7 ms·

The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by th

by gpt5 3mo ago

The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefits accumulated. With models right now, there is just no way to do distributed training, or really, any large scale parallel way to improve them. So whatever the short term strategy driving publicizing the model weights (e.g. potentially, to create a price war in order to put pressure on western companies and deprive them of the money they need), we can't ignore the fact that incentives and decisions could easily change in the future, and unless there is a way to truly decentralize models improvements - the party could stop at any time.

yogthos 3mo ago
This is precisely why we need more projects like this https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals There's no fundamental reason why models couldn't be developed and trained using community efforts. It might not be as fast and efficient, but it's definitely possible.
- woctordho 3mo ago
  See the recent development of DiLoCo at Nous Research and Prime Intellect.
  - yogthos 3mo ago
    oh that's very cool, exactly the kind of stuff we need
ericmay 3mo ago
> The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. Right... and there are two problems with this: 1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the underlying assumptions about compute and scale needed are mostly on the mark. So you can release open-weight models and they will have great use cases and applications, but ultimately similar to how you don't use an open-source phone or a budget Android phone from Wal-Mart and you buy an iPhone instead, you will see that although they "do the same thing" one product is clearly superior and you just have to pay for it. For this to not be true... 2. then it incentivizes most (all?) companies, American, Chinese, or European to halt development of models because if you spend all the CAPEX and it can just be copied and turned open-source nobody will invest in that. Given that China is not halting development of proprietary models I believe the current strategy and the subsequent approach to release open-weight models is at best a stall tactic, and at worse a sign of desperation. Open source and the support and development models around it have been great. But folks are a little too dogmatic about it. Open-source software isn't a moral good, and closed-source software isn't a moral wrong either.
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  Did you just assume the singularity?
  - ericmay 3mo ago
    No
- jbm 3mo ago
  > Open-source software isn't a moral good Yes it is.
  - ericmay 3mo ago
    Prove it
    - Razengan 3mo ago
      No u
      - ericmay 3mo ago
        That's just like, your opinion.... man....
    - Isamu 3mo ago
      I’ll take a swing at it. Open Source is a form of sharing with the wider community. Closed Source is not sharing. Moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit (the opposite of selfishness.) Ergo it’s a kind of moral good. And I’m not even an advocate for open source.
      - ericmay 3mo ago
        This argument boils down to X is good, therefore more of X is good. But you can see how that breaks down with even trivial examples. Not a great argument. The second piece of this "a moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit" - says who? Why? This logic is also faulty. You're also cargo-cutting self-interest in here as a moral failure when many good things depend on humans acting in their own self interest. For example I completely and selfishly installed a new tree at my house. But the community benefits from carbon capture, shade, &c. I understand the sentiment you have here and I think for everyday use and having some guiding principles it is probably fine, but don't confuse this for a principle that is actually examined. You can find contradictions rather easily, never mind solid arguments which expose cases where what you think is true is not really true and so forth.
dinfinity 3mo ago
> The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. Imagine approaching fundamental scientific research like that. "Welp, it can't make money, so it won't happen." There is more to society than capitalism.
- jonahx 3mo ago
  > Imagine approaching fundamental scientific research like that. "Welp, it can't make money, so it won't happen." > There is more to society than capitalism. I don't read GP like that. I read it as "we should recognize a situation of unstable incentives for an important outcome, and start thinking about other solutions."
geophile 3mo ago
But different huge companies have different incentives. It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to have me running a powerful open source model on a $4k machine that they sell me.
- nightpool 3mo ago
  Is it? When they could be having you running an even more powerful model on a $50k machine they sell by the pallet-load to enterprise consumers? We already see RAM manufacturers abandoning the low-end market in favor of server support. It's not clear to me that Nvidia sees personal GPUs as their best long term investment compared to selling millions of server-farm class machines
  - layla5alive 3mo ago
    You mean a $500k machine, or a $15M rack... the costs have gotten unimaginably large from the lens of just a decade ago.
    - anonzzzies 3mo ago
      ... for AI... which people have to convince themselves they 'need'. I am a user, I have a 1m$ rack for my small company for AI, but I have currently 189 racks that cost about 15k one off per rack. And those make us a LOT more money than the AI ones ; most are departmental apps or websites that take very little processing power and are low on everything while people pay nice money to keep them going. Our support is better than the rest; you can just call me or come to my house and we'll do something. Not many clients leave, ever. For the past 30 years. I buy 5-10 year old servers which are complete overkill for 99% of my clients (some are fortune 500 companies but departmental stuff) and they just never leave. Makes vastly more money than AI and we are still cheaper than AWS and the department does not have to get a flexible budget (like they would have to if AWS) with us. We just have the same fixed price + yearly inflation correction and that's it. For 30 years.
  - davnicwil 3mo ago
    Selling to individuals can be a hugely more robust predictable business, the problem with selling by the pallet load is spiky revenue that can also quickly fall off a cliff if larger customers stop buying. The other problem is sales negotiations driving down margins for bulk buyers etc. Consumer hardware is a very attractive market in lots of ways, just look at Apple.
idontwantthis 3mo ago
I am also confused by this point. The American government could force OpenAI and Anthropic to open their models, but then they would instantly evaporate, right? It doesn't seem like a choice that they can make, so framing it as a "winning" strategy doesn't make any sense to me. In what world could those companies have existed and opened their models?
- Danox 3mo ago
  They could, but they don’t have to. The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable. The one thing that is sort of ironic or bad is that between Russia and the Ukraine there’s a large number of mathematically inclined people that if it wasn’t for the Putin war, their brain power working on AI models would have probably pushed open source down the road, even faster…
