago
      Then they came for me But it was unsuccessful Because I was not in California
      - felooboolooomba 4mo ago
        [flagged]
      - pyvpx 4mo ago
        That’s not how any of it (human nature) works
- vitally3643 4mo ago
  Just like declaring piracy illegal stopped piracy and removed pirated materials from everyone's computers. Everything cannot, in fact, be taken away. Don't propagandize yourself. Some things, like information, are free. Not even China can prevent all its citizens from accessing Western internet. USGov simply does not have the resources to find and audit every hard drive and USB stick in the country for illegal files. The internet cannot be censored 100% without literally cutting every cable and confiscating every radio. The software that runs on my computer cannot, in fact, be restricted. It can be declared illegal, but there literally is no mechanism by which it can be enforced other than a government goon standing over my shoulder 24/7. Some freedoms really cannot be removed without utterly implausible amounts of effort. Arguing otherwise is helping to erode freedom. So stop it.
  - Simran-B 4mo ago
    Remote attestation?
    - advael 4mo ago
      On PCs, the best you could really do is restrict access to certain websites on certain boxes with TPMs the users can't disable. Remote attestation can lock people out of your stuff, but not out of their own stuff. For that you need control of the device. Of course, most mobile phones aren't easy for the user to have control of, but most PCs still are, so long as you scrub the rootkits (e.g. windows) off 'em
    - bijowo1676 4mo ago
      it doesnt even work in the government's own servers to protect their own shit
  - NamlchakKhandro 4mo ago
    You wouldn't download a car?
    - psychoslave 4mo ago
      In Soviet Russia, one couldn't download a car. In modern America, cars upload you.
- jgalt212 4mo ago
  > What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Are laws that are inherently unenforceable even laws?
  - fsflover 4mo ago
    With the age verification and whatnot, these laws are getting more enforceable with time.
- kageroumado 4mo ago
  There’s going to be more and more propaganda about open models being a tool to program your children into being Chinese spies or some other absurd reason, and then a new beautiful law will be enacted unanimously, banning their use. And “thankfully," child-protecting measures will by then be implemented at the OS level.
- gspr 4mo ago
  Anything can be taken away, yes. But in a free and democratic society, there's an enormous difference between "the democratically chosen state powers may take something from me" and "a private entity takes away something from me on an inscrutable whim with no recourse". Neither is good if you don't want the thing taken away. But removing the second mechanism is still a laudable goal.
  - BryanBigs 4mo ago
    I think one is worse than two. Only governments have the power of violence.
    - felooboolooomba 4mo ago
      Currently there's very much of a blur between "democratically chosen state" and "a private entity" (with a lot of money).
    - gspr 4mo ago
      And we want them to. And to have the power to take things away. It's all a matter of degree and details.
- andai 4mo ago
  Well that's true isn't it? If your goal is to blow up the proverbial Death Star, you want to be running your AI locally, right?
- tarpitt 4mo ago
  Your right to 3d print has been taken away, but not your ability.
- drnick1 4mo ago
  > What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Yes, over my dead body.
- jason_oster 4mo ago
  > Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What are they going to do? Fine me for not updating my printer's firmware?
- oompydoompy74 4mo ago
  Legality doesn’t matter as long as you use open source tools. Buy hardware that you can load your own software or firmware on. Keep backups of the software that you use. Nobody can take away an open weight model sitting on my NAS. Almost everything my family uses is self hosted. Stop depending on the government and companies to do the right thing.
jfim 4mo ago
True, but the capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time, so the value of that model declines over time. A model that writes code without knowledge of any language or library changes for half a decade is less useful. A 2021 era chatgpt would be quite quaint in 2026. Right now the Chinese labs might have incentives to release their models for free, and maybe Google is happy to release open weights today, but I'm sure there are already bean counters at Google salivating at the idea of having Gemini in Chrome as part of a Google AI monthly subscription just like YouTube premium and other Google subscriptions.
