4 ms·

I keep telling people that we are living in the golden age of AI - like the first year or two of google. It is all down hill as these companies push for profit

I keep telling people that we are living in the golden age of AI - like the first year or two of google. It is all down hill as these companies push for profit and lock-in.

adamisom 28d ago
local models will be powerful enough, can't say the same about local search engines 20y ago
nullbio 28d ago
Exactly why everyone needs to be hyper-focused on ensuring that the open-source ecosystem is healthy and that we don't let them shut that down.
- Roland303 28d ago
  how does one do that from their comfy chair?
  - pixelatedindex 28d ago
    I for one am running what I can on my aging 1080Ti(!!), namely a Qwen2.5 14B (4-bit quantized). It’s not great, and the only other card I have is a 3070Ti but I need that for gaming. :( What a terrible card that 3070Ti is. Mad regrets buying it because I wanted to save $400 compared to a 3080Ti.
    - pixelatedindex 27d ago
      I really don’t understand why this is being downvoted? Did I say something wrong / controversial? Or is it because I’m not using my resources the “optimal” way? Is it because my models aren’t open weight? I was only trying to contribute my experience :(
  - oefrha 28d ago
    By sending some cash (and maybe some non-sensitive training data too) the way of labs creating open models? At work we have expensive Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions but also have some in house workflows plugged into DeepSeek and GLM APIs.
  - LtWorf 28d ago
    By not harassing projects with AI generated pull requests.
    - dv_dt 28d ago
      A pull request is a communication to the project. AI or no AI, a poorly communicated request is a burden. IMHO AI prs are fine as long as the submitter has done the work to refine that communication to make it easy to read and assess.
      - LtWorf 28d ago
        True, the problem is that AI ones are 500x longer and at a first glance look fine, so they waste much more time. Moreover a human contributor can learn and do better in the next PR, while the AI won't, unless the prompt is changed, but the operator won't learn.
        dv_dt 28d ago
        A large submission without a breakdown or explanation, or a pass to minimize the code change is junk. The operator can literally ask the ai to compose it better, refactor in to smaller PRs, or do it themself. The annoyance is to have to communicate and enforce expectations to drive by submitters. In the end every project has to figure out what they accept. If, at a glance the PR is drive by junk being thrown over the wall, a response of this doesn't meet our pr submission standards delete, or try again, to me is not overly burdensome.
      - owebmaster 28d ago
        AI PRs aren't fine. Open a issue and propose a change, the maintainers decide what to do next with their own AI if they want.
  - nucleative 28d ago
    1. Download ollama and give it a try. It doesn't have to be that one but it's an easy on-ramp. Just get a feel for what open source/open weights is capable of 2. Mention it whenever it comes up. Most people have no clue this is a thing and I think it's useful to make people aware. We need access to uncensored / unbiased LLM models - information wants to be free but there are plenty of businesses gunning for regulatory capture as these are very powerful tools. 3. If you're in a position of developing any project that makes use of AI in any form, check the open source models first, unless you absolutely require the best of the best, these other models are pretty dang capable of almost everything any commercial model can do. 4. If your state or {insert legal jurisdiction here} attempts to regulate access to open source tools for this, oppose it with your vote and your voice. 5. Opposed laws that grant commercial AI suppliers any priority or premium access under government purchasing programs. I'm sure others will chime in, those are a few that pop the mind.
    - KronisLV 28d ago
      > Download ollama and give it a try Weren't people pissed off at them for a variety of reasons? Not giving attribution etc. In case anyone wants other good alternatives, there's llama.cpp and vLLM, each harder to setup but opens the door for squeezing more performance out of your hardware. I've also heard okay things about LM Studio and I think Unsloth had their own thing as well: https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio > Mention it whenever it comes up. You could also vote with your valley and support orgs that release open weights of their near-SOTA models, though nowadays that means giving cash to primarily Chinese companies (e.g. Moonshot and Z.ai). For what it's worth, people are also complaining about them decreasing usage quotas on their subscription offerings as well so seems like the squeeze is everywhere, even DeepSeek raised their prices (which is better than them going broke, I guess).
      - wongarsu 28d ago
        sglang is also worth mentioning. Fills a similar role as vLLM, but with less fiddling at the knobs to get a working setup For a GUI experience that also serves an OpenAI-compatible API, Unsloth studio or LM Studio is probably the way to go
  - athrowaway3z 28d ago
    Unsubscribe from Anthropic because they block third party harness on subscriptions. As long as you keep providers replaceable things will be fine. Google, Facebook, Apple etc were much better deals around 2010 before they became entrenched and irreplaceable, and thus able to extract & enshitify without people leaving.
    - intrasight 28d ago
      I agree on Google and Apple being irreplaceable. But Facebook is easy to leave.
      - wasmitnetzen 28d ago
        For you, sure. But there are a lot of communities running entirely there. Our local farmer's market is preorder only, and is entirely run off Facebook. I would have to skip going there altogether. And it's not viable to propose any alternative. There is no platform, closed or open, where there are enough people registered to be actually usable, and nobody will make a separate account for this.
      - Pavilion2095 28d ago
        In many countries Meta platforms—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApps—are primary means of communication. If you want to find interesting events happening this weekend, you need to be on Facebook. In this regard, Google and Apple are much easier to leave because they offer personalised services, and you can always move your email and photos elsewhere. But you cannot move other people from Facebook or Instagram.
