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Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]
- therobots927 3mo ago[flagged]
- shimman 3mo ago[flagged]
- simianwords 3mo agoRedistribution can only get you so far. Creating new wealth is more sustainable.
- jimnotgym 3mo agoSo why did we stop doing that in favour of winner takes all weath centralisation?
- aorloff 3mo agoLargely because enough American voters, contrary to all of the evidence, believed that Trump was going to grow a sense of duty, eviscerate corruption in Washington, deliver an economy that works for the working class, and not engage in any new wars. Charlie Brown, Lucy, football.
- applicative 3mo agoWhat country are our boys occupying now?
- pastel8739 3mo agoAre you suggesting that in fact we have not entered any new wars in recent history?
- applicative 3mo agoWe entered a war in Iraq a quarter century ago
- krapp 3mo agoWe entered a war in Iran in February.
- jimnotgym 3mo agoAt least the war in Iraq had a veneer of a pretext. Trump seems to be attacking Iran because Bibi asked him to
- krapp 3mo agoSomeone must not have told Iran that Trump is the great peace president who ended all wars, united the Middle East and brought about world peace. They really need to get with the program or we'll have to win the war a few more times.
- shimman 3mo agoNumber one expense for SMB is healthcare, providing a nationalized healthcare service would likely unlock trillions in value (imagine what Americans would do if they got $200-500 more per paycheck?). Instead we are forced to watch some of the wealthiest companies on the planet burn money for fun because apparently the government is "wasteful." What a crock of shit.
- irishcoffee 3mo agoHow would nationalized healthcare get funded other than shifting that 200-500/check towards… nationalized healthcare?
- Avicebron 3mo agoWhen you cut out the insurance middlemen and pharmaceutical companies driving up record profits at the expense of care you can get pretty far with less in taxes
- daedrdev 3mo agoInsurance companies make like 2-4% hardly breaking the bank here. Pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money, but the US also funds most drug development which other countries freeload off of. US healthcare workers get a state enforced shortage to drive up their wages thanks to residency limits, but nobody ever wants to look at that. If you can't tell I am extremely pessimistic about the changes of universal healthcare improving on our current system. And to be clear it's universal, not unlimited.
- Apocryphon 3mo agoInsurance companies basically are banks, in that while they make low profit margins they wield such vast amounts of capital, some of which they invest in, they might as well be financial service institutions. There's also other categories of entities (pharmacy benefit managers, wholesalers and distributors) that also get a cut. https://medium.com/@brian-curry-research/the-healthcare-maze-tracing-a-dollar-through-six-layers-of-middlemen-2abb718003a1 https://medium.com/@brian-curry-research/the-healthcare-maze...
- boosturpud 3mo ago> Redistribution can only get you so far. That "so far" being a middle class the envy of the rest of the world which the US threw away to create a new class of oligarch. "Back at the tail-end of that era, in the early 1960s, America’s richest faced a 91 percent tax rate on income in the top tax bracket." https://inequality.org/article/tax-the-rich-we-did-that-once/ https://inequality.org/article/tax-the-rich-we-did-that-once...
- simianwords 3mo agoPerhaps they realised it’s not a good policy? Like literally everywhere else in the world? No other country has 91% taxes and all those who tried dialled it back. India tried it and it was hilariously bad.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3mo ago> Perhaps they realised it’s not a good policy? Citation needed that it's not a good policy. Parent comment explained why it was good, and your reply is "or perhaps it was actually bad". There's a simpler explanation as to why it was rolled back: the people with the most money and power didn't like it and wanted it gone, and worked over time to accomplish this.
- simianwords 3mo agoso it could be two reasons 1. 90% tax is a net good for society but big bad capitalists colluded to reduce it in every country independently or 2. 90% is actually a bad policy and every country independently adopted against it including Nordic countries, China, India, USA you decide which one is more likely.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3mo agoIt's not "90% tax" it's 90% or similar tax rate at the highest band, which most people will never reach. Despite you showing your bias by phrasing option 1 to look childish, I think it's more or less what happened, actually. It doesn't take much "collusion", just greed and short-sighted self-interest from greedy, short-sighted self-interested people with influence to wield. And you till haven't cited how that 1) this definitely didn't happen and 2) high tax rates in the highest band is a bad idea.