- api 4mo ago
  Fine tuning and updating is far cheaper than training from scratch.
- charcircuit 4mo ago
  The weights are not frozen in time. You can train the model on new data. It's just a matter of economics of whether you have a leading lab pay for the training or you pay for it. For the past few years having the labs do it has been the economical choice but if they stop doing so the choice will shift back to the users.
- teleforce 4mo ago
  >True, but the capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time, so the value of that model declines over time. Correction: The capabilities and knowledge of that model can be improved via self-distillation, so the value of that model increases over time. This is where I think self-distillation is the main way forward, and probably the second best thing ever happened to AI/LLM after the transformer. Based on self-distillation, the value of the open weights models will incease over time for sub-specialization through post-training and fine-tuning. Please check these very promising recent works and results from MIT/ETH, UCLA and Apple [1],[2,[3]. For example the MIT/ETH self-distillation approach was demonstrated by a single H200 GPU. Apple approach is even simpler that it's simply called Simple Self-Distillation (SSD), pun intended. [1] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19897 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19897 [2] Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18734 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18734 [3] Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01193 https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01193
UncleOxidant 4mo ago
> Nvda for one has every incentive to keep the nemotron line going They're releases so far have been kind of lackluster compared to Qwen and other Chinese models. My suspicion is that Nvidia won't be releasing models that appear to compete with frontier models because that would upset their big customers.
- anon373839 4mo ago
  Nvidia's future incentives are not clear to me. Their big customers are actively working to develop custom silicon, see e.g. "Open"AI's Broadcom announcement. The more independence their whale customers attain, the more attractive cutting them off at the knees and selling sovereign AI inference hardware directly to businesses and consumers becomes. This is pure speculation, but I have a hunch that the Nemotron line is intended as a shot across the bow, and that's why its capabilities have been strong but not quite open-frontier level.
- eru 4mo ago
  Also they don't need to, as long as someone else is releasing good open-weight models.
Bolwin 4mo ago
> Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever. In theory yes, but the average person can't really run the big open models. This is already happening, try to find a provider that still hosts older, especially less popular or succeeded open models. For me personally, I've been trying to access Kimi K2-0711. There seems to be only one provider left on openrouter (NovitaAI) and 3/4 requests error out
- veqq 4mo ago
  > NovitaAI is a low cost provider who's strategy seems to be to host as many models as possible for the lowest cost possible so that OpenRouter's routing algorithm will default to them as often as possible. The problem is that they clearly don't spend much time on actually testing and configuring all of the models they provide. There's a reason they are very often the first provider to host a new model. I also suspect that they run models at lower quants than they claim but that is not something I can prove. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mk4kt0/be_careful_in_selecting_providers_on_openrouter/n7gkr26/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mk4kt0/be_care...
  - freecodej 4mo ago
    [dead]
- freecodej 4mo ago
  [flagged]
alfiedotwtf 4mo ago
> And the chinese labs also have incentives to keep releasing models Not really.
CTDOCodebases 4mo ago
Is this a valid point when we live in an evolving world. Language changes, facts change etc. Or can everything can just be grabbed from webpages and stored in the context window?