        sajithdilshan 28d ago
        It’s not that easy to leave Google or Apple. As an example I wanted to leave iCloud and stop paying storage tax for Apple. But they have made it almost impossible to migrate the photos. There is no API to download the photos programmatically and the only way is to sync all the photos to MacBook and then move it. However, the photos are close to 1TB of storage and my MacBook doesn’t have enough storage to sync all those photos locally. Same goes for Gmail. I have used my Gmail address for countless services and it’s almost part of my official identity. The benefits of moving away from Gmail doesn’t justify the effort I have to put in
  - znite 28d ago
    OpenCode+OpenRouter is probably one of the easiest combos
  - xenodium 28d ago
    Support vendor agnostic tools offering agent integrations through the likes of Agent Client Protocol https://agentclientprotocol.com https://agentclientprotocol.com ps. I built Emacs integration through ACP https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell
- pydry 28d ago
  If it does then software will become even more unreliable.
- troupo 28d ago
  > on ensuring that the open-source ecosystem There are no open source models. Only open weights. No one is giving you the source (training data). And yeah, no one is giving you the compute to train the models.
  - sjducb 28d ago
    I think OP means the existing open source ecosystem, things like the Python requests library. There’s a real risk that AI kills contributions to traditional open source projects, and we all move to custom libraries written by our own AI.
  - nullbio 28d ago
    Yes, there are. But that's not what I was saying. I'm talking about harnesses, tooling, sharing training data, the shared research, and the list goes on. Frontier labs are already trying to move everyone into the cloud so their harnesses and surrounding tooling can be hidden away. We need to make sure there are strong open-source competitors to this model that keep the power on the local machine.
  - latentsea 28d ago
    https://ifm.ai/blog/k2 https://ifm.ai/blog/k2 is actually open source as I understand.
  - kbwal7 28d ago
    Olmo is one truly open source model. https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3 https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
    - yencabulator 28d ago
      You can't ingest Common Crawl and claim to be an Open Model. Common Crawl is just a premade collection of random copyrighted unlicensed content.
- kyleaa 27d ago
  Does Nvidia's acquisition put the open-source ecosystem at risk? I remember what Oracle purchased Java. IMO, it was a mess for many years after that. It is a strategic move for Nvidia, but I see it harming open-source AI options.
nerdsniper 28d ago
Google was pretty amazing for about 15 years, not 1 to 2. Google rocked from its launch (1999ish) until around the time it shut down Google Reader (2013ish).
- chupchap 28d ago
  The actual reason was when they pushed Google+ and tried to make that the centre of Google. Everything else that had a social element had to be killed. Anything that breathed the same oxygen as plus got the boot.
  - b112 28d ago
    Including the inanity of the + operator being a "this word unchanged must appear in results" modifier. So when they hot patched search, it broke, as +aliens looked for the plus name aliens only. Then some bonkers spokesperson for google said "oh just use quotes", which at the time did nothing even remotely the same. I loath this person for eternity, her lies, and her waving off of reporters concerns. Thus verbatim was introduced, validating quotes weren't the same, yet which wouldn't work with date ranges, and is lame. So goes the "professionalisn" of Google, or "screw around like uncoordinated idiots". To say Plus was inane and destructive to Google is vastly understating. And everyone involved in Plus were buffoons. You know, I wish could speak freely on this topic, but as a public forum, I have held back some vitriol.
    - tdeck 28d ago
      Im glad someone else still remembers the plus operator. I miss it.
  - eloisant 28d ago
    ...and them pushing Google+ despite their users best interests was the first signal the good years were finished.
- cousinbryce 28d ago
  Things have accelerated since then. Maybe compare their time to a billion users to scale the golden age. I’d guess it’s almost over.
speedgoose 28d ago
You can run pretty good LLMs locally. Currently the hardware is expensive but it will be cheaper eventually.
m12k 28d ago
I haven't used Kimi K3 or GLM 5.3, but boy am I glad they exist! Every time an open weights model is released a bit closer to the frontier models, that's another level of performance that we, the users, can't lose access to no matter if the frontier labs jack up prices out of our reach, or the US administration decides to put a full export block in place on AI.
aaron_m04 28d ago
Yes. Grab those open-weight models while you still can.
- TacticalCoder 28d ago
  > Yes. Grab those open-weight models while you still can. You mean like it's impossible to download a movie because it's illegal, it's going to be impossible to download open-weight models because it's going to be made illegal? So for the same definition of "impossible", it's going to be "impossible" to download open-weight models?
  - aaron_m04 28d ago
    I don't think it'll become impossible or even illegal, but better safe than sorry.
timcobb 28d ago
How is this comment relevant and why is it the top post on this thread.
- altcognito 28d ago
  It's cynical and critical of marketing? Many of us are cynical, and there's an argument that being cynical is lazy because most of its arguments are obvious because they are rooted in truth.
npn 28d ago
luckily I have purchased a used amd mi50 32gb card for pretty cheap back then. while I haven't used it extensively, it feels pretty great having a backup plan that does not depend on any external 3rd parties.
neoyagami 28d ago
Rn im having a blast moving to linux, I had hardware that was not compatible bc it had windows specific softwarw -stream deck(the current software did not work as spected) -pcpanel (linux compat sucked) -avermedia lgd(no drivers for linux) On 3 weeks I had them ported(all gpl on github) and they work really well. If you know what are you doing, agents can be really focused and deliver well

