| ▲ | NitpickLawyer 7 hours ago |
| Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever. That can't be said for API-based models where a provider can sunset models whenever they feel like (i.e. gpt5-mini will soon be gone, and replaced by a more expensive 5.4-mini, same for goog, etc). And there will always be incentivised parties that release models. Nvda for one has every incentive to keep the nemotron line going, as they're directly profiting from people running this. And the models aren't really far from open SotA anyway. Goog will probably continue to release the small models, since they'll use them for browser stuff anyway, and know that they'll leak. So for them it's a win-win to release the small models and gain some dev market share. And the chinese labs also have incentives to keep releasing models, and will likely continue to get gov support to do so (yay commercial wars between nations). |
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| ▲ | felooboolooomba 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > they can never be taken away Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Absolutely everything can be taken away. The simplest way to remove open models is probably to declare them a tool that terrorists could use. Crazy? Yes, the world is totally crazy these days. |
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| ▲ | redox99 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That only affects people in California. Whereas Fable being shut down affects people all over the world. | | |
| ▲ | anticorporate 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's also, importantly, a distinction between what are told we can no longer use, and what can actually be taken away. Open source and open hardware can be called illegal by a government, but, if we collectively invest our energy into open alternatives, they can't be taken away in the same sense. I can build a RepRap printer and I can use a local AI model. It's on all of us to make sure that the open alternatives are viable, maybe in the current global political reality now more than ever. Making something illegal isn't a disincentive for everyone. When they start banning books, some of us start assembling printing presses. | | |
| ▲ | echoangle 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Believe me, if the government wants to stop you from having access to something like that, they could do it. Just give people some incentive to report you and make really harsh punishments and everyone will be thinking really hard about how bad they want have access. | | |
| ▲ | Zetaphor an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Because that has worked so well for: * Drugs * Media piracy * Alcohol * Sex work * Unlicensed gambling The government is not an all powerful entity with absolute control over its people. Even in countries under past and present dictatorship there are examples of people getting access to what the government deemed as illegal. | |
| ▲ | dvngnt_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They can stop piracy or child predators. what makes you think they can prevent access to running models that require no internet access to run | |
| ▲ | anticorporate 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well, sure. The same could be said of any freedom they want to take away. The responsibility is on us to preserve those freedoms. Free software, open hardware, right to repair, privacy tools, etc. will all be the weapons of the people in the fight against totalitarianism. | |
| ▲ | bijowo1676 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | the government is not God, they cant do much beyond declaring anything bad. It is on people to realize we have the ultimate power and oppose the overreach of government in all ways we can to keep our freedoms. Freedom is not free, after all | |
| ▲ | danny_codes 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fortunately we have both a democracy and a constitution, making those sorts of things hard for the government to do. |
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| ▲ | vitally3643 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Just like declaring piracy illegal stopped piracy and removed pirated materials from everyone's computers. Everything cannot, in fact, be taken away. Don't propagandize yourself. Some things, like information, are free. Not even China can prevent all its citizens from accessing Western internet. USGov simply does not have the resources to find and audit every hard drive and USB stick in the country for illegal files. The internet cannot be censored 100% without literally cutting every cable and confiscating every radio. The software that runs on my computer cannot, in fact, be restricted. It can be declared illegal, but there literally is no mechanism by which it can be enforced other than a government goon standing over my shoulder 24/7. Some freedoms really cannot be removed without utterly implausible amounts of effort. Arguing otherwise is helping to erode freedom. So stop it. | | |
| ▲ | citadel_melon an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe we can each get assigned an AI government goon to look over our shoulders 24/7. Maybe each neuron in my brain will have their own subagent goon. Each mitochondria gets their own subagent government goon. The government will perfectly model my every move. They will perfectly model the smell of my asparagus piss aroma. | |
| ▲ | NamlchakKhandro 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You wouldn't download a car? | | | |
| ▲ | Simran-B 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Remote attestation? | | |
