| ▲ | parliament32 7 hours ago |
| Step 1: Require companies to submit product for "review" Step 2: Complain about how the OSS/Chinese/whatever models are doing releases without approval Step 3: Prohibit, because "safety" and "financial risks"(?) So this is the door-shutting Altman et al have been pushing for eh? |
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| ▲ | supriyo-biswas 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source. |
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| ▲ | philipkglass 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago. https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/ https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin... https://www.ibm.com/granite https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ | | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though. | | |
| ▲ | philipkglass 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time. |
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| ▲ | ndiddy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One of the main reasons why companies start new open source projects is because having a good open source option in a given category will usually push the market value of software in that category to $0, and this can be strategically valuable. For example, Google released Android as an open source operating system because they make their money from ads and data collection, not from selling operating system licenses. All the cell phone companies switched from Windows Mobile and Symbian to Android, which gave Google a ton of user data to sell. For AI, the most profitable part of the value chain is selling inference. None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0. Meanwhile, open source AI models are a huge strategic initiative for China. Having commodity Chinese models that are as good as the leading edge American models from 6 months ago forces the American companies to keep paying more and more money to train better and better models since the amount of time they can collect rent on a model they've previously trained is limited to 6 months. | | |
| ▲ | anigbrowl an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The Chinese approach is reminiscent of the US spending so much on 'defense' in the 1980s that the USSR bankrupted itself trying to keep up. | |
| ▲ | nradov 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In business strategy terms this is known as "commoditize your complements". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ | | |
| ▲ | jdironman 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thank you for this article link! I had not seen it before. will be printing it off to read later. |
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| ▲ | mullingitover 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0 Meta/Llama: "What am I, chopped liver?" I thought the thing keeping inference above $0 was the hardware, and even if that were free there's still the tyranny of the Landauer Limit. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Meta Llama is free for many uses but it doesn't even remotely meet the definition of "open source". | |
| ▲ | sofixa 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | When was the last Llama release? Meta have abandoned it and reportedly they've had a shift in their AI strategy. |
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| ▲ | giancarlostoro 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Google had to release at least the core packages in Android regardless because it is based on top of Linux and the GPL license would require it. | | |
| ▲ | jraph 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | But they open sourced much more than that, and under more permissive licenses. The notable exception is of course the google play services, which is also strategic (they control the OEMs with this, among other things). And the drivers, but that's mostly not them I think (they could possibly have required open source drivers though) | | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro a few seconds ago | parent [-] | | Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Google did the Microsoft playbook. Look at email. Look at youtube we used to share videos via Kazaa and other p2p programs, zero censorship, all the same features (including chat!!) theres also XMPP which became Google Talk -> Chat -> Hangouts etc then the browser, how many random apps “Only works on Chrome” but you change the Firefox browser agent and it works there too! |
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| ▲ | an0malous 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No one open sources their core competencies, GitHub never open sourced their networked filesystem and Heroku never open sourced their dyno sandboxing code. They open source ancillary tools. | |
| ▲ | davidkwast 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As what we say here in Brazil: "The world doesn't go round. It flips over!" | |
| ▲ | yoyohello13 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | American companies are interested in cashing in, not making a good product. | |
| ▲ | treis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Llama? |
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| ▲ | satvikpendem 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to prevent. https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership |
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| ▲ | sterlind 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I loathe Anthropic. many companies don't contribute to open-source, but for one to be actively hostile to open-source, to the degree they're lobbying the government to ban it, is uniquely evil. at least these gatekeepers call themselves what they are. scraping CoT won't stop the advance of Chinese models. neither will a US "ban" on using such models. at this point I'm cheering for DeepSeek or Qwen to catch up to Anthropic. I support anyone who releases open weights. | | |
| ▲ | xoxolian 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Is OpenAI significantly better so far regarding this, at least publicly? I'm increasing my LLM spend this weekend, and this could impact my decision. And I'll prioritize supporting open-weight models moving forward — already Chatgpt's censorship and surveillance dissuade from asking it genuinely helpful questions. | | |
| ▲ | sterlind 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | OpenAI seems marginally better. they did release gpt-oss-120b, which was decent at the time. but certainly not much better, and they seemed even more on board with fully disabling guardrails for Uncle Sam than Anthropic was. then again, rumor has it that Anthropic's AI selected that Iranian elementary school as part of Palantir's Project Maven pipeline, so.. I strongly recommend open-weight wherever you can. assume any data you pass to a closed model (including opinions or political positions you intimate) will be retained and analyzed in unfriendly ways, either now or ten years from now. |
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| ▲ | scottyah 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Out of curiosity, what's your stance on gun ownership? | | |
| ▲ | sterlind 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 3D2A. I support repealing the machine gun ban. (and I don't even own a gun.) | | |
| ▲ | scottyah an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm impressed you stick to a pretty absolute devotion to freedom. I get more bitter the older I get, it seems easier to psyop someone into abusing their rights than to get people to fight for and be proper custodians of them. Especially drugs- I used to think all people should have access, but overall I really wish meth just never existed and people wouldn't distribute it outside of specific circumstances. Being able to cause irreparable damage in one moment of weakness is terrible for people who have less control, and for society as a whole really. |
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| ▲ | smallmancontrov 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > cyber misuse He who controls the porn controls the universe. - Baron Amodei |
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| ▲ | slicktux 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Seems to be. What better way to secure your companies future by limiting open frontier models. Government sponsored monopoly? |
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| ▲ | PearlRiver 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The US can't limit anything beyond their borders. We ae living in the twilight of the white man. |
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| ▲ | an0malous 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This entire year with the IPOs and now this is because there's a trillion dollars betting on AI and they all know they have no moat, there's no more training data and they're seeing diminishing returns on scaling anyway, and it's inevitable that smaller, open-source models will catch up and become competitive. It's a complete disaster, the tech industry is broken. |