I keep telling people that we are living in the golden age of AI - like the first year or two of google. It is all down hill as these companies push for profit and lock-in.

adamisom 28d ago

local models will be powerful enough, can't say the same about local search engines 20y ago

nullbio 28d ago

Exactly why everyone needs to be hyper-focused on ensuring that the open-source ecosystem is healthy and that we don't let them shut that down.

Roland303 28d ago
how does one do that from their comfy chair?
- pixelatedindex 28d ago
  I for one am running what I can on my aging 1080Ti(!!), namely a Qwen2.5 14B (4-bit quantized). It’s not great, and the only other card I have is a 3070Ti but I need that for gaming. :( What a terrible card that 3070Ti is. Mad regrets buying it because I wanted to save $400 compared to a 3080Ti.
  - pixelatedindex 27d ago
    I really don’t understand why this is being downvoted? Did I say something wrong / controversial? Or is it because I’m not using my resources the “optimal” way? Is it because my models aren’t open weight? I was only trying to contribute my experience :(
- oefrha 28d ago
  By sending some cash (and maybe some non-sensitive training data too) the way of labs creating open models? At work we have expensive Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions but also have some in house workflows plugged into DeepSeek and GLM APIs.
- LtWorf 28d ago
  By not harassing projects with AI generated pull requests.
  - dv_dt 28d ago
    A pull request is a communication to the project. AI or no AI, a poorly communicated request is a burden. IMHO AI prs are fine as long as the submitter has done the work to refine that communication to make it easy to read and assess.
    - LtWorf 28d ago
      True, the problem is that AI ones are 500x longer and at a first glance look fine, so they waste much more time. Moreover a human contributor can learn and do better in the next PR, while the AI won't, unless the prompt is changed, but the operator won't learn.
      - dv_dt 28d ago
        A large submission without a breakdown or explanation, or a pass to minimize the code change is junk. The operator can literally ask the ai to compose it better, refactor in to smaller PRs, or do it themself. The annoyance is to have to communicate and enforce expectations to drive by submitters. In the end every project has to figure out what they accept. If, at a glance the PR is drive by junk being thrown over the wall, a response of this doesn't meet our pr submission standards delete, or try again, to me is not overly burdensome.
    - owebmaster 28d ago
      AI PRs aren't fine. Open a issue and propose a change, the maintainers decide what to do next with their own AI if they want.
- nucleative 28d ago
  1. Download ollama and give it a try. It doesn't have to be that one but it's an easy on-ramp. Just get a feel for what open source/open weights is capable of 2. Mention it whenever it comes up. Most people have no clue this is a thing and I think it's useful to make people aware. We need access to uncensored / unbiased LLM models - information wants to be free but there are plenty of businesses gunning for regulatory capture as these are very powerful tools. 3. If you're in a position of developing any project that makes use of AI in any form, check the open source models first, unless you absolutely require the best of the best, these other models are pretty dang capable of almost everything any commercial model can do. 4. If your state or {insert legal jurisdiction here} attempts to regulate access to open source tools for this, oppose it with your vote and your voice. 5. Opposed laws that grant commercial AI suppliers any priority or premium access under government purchasing programs. I'm sure others will chime in, those are a few that pop the mind.
  - KronisLV 28d ago
    > Download ollama and give it a try Weren't people pissed off at them for a variety of reasons? Not giving attribution etc. In case anyone wants other good alternatives, there's llama.cpp and vLLM, each harder to setup but opens the door for squeezing more performance out of your hardware. I've also heard okay things about LM Studio and I think Unsloth had their own thing as well: https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio > Mention it whenever it comes up. You could also vote with your valley and support orgs that release open weights of their near-SOTA models, though nowadays that means giving cash to primarily Chinese companies (e.g. Moonshot and Z.ai). For what it's worth, people are also complaining about them decreasing usage quotas on their subscription offerings as well so seems like the squeeze is everywhere, even DeepSeek raised their prices (which is better than them going broke, I guess).