felooboolooomba 4mo ago

> they can never be taken away Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Absolutely everything can be taken away. The simplest way to remove open models is probably to declare them a tool that terrorists could use. Crazy? Yes, the world is totally crazy these days.

redox99 4mo ago
That only affects people in California. Whereas Fable being shut down affects people all over the world.
- anticorporate 4mo ago
  There's also, importantly, a distinction between what are told we can no longer use, and what can actually be taken away. Open source and open hardware can be called illegal by a government, but, if we collectively invest our energy into open alternatives, they can't be taken away in the same sense. I can build a RepRap printer and I can use a local AI model. It's on all of us to make sure that the open alternatives are viable, maybe in the current global political reality now more than ever. Making something illegal isn't a disincentive for everyone. When they start banning books, some of us start assembling printing presses.
  - echoangle 4mo ago
    Believe me, if the government wants to stop you from having access to something like that, they could do it. Just give people some incentive to report you and make really harsh punishments and everyone will be thinking really hard about how bad they want have access.
    - dvngnt_ 4mo ago
      They can stop piracy or child predators. what makes you think they can prevent access to running models that require no internet access to run
      - NemoNobody 4mo ago
        Piracy is in a practical Golden Age rn and the Epstein Files exist - so the Government doesn't really do either of those things very well at all. Plus for a certain type of person "Piracy" is more of a philosophical belief or political position - there are fundamentalist equivalent, very proficient, "Pirates" who will under no circumstances stop and are not doing it for money. There are obviously an enormous amount who are in it for the money - "big brand names" now reportedly comprise as high as 63% of the advertising on illicit piracy sites - I'm too lazy to get the link, that sentence ought to be enough tho if you want to look into that bizarre reality. I'm not certain either of those things are in the Government's direct control - both require society at large to share the belief and essentially choose not to do said activities. (Regarding your second example, unfortunately most abusers are people children know, the Epstein Class was supposed to be just Q Anon crazy conspiracy stuff, none of this is ok in any fashion. Both exist, one local entirely beyond the government - the other appears to have incorporated people from government.) My point is simply this - WE determine what the Government can do. What we believe matters more than anything else. Don't ever discredit The People's ability - we are pretty awesome.
        dvngnt_ 4mo ago
        Typo my mistake
- felooboolooomba 4mo ago
  > That only affects people in California First they came for the Californians And I did not speak out Because I was not a Californian
  - Y_Y 4mo ago
    Then they came for me But it was unsuccessful Because I was not in California
    - felooboolooomba 4mo ago
      [flagged]
    - pyvpx 4mo ago
      That’s not how any of it (human nature) works
vitally3643 4mo ago
Just like declaring piracy illegal stopped piracy and removed pirated materials from everyone's computers. Everything cannot, in fact, be taken away. Don't propagandize yourself. Some things, like information, are free. Not even China can prevent all its citizens from accessing Western internet. USGov simply does not have the resources to find and audit every hard drive and USB stick in the country for illegal files. The internet cannot be censored 100% without literally cutting every cable and confiscating every radio. The software that runs on my computer cannot, in fact, be restricted. It can be declared illegal, but there literally is no mechanism by which it can be enforced other than a government goon standing over my shoulder 24/7. Some freedoms really cannot be removed without utterly implausible amounts of effort. Arguing otherwise is helping to erode freedom. So stop it.
- Simran-B 4mo ago
  Remote attestation?
  - advael 4mo ago
    On PCs, the best you could really do is restrict access to certain websites on certain boxes with TPMs the users can't disable. Remote attestation can lock people out of your stuff, but not out of their own stuff. For that you need control of the device. Of course, most mobile phones aren't easy for the user to have control of, but most PCs still are, so long as you scrub the rootkits (e.g. windows) off 'em
  - bijowo1676 4mo ago
    it doesnt even work in the government's own servers to protect their own shit
- NamlchakKhandro 4mo ago
  You wouldn't download a car?
  - psychoslave 4mo ago
    In Soviet Russia, one couldn't download a car. In modern America, cars upload you.
jgalt212 4mo ago
> What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Are laws that are inherently unenforceable even laws?
- fsflover 4mo ago
  With the age verification and whatnot, these laws are getting more enforceable with time.
kageroumado 4mo ago
There’s going to be more and more propaganda about open models being a tool to program your children into being Chinese spies or some other absurd reason, and then a new beautiful law will be enacted unanimously, banning their use. And “thankfully," child-protecting measures will by then be implemented at the OS level.
gspr 4mo ago
Anything can be taken away, yes. But in a free and democratic society, there's an enormous difference between "the democratically chosen state powers may take something from me" and "a private entity takes away something from me on an inscrutable whim with no recourse". Neither is good if you don't want the thing taken away. But removing the second mechanism is still a laudable goal.
- BryanBigs 4mo ago
  I think one is worse than two. Only governments have the power of violence.
  - felooboolooomba 4mo ago
    Currently there's very much of a blur between "democratically chosen state" and "a private entity" (with a lot of money).
  - gspr 4mo ago
    And we want them to. And to have the power to take things away. It's all a matter of degree and details.
andai 4mo ago
Well that's true isn't it? If your goal is to blow up the proverbial Death Star, you want to be running your AI locally, right?
tarpitt 4mo ago
Your right to 3d print has been taken away, but not your ability.
drnick1 4mo ago
> What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Yes, over my dead body.
jason_oster 4mo ago
> Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What are they going to do? Fine me for not updating my printer's firmware?
oompydoompy74 4mo ago
Legality doesn’t matter as long as you use open source tools. Buy hardware that you can load your own software or firmware on. Keep backups of the software that you use. Nobody can take away an open weight model sitting on my NAS. Almost everything my family uses is self hosted. Stop depending on the government and companies to do the right thing.