  - chasd00 3mo ago
    > The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable. This reads just like "AGI is 2 years away", I'll go set my calendar...
  - idontwantthis 3mo ago
    But I still don't get it. Like China could be come the world's leading producer of chocolate...if they started giving away chocolate for free. Would we be having this conversation saying that Switzerland lost because they were greedy and protectionist and didn't decide to give away their chocolate for free first (I realize Switzerland probably isn't actually the world's top producer of chocolate).
    - randbyte 3mo ago
      Long history of open source projects already have answers on how to monetize a free and complex open source product. - Low development cost: collaborative efforts from open source contributors, innovative model training and serving for llm (Chinese models costs a fraction to train and their local chip design and manufacturing are catching up, plus cheap electricity) - monetizing by selling hosted services, while leaving the core product free to tinker with / self host. China’s gdp is 2/3 of the US and it’s already a huge market for AI - which OAI and A\ don’t enter. - for (the US) market that they can’t enter, let the US cloud providers to do free marketing / advocacy for them. Gaining share of mind. It costs them nothing.
trhway 3mo ago
In Russian opposition's mostly liberal discussions their school of thought connects several things together (sorry for not going directly to Marx's "General Intellect" and "Fragment on Machines" and using AI summaries instead ) - general idea of communism in China vs. techno-libertarianism of Thiel, Musk and the likes, and the Marx's thinking like: "Fragment on Machines": "he explores how human knowledge and collective intellect become embedded into machines, divorcing the worker from their own creativity." "General Intellect": "These texts are widely discussed for his concept of the General Intellect—the idea that society's shared, collective knowledge increasingly drives production rather than raw manual labor, and that this knowledge is alienated from workers and used as an instrument of capital." (note: my point isn't to pass any political judgement here, like what real communism in China or not real, is it good or bad, i just find it interesting that pure political discussions by people with no technical credentials bring AI as a major factor today)
bmitc 3mo ago
Why do people always bring up state support when it comes to China? As if the U.S. doesn't provide massive tax breaks and explicit funding to industry? It's on every tech post about China, as if it gives them some sort of "unfair" advantage.
- blackqueeriroh 3mo ago
  Because the scale of the subsidization is unimaginably different.
  - deadfoxygrandpa 3mo ago
    yep. the ppp loans alone dwarf any state subsidies any other country has ever done
  - bmitc 3mo ago
    How much is it?
  - danny_codes 3mo ago
    The scale of public spend is probably much higher in the US..
    - Danox 3mo ago
      From a distance, the Chinese spending seems to be more focused and spread out across their infrastructure at all levels. Is that a difference between engineers running the system and lawyers running the USA? I certainly would like to see Thorium get some love after basically 50 years of being mothballed moth, and the same goes for the rail system within the United States.
      - danny_codes 3mo ago
        Probably. I mean I don't think anyone would choose Lawyer as the leading profession for leadership. It's a "largely useless" profession outside of it's very narrow context.
thayne 3mo ago
Well that's kind of the point of the article. That in order to "win", the US needs an incentive structure that encourages open models. I'm not sure what that looks like though.
DrScientist 3mo ago
Who funds the majority of cutting edge scientific research? Is it companies or is it governments? If governments around the world see LLMs built from public knowledge as pre-competitive as the public knowledge itself, then why wouldn't they sustainbly fund it?
- stanzeo 3mo ago
  Because the business model for governments is difficult. Income are mostly taxes, so you have to be able to explain constantly why it is a good idea to keep on spending budget on that funding.
  - mbgerring 3mo ago
    If AI optimists are correct, and AI can increase productivity across the board, tax revenues go up. Not rocket science.
  - KerrAvon 3mo ago
    Governments don't have a business model. They don't need to make a profit. (Also, debt doesn't work the same way for the federal government that it does for a business or even a US state.) see, for just one take on this, https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/why-federally-funded-research-so-important https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/why-federally-funded-resear...
- lluisantoni 3mo ago
  It feels like governments might not be as stable as a company to fund large scale research given how many years can a government last. I have discussed with a friend at Argonne National Laboratory how quickly projects can die and management change based on ruling party. That being said, there are some topics the US government keeps funding no matter the party.
woctordho 3mo ago
There's a lot of individual effort of improving the models. See how many finetuned models and LoRAs are there on Hugging Face.
- shiftingleft 3mo ago
  fine-tuning a model is very different from training the whole model in terms of resource requirements.
  - woctordho 3mo ago
    So is making a PR different from making the whole software. This is what an open source community is good for.
sylware 3mo ago
Don't have a choice, will probably have to go open-weights models as currently, "AI" is gated using 'whatwg cartel' web engines. In the light of this, I am mechanically a proponent of very good open weights models, which I can download (for instance on on bittorrent) and run, slowly (the price), on local hardware. That would be for coding. If china puts its AI models on the same ground than US capital investment funds and big tech financial support (aka Big Tech international finance), they will very probably lose everything (know how, ML and inference infrastructures).
21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
Soo? If they need a better version, the world can pool resources together, form a company that trains the model, then the company goes under and the model becomes open source again.
gmerc 3mo ago
Complements.
MetroWind 3mo ago
Nope, that's not true at all in China. Everybody in China is using AI, even the elderlies and the kids. DeepSeek is already earning money.
rapind 3mo ago
The way I frame it is like the space race (except probably more consequential). China is collaborating with and encouraging their industry, definitely leaning into the state sponsored NASA route, while the United States fully embraced minting oligarchs that they'll most likely bail out later. We'll see what happens, but I suspect history will show us that the United States badly fumbled what was a pretty great initial lead. China might have just floored the gas pedal.