    - wongarsu 28d ago
      sglang is also worth mentioning. Fills a similar role as vLLM, but with less fiddling at the knobs to get a working setup For a GUI experience that also serves an OpenAI-compatible API, Unsloth studio or LM Studio is probably the way to go
- athrowaway3z 28d ago
  Unsubscribe from Anthropic because they block third party harness on subscriptions. As long as you keep providers replaceable things will be fine. Google, Facebook, Apple etc were much better deals around 2010 before they became entrenched and irreplaceable, and thus able to extract & enshitify without people leaving.
  - intrasight 28d ago
    I agree on Google and Apple being irreplaceable. But Facebook is easy to leave.
    - wasmitnetzen 28d ago
      For you, sure. But there are a lot of communities running entirely there. Our local farmer's market is preorder only, and is entirely run off Facebook. I would have to skip going there altogether. And it's not viable to propose any alternative. There is no platform, closed or open, where there are enough people registered to be actually usable, and nobody will make a separate account for this.
    - Pavilion2095 28d ago
      In many countries Meta platforms—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApps—are primary means of communication. If you want to find interesting events happening this weekend, you need to be on Facebook. In this regard, Google and Apple are much easier to leave because they offer personalised services, and you can always move your email and photos elsewhere. But you cannot move other people from Facebook or Instagram.
      - sajithdilshan 28d ago
        It’s not that easy to leave Google or Apple. As an example I wanted to leave iCloud and stop paying storage tax for Apple. But they have made it almost impossible to migrate the photos. There is no API to download the photos programmatically and the only way is to sync all the photos to MacBook and then move it. However, the photos are close to 1TB of storage and my MacBook doesn’t have enough storage to sync all those photos locally. Same goes for Gmail. I have used my Gmail address for countless services and it’s almost part of my official identity. The benefits of moving away from Gmail doesn’t justify the effort I have to put in
- znite 28d ago
  OpenCode+OpenRouter is probably one of the easiest combos
- xenodium 28d ago
  Support vendor agnostic tools offering agent integrations through the likes of Agent Client Protocol https://agentclientprotocol.com https://agentclientprotocol.com ps. I built Emacs integration through ACP https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell
pydry 28d ago
If it does then software will become even more unreliable.
troupo 28d ago
> on ensuring that the open-source ecosystem There are no open source models. Only open weights. No one is giving you the source (training data). And yeah, no one is giving you the compute to train the models.
- sjducb 28d ago
  I think OP means the existing open source ecosystem, things like the Python requests library. There’s a real risk that AI kills contributions to traditional open source projects, and we all move to custom libraries written by our own AI.
- nullbio 28d ago
  Yes, there are. But that's not what I was saying. I'm talking about harnesses, tooling, sharing training data, the shared research, and the list goes on. Frontier labs are already trying to move everyone into the cloud so their harnesses and surrounding tooling can be hidden away. We need to make sure there are strong open-source competitors to this model that keep the power on the local machine.
- latentsea 28d ago
  https://ifm.ai/blog/k2 https://ifm.ai/blog/k2 is actually open source as I understand.
- kbwal7 28d ago
  Olmo is one truly open source model. https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3 https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
  - yencabulator 28d ago
    You can't ingest Common Crawl and claim to be an Open Model. Common Crawl is just a premade collection of random copyrighted unlicensed content.
kyleaa 27d ago
Does Nvidia's acquisition put the open-source ecosystem at risk? I remember what Oracle purchased Java. IMO, it was a mess for many years after that. It is a strategic move for Nvidia, but I see it harming open-source AI options.