jfim 4mo ago

True, but the capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time, so the value of that model declines over time. A model that writes code without knowledge of any language or library changes for half a decade is less useful. A 2021 era chatgpt would be quite quaint in 2026. Right now the Chinese labs might have incentives to release their models for free, and maybe Google is happy to release open weights today, but I'm sure there are already bean counters at Google salivating at the idea of having Gemini in Chrome as part of a Google AI monthly subscription just like YouTube premium and other Google subscriptions.

api 4mo ago
Fine tuning and updating is far cheaper than training from scratch.
charcircuit 4mo ago
The weights are not frozen in time. You can train the model on new data. It's just a matter of economics of whether you have a leading lab pay for the training or you pay for it. For the past few years having the labs do it has been the economical choice but if they stop doing so the choice will shift back to the users.
teleforce 4mo ago
>True, but the capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time, so the value of that model declines over time. Correction: The capabilities and knowledge of that model can be improved via self-distillation, so the value of that model increases over time. This is where I think self-distillation is the main way forward, and probably the second best thing ever happened to AI/LLM after the transformer. Based on self-distillation, the value of the open weights models will incease over time for sub-specialization through post-training and fine-tuning. Please check these very promising recent works and results from MIT/ETH, UCLA and Apple [1],[2,[3]. For example the MIT/ETH self-distillation approach was demonstrated by a single H200 GPU. Apple approach is even simpler that it's simply called Simple Self-Distillation (SSD), pun intended. [1] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19897 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19897 [2] Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18734 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18734 [3] Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01193 https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01193

UncleOxidant 4mo ago

> Nvda for one has every incentive to keep the nemotron line going They're releases so far have been kind of lackluster compared to Qwen and other Chinese models. My suspicion is that Nvidia won't be releasing models that appear to compete with frontier models because that would upset their big customers.

anon373839 4mo ago
Nvidia's future incentives are not clear to me. Their big customers are actively working to develop custom silicon, see e.g. "Open"AI's Broadcom announcement. The more independence their whale customers attain, the more attractive cutting them off at the knees and selling sovereign AI inference hardware directly to businesses and consumers becomes. This is pure speculation, but I have a hunch that the Nemotron line is intended as a shot across the bow, and that's why its capabilities have been strong but not quite open-frontier level.
eru 4mo ago
Also they don't need to, as long as someone else is releasing good open-weight models.

Bolwin 4mo ago

> Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever. In theory yes, but the average person can't really run the big open models. This is already happening, try to find a provider that still hosts older, especially less popular or succeeded open models. For me personally, I've been trying to access Kimi K2-0711. There seems to be only one provider left on openrouter (NovitaAI) and 3/4 requests error out

veqq 4mo ago
> NovitaAI is a low cost provider who's strategy seems to be to host as many models as possible for the lowest cost possible so that OpenRouter's routing algorithm will default to them as often as possible. The problem is that they clearly don't spend much time on actually testing and configuring all of the models they provide. There's a reason they are very often the first provider to host a new model. I also suspect that they run models at lower quants than they claim but that is not something I can prove. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mk4kt0/be_careful_in_selecting_providers_on_openrouter/n7gkr26/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mk4kt0/be_care...
- freecodej 4mo ago
  [dead]
freecodej 4mo ago
[flagged]

alfiedotwtf 4mo ago

> And the chinese labs also have incentives to keep releasing models Not really.

CTDOCodebases 4mo ago

Is this a valid point when we live in an evolving world. Language changes, facts change etc. Or can everything can just be grabbed from webpages and stored in the context window?