| ▲ | advael 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | On PCs, the best you could really do is restrict access to certain websites on certain boxes with TPMs the users can't disable. Remote attestation can lock people out of your stuff, but not out of their own stuff. For that you need control of the device. Of course, most mobile phones aren't easy for the user to have control of, but most PCs still are, so long as you scrub the rootkits (e.g. windows) off 'em | |
| ▲ | bijowo1676 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | it doesnt even work in the government's own servers to protect their own shit |
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| ▲ | jgalt212 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Are laws that are inherently unenforceable even laws? |
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| ▲ | Bolwin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever. In theory yes, but the average person can't really run the big open models. This is already happening, try to find a provider that still hosts older, especially less popular or succeeded open models. For me personally, I've been trying to access Kimi K2-0711. There seems to be only one provider left on openrouter (NovitaAI) and 3/4 requests error out |
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| ▲ | veqq 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > NovitaAI is a low cost provider who's strategy seems to be to host as many models as possible for the lowest cost possible so that OpenRouter's routing algorithm will default to them as often as possible. The problem is that they clearly don't spend much time on actually testing and configuring all of the models they provide. There's a reason they are very often the first provider to host a new model. I also suspect that they run models at lower quants than they claim but that is not something I can prove. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mk4kt0/be_care... |
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| ▲ | jfim 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| True, but the capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time, so the value of that model declines over time. A model that writes code without knowledge of any language or library changes for half a decade is less useful. A 2021 era chatgpt would be quite quaint in 2026. Right now the Chinese labs might have incentives to release their models for free, and maybe Google is happy to release open weights today, but I'm sure there are already bean counters at Google salivating at the idea of having Gemini in Chrome as part of a Google AI monthly subscription just like YouTube premium and other Google subscriptions. |
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| ▲ | anon373839 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time I think this matters less than you think. If the spigot turns off, open LLM research is going to have a powerful incentive to focus on post-training to refresh stale base models. And post-training, in general, is so much cheaper and faster than pre-training anyway. I was pretty surprised to learn that GLM-5.2's entire RL training (the part that makes it reliable at agentic tasks) was completed in just TWO DAYS. | |
| ▲ | teleforce 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >True, but the capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time, so the value of that model declines over time. Correction: The capabilities and knowledge of that model can be improved via self-distillation, so the value of that model increases over time. This is where I think self-distillation is the main way forward, and probably the second best thing ever happened to AI/LLM after the transformer. Based on self-distillation, the value of the open weights models will incease over time for sub-specialization through post-training and fine-tuning. Please check these very promising recent works and results from MIT/ETH, UCLA and Apple [1],[2,[3]. For example the MIT/ETH self-distillation approach was demonstrated by a single H200 GPU. Apple approach is even simpler that it's simply called Simple Self-Distillation (SSD), pun intended. [1] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19897 [2] Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18734 [3] Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01193 | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The weights are not frozen in time. You can train the model on new data. It's just a matter of economics of whether you have a leading lab pay for the training or you pay for it. For the past few years having the labs do it has been the economical choice but if they stop doing so the choice will shift back to the users. | |
| ▲ | api 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fine tuning and updating is far cheaper than training from scratch. |
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| ▲ | UncleOxidant 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Nvda for one has every incentive to keep the nemotron line going They're releases so far have been kind of lackluster compared to Qwen and other Chinese models. My suspicion is that Nvidia won't be releasing models that appear to compete with frontier models because that would upset their big customers. |
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| ▲ | anon373839 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Nvidia's future incentives are not clear to me. Their big customers are actively working to develop custom silicon, see e.g. "Open"AI's Broadcom announcement. The more independence their whale customers attain, the more attractive cutting them off at the knees and selling sovereign AI inference hardware directly to businesses and consumers becomes. This is pure speculation, but I have a hunch that the Nemotron line is intended as a shot across the bow, and that's why its capabilities have been strong but not quite open-frontier level. |
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