The state of open source AI

The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have sweatily argued on this forum. Personally, I'm not convinced there's much of a difference between these models at this point. The harness is what takes these random and hallucinogenic models and make them into something deterministic and useful.

If you are looking for more details (as inferred by openrouter data), I built a dashboard that updates daily: https://dirac.run/labs-market-share

Much better would be if the CTO of Mozilla had actually articulated their own analysis.

I guess they fired whoever used to write copy for these things.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not trying to just dunk on them, I think it's actively hurting their own point to do this, and counter-productive when people can easily clock it - it makes some percent of the audience immediately tune out.

I'd say that the front door to the web is pretty much owned by Google and Apple at this point given Firefox current marketshare. And maybe that's enough, maybe a future where a low percentage of open models keep the rest of the system honest but that doesn't seem the argument of this article

the pdf is easier to read

Some sentences smell a lot like AI.

Regardless, the inference costs dropping almost 50× is really amazing to see. And now Kimi K3 release has shown how open models are getting closer to the frontier level already. Open source AI is moving a lot faster than Anthropic and OpenAI would have expected lol.

I’d like a community led, BYOK, modular project where I can define, orchestrate, monitor and maintain agents.

Of course this is a new area and projects like this take time. But still, IMHO, a gap exists.

Unless someone wants to recommend their favorite FOSS tool; please do.

That opening is so hard to understand what they are trying to say, from the font and how it's written. It took me several times rereading to even grasp.

Plus the article is filled with cryptic things like:

    Open ships easy.
    Open deploys hard.

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i still use firefox but hot damn did they utterly fail to read the room initially. the only other company i can think of in recent memory -- besides sony cutting out discs -- is logitech when their ceo began gibbering about a subscription mouse or microsoft and its copilot button(s).

Not every trend needs to be followed. Have some backbone. You receive donations to have that.

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Apart from the website being - frankly - bullshit, the content is also - frankly - bullshit.

It's just on the frontpage because the title says "open source AI".

They tell us about how the farmers and native people and whateve are all happy with their chatbots and models. The major effects are a massive and ever-increasing energy use - in a time where we must cut back and economize to avoid further global warming; a massive diversion of investment capital - especially in the US; fantastic stock valuations for a few tech giants (gee, I wonder whether any of them is related to Mozilla somehow); and other effects one could survey, all more significant by far than the examples they bring.

I think Mozilla is chasing a past formula, but the projection isn't linear enough to remain consistent, and the critical parts of the outcome, utter centralization of the market dominance of the three C's, are left out of the equation.

We might get the consolation prize, a few nerds having competitive alternatives to applaud, but we will be left with the hidden costs: stagnation by bloated market leaders, consumers and businesses pouring trillions of dollars into the commercial offerings while open development wonders where money comes from, and the leakage of these imbalances into political and social spheres.

If we follow a Mozilla template and get to the peak of Mozilla's success at the web, look at what that really is. Facebook, Amazon, Google etc are orthogonal to that equation.

First sentence: In New Zealand's far north, a Māori broadcaster...

...oh boy, that's all you need to read to know what kind of media diet the writer is on.

There's nothing practical about open-source models yet that makes them even remotely comparable to closed frontier models.

All the hype around GLM, Qwen, now Kimi.... Are people really this naive that they believe these reports or, more worringly, are people NOT using these models and seeing the HUGE gap that still exists?

Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd trust to give to Sonnet to finish without a hitch. Now give it to ANY open-source frontier model and watch them struggle and go in circles while failing tool calls and randomly assuming things.

Open-source is and has been amazing but its so hard to deploy reliably and at scale and there's still big problems in the underlying models with instruction following and tool calling that makes it basically unusable for production workloads at a decent price point...