by gpt5 3mo ago

yogthos 3mo ago

This is precisely why we need more projects like this https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals There's no fundamental reason why models couldn't be developed and trained using community efforts. It might not be as fast and efficient, but it's definitely possible.

woctordho 3mo ago
See the recent development of DiLoCo at Nous Research and Prime Intellect.
- yogthos 3mo ago
  oh that's very cool, exactly the kind of stuff we need

ericmay 3mo ago

> The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. Right... and there are two problems with this: 1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the underlying assumptions about compute and scale needed are mostly on the mark. So you can release open-weight models and they will have great use cases and applications, but ultimately similar to how you don't use an open-source phone or a budget Android phone from Wal-Mart and you buy an iPhone instead, you will see that although they "do the same thing" one product is clearly superior and you just have to pay for it. For this to not be true... 2. then it incentivizes most (all?) companies, American, Chinese, or European to halt development of models because if you spend all the CAPEX and it can just be copied and turned open-source nobody will invest in that. Given that China is not halting development of proprietary models I believe the current strategy and the subsequent approach to release open-weight models is at best a stall tactic, and at worse a sign of desperation. Open source and the support and development models around it have been great. But folks are a little too dogmatic about it. Open-source software isn't a moral good, and closed-source software isn't a moral wrong either.

cyanydeez 3mo ago
Did you just assume the singularity?
- ericmay 3mo ago
  No
jbm 3mo ago
> Open-source software isn't a moral good Yes it is.
- ericmay 3mo ago
  Prove it
  - Razengan 3mo ago
    No u
    - ericmay 3mo ago
      That's just like, your opinion.... man....
  - Isamu 3mo ago
    I’ll take a swing at it. Open Source is a form of sharing with the wider community. Closed Source is not sharing. Moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit (the opposite of selfishness.) Ergo it’s a kind of moral good. And I’m not even an advocate for open source.
    - ericmay 3mo ago
      This argument boils down to X is good, therefore more of X is good. But you can see how that breaks down with even trivial examples. Not a great argument. The second piece of this "a moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit" - says who? Why? This logic is also faulty. You're also cargo-cutting self-interest in here as a moral failure when many good things depend on humans acting in their own self interest. For example I completely and selfishly installed a new tree at my house. But the community benefits from carbon capture, shade, &c. I understand the sentiment you have here and I think for everyday use and having some guiding principles it is probably fine, but don't confuse this for a principle that is actually examined. You can find contradictions rather easily, never mind solid arguments which expose cases where what you think is true is not really true and so forth.