- inigyou 3mo agoAI destroys wealth, so what is that?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- taurath 3mo agoWell because you said that, we're going to add public investment in crypto too, everyone gets an NFT with their taxes this year.
- ideashower 3mo agoI would add supporting literacy programs to that list. Unfortunately, many Americans struggle to read beyond the sixth grade level.
- shimman 3mo agoMany states are trying to go back to phonics based reading. If you'd like to support such efforts check out your local school board, you can have a tremendous impact in your community and help better the lives of children in the progress.
- pizzafeelsright 3mo agoMothers are great at childcare and can easily provide much healthier lunches at far lower cost than schools. As for medicine, children are a small percentage of healthcare costs.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- aetherspawn 3mo agoCan’t wait for the day Altman goes to run payroll or whatever and there just isn’t enough liquidity there, full stop. That will be the start of the world healing from a very severe psychosis and ailment, slop leaving the internet, and the future being certain and stable again for kids and such. It’s optimistic I know.
- protocolture 3mo agoYeah those arent options. The US cares about bombing children and AI. Redirecting funding from the former to the latter is a moral imperative.
- hereme888 3mo agoThey 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 3mo agoThat'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 3mo agoOSS 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoLLMs 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.
- 3mo ago
- rao-v 3mo agoWe really need to band together to fund / sponsor targeted inducement prizes (a la Nobel laureate Michael Kremer) for open models. Every 6-12 months, give out $200K to the first model to hit a min threshold on a set of ~5-10 hard benchmarks (+ perhaps one secret benchmark) using a total of 16GB / 32GB / 64GB / 128GB of VRAM (at a min context length of 200K), then move the threshold up. Quantization etc. is dealers choice, it just needs to nail the benchmark on a reference machine by using exactly that much VRAM (no mapping to RAM / disk etc.) You could crowdsource the funding, and cross subsidize by adding targeted prizes focused on corporate needs (the classic one is PDF processing benchmarks), and say that 25% of each corporate prize funding also flows into the general prize pool. For a lot of these open-source model companies, it's less about the $s (though $200K is nothing to sneeze at), it's the clear recognition that helps their model efforts stand out, gain usage etc.
- patches11 3mo agoThis seems like a good idea but also just fun. I can’t train a frontier model but maybe I could compete in the 16 GB tier. I would suspect there are a ton of optimizations out there for the taking that aren’t being considered because frontier models are way above these weight classes
- NitpickLawyer 3mo agoI think the Korean government did have a competition like this, I remember last year we got a bunch of models released at the same time to make the cut for the next stage. The models weren't anything to write home about, IMO. Having it with clear hw requirements tiers is a nice differentiator. The only issue is that the benchmarks would 100% need to be closed, no other way around it. And then you have the issue of creating and curating good evals for every "stage" of the project. That's a hard task even for "honest" lab-internal evals. And you'd have to publish those evals after each round (for trust purposes), and start over for the next round. Doable, but it would cost a lot (probably more than the prize pools) and you'd have to keep doing this.
- BrtByte 3mo agoYeah, I suspect the $200K check would be the cheapest line item in the whole thing
- djolo2211 3mo agoJust because a software is closed-source doesn't mean the knowledge can't be shared. You don't need to see the underlying code to explain to someone architectural patterns or best practices. The library analogy in the scenario would hold true if LLM providers refused to answer any questions about RL or Transformers. I am a big proponent of open-source open-weight models, but mostly because I think it's just a better product. We've seen that they are much cheaper to train and operate. Frontier intelligence might not be needed for most tasks. Just let the market decide. My bet is that LLMs will become analogous to programming languages, and big labs will make their money by fine-tuning models for very specific use cases or by deploying them for customers.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- BrtByte 3mo agoI would not count on the market alone. Like customers do not always choose the technically best or cheapest option
- luk212 3mo ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoTitle was: I argued with the father of open source for 2 years. Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger Op-ed alt link: https://fortune.com/2026/07/03/open-source-ai-same-fight-as-software-fight-1980s-david-siegel-two-sigma/ https://fortune.com/2026/07/03/open-source-ai-same-fight-as-...
