For Most of the World, Open-Source AI Is the Only Way Forward

There is no reason we should accept the enclosure of the digital commons represented by AI. The data these models are trained on amounts to the total intellectual and artistic output of human kind through recorded history. It belongs to all of us, and accordingly, so should the models and weights produced by it.

Agreed but I want to see how it plays out. Historically a good Windows computer cost $1000 and it was all it took to start programming. How much does it cost a computer with enough resources to run a good enough AI model for agentic workflows and a reasonable time to first token? Can "most of the world" afford buying one?

Edge models will get much better after the current insane capex and organic data for pre-training is dried out. But hard to see how the best open source models will ever come close to the best closed ones.

Open-source models democratize access to foundational technology, reducing vendor lock-in risk for organizations. The community iteration model can also accelerate improvements in edge cases that proprietary teams might deprioritize.

There's a video of the entire session here:

https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k14/k14ej1ucqu?kalturaStartTim...

(if that link doesn't work, it starts about 12 minutes into the start)

Yann is on the mark. Almost amusing to see the EU along with its many former “subjects” realize they are at great risk of joint Chinese-American hegemony in AI. We should all be more terrified of a few nation states defining the agendas and policies of AI use than current Ai variants that a inherently without purpose or autonomy.

Great analogy to the fear of the printing press being really bad news in that it enabled the rabble to get aroused.

We aren’t going to have Open Source AI without Open Source hardware specs and Open Source manufacturing. Software has been solo driving open computing for far too long, and with AI now the bottlenecks are finally moving up the stack.

We don't need rinky-dink RTX models that budget VRAM.

We need large scale open weights models just as capable as what's at the frontier.

And we need the ability to rent compute and spin up the weights easily. One-click, easy enough for anyone. Easier than nerd tools like ComfyUI, Claw, and node graph garbage.

Freedom is owning very large scale weights. Anything less is subsistence.

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