With open-weight AI, there might not be an incentive to put large sums of capital towards training / research. There might be a donation fund of some sorts, but it certainly won't reach the level of fundraising that the frontier labs are receiving.

Because of this, I think it might not be possible to have AI *only* open-weight; major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google will likely stay for good, with better models than open-source versions.

I think it might look something like Photoshop & GIMP, with Photoshop being a frontier lab, and GIMP being the open-weight model. GIMP is decent for many different image editing workflows, but Photoshop is just better.

I would definitely prefer to have an open-weight model better than frontier labs'. Though I don't think it's possible.

> Because of this, I think it might not be possible to have AI only open-weight; major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google will likely stay for good, with better models than open-source versions.

There's a more fundamental reason for this: some AI models are large enough that they can plausibly only be reasonably run in a state-of-the-art hyperscale datacenter. Open sourcing such models would be largely pointless. Note that this would be a significantly larger scale than even the largest open models available today, one that precludes even doing inference slowly on a small-scale, cheap makeshift cluster. But it's plausible that Fable is there already.

I think the same, but I also think that local AI is actually inevitable, even if not open source models. I wouldn't be surprised to see OpenAI and others release an on-prem product. Whether that's effectively an appliance rack, or some other form, people (large companies) are going to want to run inference locally for data sovereignty & cost controls. Especially if we get to a point where companies want AI integrated into manufacturing and other air-gapped networks.

Perhaps, unless there is a way for users to donate compute to training, folding@home style. I don’t see how that could be practical though.

Zoom out. It's a matter of time the trillion valuations will be deemed senseless, only once it will prove inpossible to extract trillions from consumers.

In the meanwhile, and regardless, software optimisations coupled with hardware continuing to scale, we will end up, soon enough, with some open weight that run on a mobile device with greater capabilities than Fable.

Yeah I think that's a decent analog (Photoshop & GIMP). We're in a sort of "rapid expansion" phase right now, but unless the tech behind "AI" really evolves, better and better models will be harder to come by, with diminishing returns.

Even if the GIMP of LLMs is only 80% as good as the VC-funded stuff, that will still be plenty useful for lots of people.

And I think just having the option to use open source models is a win, even if it turns out to be true they'll never be quite as good as the proprietary ones.

That is fantastic news then, if commercial product products will always be better than open source, and open source products will continue to get better

the moat is in hardware, without capital intensive acquisition how tf they going to get that money ?????

I learn it hard from prusa 3d printer open model

Which is the nearterm future that we must demand: a stop to the amounts of capital flowing to ASI research. Join me, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI’s-founding-charter in saying the obvious, y’all; Pause AI, now.

It should be clear by now that there’s a whole universe of work to do with the models we have today, from studying to securing to ‘harness’ing. There are tons of economic benefits to be reaped already, if applied carefully. Doesn’t that sound nicer than rolling the dice with the lives of trillions?