dinfinity 3mo ago

jonahx 3mo ago
> Imagine approaching fundamental scientific research like that. "Welp, it can't make money, so it won't happen." > There is more to society than capitalism. I don't read GP like that. I read it as "we should recognize a situation of unstable incentives for an important outcome, and start thinking about other solutions."

geophile 3mo ago

But different huge companies have different incentives. It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to have me running a powerful open source model on a $4k machine that they sell me.

nightpool 3mo ago
Is it? When they could be having you running an even more powerful model on a $50k machine they sell by the pallet-load to enterprise consumers? We already see RAM manufacturers abandoning the low-end market in favor of server support. It's not clear to me that Nvidia sees personal GPUs as their best long term investment compared to selling millions of server-farm class machines
- layla5alive 3mo ago
  You mean a $500k machine, or a $15M rack... the costs have gotten unimaginably large from the lens of just a decade ago.
  - anonzzzies 3mo ago
    ... for AI... which people have to convince themselves they 'need'. I am a user, I have a 1m$ rack for my small company for AI, but I have currently 189 racks that cost about 15k one off per rack. And those make us a LOT more money than the AI ones ; most are departmental apps or websites that take very little processing power and are low on everything while people pay nice money to keep them going. Our support is better than the rest; you can just call me or come to my house and we'll do something. Not many clients leave, ever. For the past 30 years. I buy 5-10 year old servers which are complete overkill for 99% of my clients (some are fortune 500 companies but departmental stuff) and they just never leave. Makes vastly more money than AI and we are still cheaper than AWS and the department does not have to get a flexible budget (like they would have to if AWS) with us. We just have the same fixed price + yearly inflation correction and that's it. For 30 years.
- davnicwil 3mo ago
  Selling to individuals can be a hugely more robust predictable business, the problem with selling by the pallet load is spiky revenue that can also quickly fall off a cliff if larger customers stop buying. The other problem is sales negotiations driving down margins for bulk buyers etc. Consumer hardware is a very attractive market in lots of ways, just look at Apple.

idontwantthis 3mo ago

I am also confused by this point. The American government could force OpenAI and Anthropic to open their models, but then they would instantly evaporate, right? It doesn't seem like a choice that they can make, so framing it as a "winning" strategy doesn't make any sense to me. In what world could those companies have existed and opened their models?

Danox 3mo ago
They could, but they don’t have to. The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable. The one thing that is sort of ironic or bad is that between Russia and the Ukraine there’s a large number of mathematically inclined people that if it wasn’t for the Putin war, their brain power working on AI models would have probably pushed open source down the road, even faster…
- chasd00 3mo ago
  > The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable. This reads just like "AGI is 2 years away", I'll go set my calendar...
- idontwantthis 3mo ago
  But I still don't get it. Like China could be come the world's leading producer of chocolate...if they started giving away chocolate for free. Would we be having this conversation saying that Switzerland lost because they were greedy and protectionist and didn't decide to give away their chocolate for free first (I realize Switzerland probably isn't actually the world's top producer of chocolate).
  - randbyte 3mo ago
    Long history of open source projects already have answers on how to monetize a free and complex open source product. - Low development cost: collaborative efforts from open source contributors, innovative model training and serving for llm (Chinese models costs a fraction to train and their local chip design and manufacturing are catching up, plus cheap electricity) - monetizing by selling hosted services, while leaving the core product free to tinker with / self host. China’s gdp is 2/3 of the US and it’s already a huge market for AI - which OAI and A\ don’t enter. - for (the US) market that they can’t enter, let the US cloud providers to do free marketing / advocacy for them. Gaining share of mind. It costs them nothing.