- iririririr 3mo agoABSLOUTELY NOT. this is like saying "gov should invest in pyramid schem, because everyone is doing it". or btc. or web3 pictures of monkeys. what i expect the gov to do is to add a 999% tax or tarif on top of GPUs bougth for AI, after the first 100mi that company spends on it each year.
- thoughtpeddler 3mo agoAh, this from the same David Siegel who said almost 2 yrs ago (in a talk found here: https://youtu.be/0z60xUDo-NI?si=PTDe11-sn2P53qo5&t=420 https://youtu.be/0z60xUDo-NI?si=PTDe11-sn2P53qo5&t=420) that the AI data center buildout was premature because: > Even if the current approaches will continue to scale, this would be as if in the early days of computing, perhaps someone invented a bubble sort for sorting numbers (an n-squared algorithm), and the tech companies at the time decided they were going to build vast data centers to sort numbers and not bother to figure out that there's an n-log-n way of doing it <laughs> ...to which I have to say: yes, definitely! And he's right about open-source AI too.
- NitpickLawyer 3mo ago> AI data center buildout was premature Ask Amodei how he feels about going to spaceman bad for compute that he couldn't find anywhere else in the market.
- thoughtpeddler 3mo agoYes, there's a present shortage of usable frontier compute, but that doesn't establish that every proposed data center will earn a decent return, or that today’s hardware + model architecture will remain economically competitive, or more to Siegel's point, that algorithmic efficiency could not dramatically reduce compute requirements. To borrow a real example from a prior boom, railroads were congested during the initial build-out while people simultaneously funded and built too many railroads for future demand. Likewise, Anthropic et al can be compute-starved now while the industry as a whole is overbuilding expensive, depreciating infrastructure.
- NitpickLawyer 3mo agoI'm not sure comparing this one to the "real life" previous ones is worth doing. Digital has a way of scaling that IRL doesn't. You don't get exponetials with humans, but you do with models. Scale has shown time and time again that it works. Despite everything you've read in '25 about walls, lack of x, and so on it still does. And the more you have you find ways of using it even more. RL can use ~ 7:1 ratio of inference : training. That is, you run 7 nodes of inference for every node of training. And it keeps improving. Every algorithmic find on inference (and there've been plenty) translates in improvements. And we're not seeing any signs of this not continuing. And then there's the "zero" method, that hasn't been tried at true scale yet. Bitter lesson and all that.
- foo42 3mo agoI wonder if some sort of member owned cooperative would be the way forward if we the people want to retain any control.
- BrtByte 3mo agoThe library analogy works (for me), but the uncomfortable part is that most "open" models are closer to receiving a compiled binary than receiving the library
- PunchyHamster 3mo agoNo, I want govt to tax themmore. So far frontier AI companies produce negative value to near everyone (by sheer power cost increase it adds essentially tax to every other business) but themselves economy wise. Yeah, wooho, new model found a bunch of bugs, now the bad guys can do it too so security expenses spiked! It's only good for shovel sellers.
- heisig 3mo agoLet me re-iterate the main lesson of decades of FOSS work: the advantages of open collaboration and knowledge-sharing are so enormous that FOSS software wins out eventually even if financial interest are stacked against it. I fully agree with this article - please let's skip the chapter of closed and enshittified AI and go for the good stuff directly!
- thatguymike 3mo agoFOSS is the wrong analogy. Building frontier LLMs isn’t primarily an engineering discipline, it’s a scientific research program. Of course we do have basically open source research programs, including most universities and big projects like CERN. But AI grew up in universities until it transpired that sufficient capital could only be found in the private sector. It would be possible to make a decent publicly funded AI research program. But it would look more like the Manhattan or Apollo projects (which frontier labs already model themselves after) than some extra research grants for universities.