nerdsniper 28d ago

Google was pretty amazing for about 15 years, not 1 to 2. Google rocked from its launch (1999ish) until around the time it shut down Google Reader (2013ish).

chupchap 28d ago
The actual reason was when they pushed Google+ and tried to make that the centre of Google. Everything else that had a social element had to be killed. Anything that breathed the same oxygen as plus got the boot.
- b112 28d ago
  Including the inanity of the + operator being a "this word unchanged must appear in results" modifier. So when they hot patched search, it broke, as +aliens looked for the plus name aliens only. Then some bonkers spokesperson for google said "oh just use quotes", which at the time did nothing even remotely the same. I loath this person for eternity, her lies, and her waving off of reporters concerns. Thus verbatim was introduced, validating quotes weren't the same, yet which wouldn't work with date ranges, and is lame. So goes the "professionalisn" of Google, or "screw around like uncoordinated idiots". To say Plus was inane and destructive to Google is vastly understating. And everyone involved in Plus were buffoons. You know, I wish could speak freely on this topic, but as a public forum, I have held back some vitriol.
  - tdeck 28d ago
    Im glad someone else still remembers the plus operator. I miss it.
- eloisant 28d ago
  ...and them pushing Google+ despite their users best interests was the first signal the good years were finished.
cousinbryce 28d ago
Things have accelerated since then. Maybe compare their time to a billion users to scale the golden age. I’d guess it’s almost over.

speedgoose 28d ago

You can run pretty good LLMs locally. Currently the hardware is expensive but it will be cheaper eventually.

m12k 28d ago

I haven't used Kimi K3 or GLM 5.3, but boy am I glad they exist! Every time an open weights model is released a bit closer to the frontier models, that's another level of performance that we, the users, can't lose access to no matter if the frontier labs jack up prices out of our reach, or the US administration decides to put a full export block in place on AI.

aaron_m04 28d ago

Yes. Grab those open-weight models while you still can.

TacticalCoder 28d ago
> Yes. Grab those open-weight models while you still can. You mean like it's impossible to download a movie because it's illegal, it's going to be impossible to download open-weight models because it's going to be made illegal? So for the same definition of "impossible", it's going to be "impossible" to download open-weight models?
- aaron_m04 28d ago
  I don't think it'll become impossible or even illegal, but better safe than sorry.

timcobb 28d ago

How is this comment relevant and why is it the top post on this thread.

altcognito 28d ago
It's cynical and critical of marketing? Many of us are cynical, and there's an argument that being cynical is lazy because most of its arguments are obvious because they are rooted in truth.

npn 28d ago

luckily I have purchased a used amd mi50 32gb card for pretty cheap back then. while I haven't used it extensively, it feels pretty great having a backup plan that does not depend on any external 3rd parties.

neoyagami 28d ago

Rn im having a blast moving to linux, I had hardware that was not compatible bc it had windows specific softwarw -stream deck(the current software did not work as spected) -pcpanel (linux compat sucked) -avermedia lgd(no drivers for linux) On 3 weeks I had them ported(all gpl on github) and they work really well. If you know what are you doing, agents can be really focused and deliver well