trhway 3mo ago

In Russian opposition's mostly liberal discussions their school of thought connects several things together (sorry for not going directly to Marx's "General Intellect" and "Fragment on Machines" and using AI summaries instead ) - general idea of communism in China vs. techno-libertarianism of Thiel, Musk and the likes, and the Marx's thinking like: "Fragment on Machines": "he explores how human knowledge and collective intellect become embedded into machines, divorcing the worker from their own creativity." "General Intellect": "These texts are widely discussed for his concept of the General Intellect—the idea that society's shared, collective knowledge increasingly drives production rather than raw manual labor, and that this knowledge is alienated from workers and used as an instrument of capital." (note: my point isn't to pass any political judgement here, like what real communism in China or not real, is it good or bad, i just find it interesting that pure political discussions by people with no technical credentials bring AI as a major factor today)

bmitc 3mo ago

Why do people always bring up state support when it comes to China? As if the U.S. doesn't provide massive tax breaks and explicit funding to industry? It's on every tech post about China, as if it gives them some sort of "unfair" advantage.

blackqueeriroh 3mo ago
Because the scale of the subsidization is unimaginably different.
- deadfoxygrandpa 3mo ago
  yep. the ppp loans alone dwarf any state subsidies any other country has ever done
- bmitc 3mo ago
  How much is it?
- danny_codes 3mo ago
  The scale of public spend is probably much higher in the US..
  - Danox 3mo ago
    From a distance, the Chinese spending seems to be more focused and spread out across their infrastructure at all levels. Is that a difference between engineers running the system and lawyers running the USA? I certainly would like to see Thorium get some love after basically 50 years of being mothballed moth, and the same goes for the rail system within the United States.
    - danny_codes 3mo ago
      Probably. I mean I don't think anyone would choose Lawyer as the leading profession for leadership. It's a "largely useless" profession outside of it's very narrow context.

thayne 3mo ago

Well that's kind of the point of the article. That in order to "win", the US needs an incentive structure that encourages open models. I'm not sure what that looks like though.

DrScientist 3mo ago

Who funds the majority of cutting edge scientific research? Is it companies or is it governments? If governments around the world see LLMs built from public knowledge as pre-competitive as the public knowledge itself, then why wouldn't they sustainbly fund it?

stanzeo 3mo ago
Because the business model for governments is difficult. Income are mostly taxes, so you have to be able to explain constantly why it is a good idea to keep on spending budget on that funding.
- mbgerring 3mo ago
  If AI optimists are correct, and AI can increase productivity across the board, tax revenues go up. Not rocket science.
- KerrAvon 3mo ago
  Governments don't have a business model. They don't need to make a profit. (Also, debt doesn't work the same way for the federal government that it does for a business or even a US state.) see, for just one take on this, https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/why-federally-funded-research-so-important https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/why-federally-funded-resear...
lluisantoni 3mo ago
It feels like governments might not be as stable as a company to fund large scale research given how many years can a government last. I have discussed with a friend at Argonne National Laboratory how quickly projects can die and management change based on ruling party. That being said, there are some topics the US government keeps funding no matter the party.

woctordho 3mo ago

There's a lot of individual effort of improving the models. See how many finetuned models and LoRAs are there on Hugging Face.

shiftingleft 3mo ago
fine-tuning a model is very different from training the whole model in terms of resource requirements.
- woctordho 3mo ago
  So is making a PR different from making the whole software. This is what an open source community is good for.

sylware 3mo ago

Don't have a choice, will probably have to go open-weights models as currently, "AI" is gated using 'whatwg cartel' web engines. In the light of this, I am mechanically a proponent of very good open weights models, which I can download (for instance on on bittorrent) and run, slowly (the price), on local hardware. That would be for coding. If china puts its AI models on the same ground than US capital investment funds and big tech financial support (aka Big Tech international finance), they will very probably lose everything (know how, ML and inference infrastructures).

21asdffdsa12 3mo ago

Soo? If they need a better version, the world can pool resources together, form a company that trains the model, then the company goes under and the model becomes open source again.

gmerc 3mo ago

Complements.

MetroWind 3mo ago

Nope, that's not true at all in China. Everybody in China is using AI, even the elderlies and the kids. DeepSeek is already earning money.

rapind 3mo ago

The way I frame it is like the space race (except probably more consequential). China is collaborating with and encouraging their industry, definitely leaning into the state sponsored NASA route, while the United States fully embraced minting oligarchs that they'll most likely bail out later. We'll see what happens, but I suspect history will show us that the United States badly fumbled what was a pretty great initial lead. China might have just floored the gas pedal.