- sigmoid10 3mo agoThe Manhatten project cost about $40 billion in total adjusted for inflation. Anthropic's latest funding round alone raised $65 billion. The entire Apollo project at the peak of the cold war cost about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's approximately what OpenAI and Anthropic have raised together in total until now. I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and economic climate. The LHC cost less than $10 billion by comparison and it was spread out over a much longer timeframe.
- pjc50 3mo ago> I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and economic climate. I'm a believer in Keynes' "anything we can do we can afford". It could be afforded .. if there was a sufficiently good reason. And there isn't. This is way behind "governments, especially the EU, should have a sovereign cloud". It is also way behind "governments need to keep global warming below 2C by the end of the century" and "governments need to ensure affordable energy", objectives which the current AI buildout is in direct conflict with. This is before we get into the question of whether AI has net positive social value in non-software use cases. Even in software the case for AI is explicitly job-destroying and raising electricity prices for everyone else.
- sigmoid10 3mo agoThere are things you can't do - even as a society - when the costs start ballooning beyond the GDP of smaller European nations. I mean, yes, in an emergency you could cancel all social security and public infrastructure spending and instead dump it into AI. But even then it will take several big nations to foot the bill if you want to still have a country left after you're done. With the level of political heckle everywhere, this is just not going to happen, because it would need unanimous support from all sides.
- nttylock 3mo ago[flagged]
- sylware 3mo agoFOSS is far from enough anymore. _LEAN_ FOSS, including the SDK then the computer languages too. All computer languages with an ultra-complex syntax are excluded de facto. Then there is the stability in time. developer/vendor lock-in on software, planned obsolescence, are much more common in FOSS nowdays.
- aaron695 3mo ago[dead]
- jleyank 3mo agoListening to those pushing AI, why should we fund open source developers when we can reproduce their work with a few judiciously chosen LLM prompts? Perhaps the AI companies should fund FOSS so as to get more solutions to memorize but normals?
- theplumber 3mo agoThe private AI companies should be forced to release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present and the data they basically steal from everyone to train their models. This should be the safety push not the regulatory capture that Dario is trying.
- johndhi 3mo agoGood idea! I'd never heard that. Very interesting. But wouldn't this help china build models just as good as ours immediately? Wouldn't it make the investment in training a model worth a lot less?
- tempfile 3mo ago> no commercial use Why? It's not like they did the hard work. It's disgraceful that this kind of commons enclosure has been allowed in the first place.
- rexpop 3mo agoWow, thank you for this! I'd forgotten about enclosure for some years. > The law locks up the man or woman / Who steals the goose from off the common / But leaves the greater villain loose / Who steals the common from the goose.
- pembrook 3mo agoIn an earlier phase of AI I might have agreed but now the publicly available data they’ve trained on is increasingly useless for the frontier. RL/post-training is now a much bigger part of it, with that being largely proprietary and expensive work that the open source model just won’t fund.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- raxxorraxor 3mo ago> the data they basically steal from everyone Agreed. Especially since now competitors have more difficulties getting the same advantage. They don't have to do so immediately and perhaps not their specific tuning. But the weights of the raw training data at least should be publicised.
- cabirum 3mo agojust remove "AI" from title and its good: — Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source.
- luck7710 3mo ago[dead]
- cdkmoose 3mo agoI must have missed the press release when Two Sigma open-sourced their algorithmic trading models so that the rest of us could make the best stock investments for our retirements. /s
- laomos 3mo ago[flagged]
- brandonJagger 3mo ago“The economists need to start charting this out, if we are in a post scarcity world, how does everyone benefit from that?, obviously its not correct for just a few people or a few companies or even a few nations to be benefiting from this technology, it has to broadly accrue the benefits to everyone, but how is that gonna be done? We really need answers now. ” -Demmis Hassabis <Google Deep mind>
- JohnLinotte 3mo agoThe sovereignty point resonates. The June 2026 export controls on Anthropic's models were a wake-up call. Open weights + deterministic orchestration feels like the only sane long-term bet.