Opinions on AI

[mb194dc]

The Chinese have entered the race, they've built a model for 5% of the cost of OpenAI and ChatGPT that is better in a lot of testing:

Chinese researchers just built an open-source rival to ChatGPT in 2 months. Silicon Valley is freaked out.

DeepSeek-R1, a new reasoning model made by Chinese researchers, completes tasks with a comparable proficiency to OpenAI's o1 at a fraction of the cost.

www.livescience.com

The biggest impact of this though, is that the model is open source. So we could see LLMs move towards being commoditized, that is anyone will be able to build a decent one quite easily and cheaply. So there's no moat around OpenAI or other start ups that have proprietary technology they thought would give them an edge over the others.

 

[Shihab]

The biggest impact of this though, is that the model is open source.

Does it matter?

The logic was always a fraction of the whole cost anyway. It was the training dataset that made or broke these things, plus the processing power to train (and run them). Being "open source" helps neither, for obvious reasons in the latter's case, as for the former: no one in their right mind would OSS the training set, and draw a bullseye on their backsides for every copyright lawyer from every sorry corner of this earth).

Opensource-washing is the new greenwashing!

 

[AusWolf]

Opensource-washing is the new greenwashing!

I don't know how it is with AI, but in a general sense, I disagree. Open-source lets everybody use your software for whatever purpose they have in mind. It lets the Linux community incorporate AMD drivers into the Linux kernel, for example. It should be the way to go for every software company, imo. Closed standards are only good for the company that created them.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Voted other. Simply because I can't see the future in that sort of way. Good or Bad.

People and their intent is good or bad. The AI is a tool. Much like a farmer will tell you a gun is a tool, where the thief calls it a weapon.

And since AI seems to be implemented for mostly good intent, I can't imagine the world to get worse, which is a very broad thing to say.

What most people fail to understand, is the world, the earth is fine. It'll be here long after humans and AI wipe themselves out.

 

[Shihab]

I don't know how it is with AI, but in a general sense, I disagree. Open-source lets everybody use your software for whatever purpose they have in mind. It lets the Linux community incorporate AMD drivers into the Linux kernel, for example. It should be the way to go for every software company, imo. Closed standards are only good for the company that created them.

And "green" is not inherently bad either, but greenwashing is.

Opensource-washing != "open source."

Openwashing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'd rather have openly "closed-source" software that I can clearly gauge the risk of working with (legally, economically and logistically-speaking) than being entrapped with something pretending to be "open" while in reality only its facade is, with every what makes actually useful locked behind paywalls (or one you can't even pay to get through. At least not if you're anything short of a megacorp).
Good read on the topic:

The Open Source AI Definition: where's the data?

Two years into the “multi-stakeholder process” to define what constitutes as “open source AI”, we are facing a number of issues that are immense, fraught, and nuanced. Why are data excluded from the proposed definition, why are they important, and why are we even doing this?

www.juliaferraioli.com

Don't get me wrong tho, I'm not saying AI/ML *can't* be deemed open without everything being available to the net. Plenty of ML packages on Github/lab/whatever that most of the users would purposely skip training set/weights when cloning/forking/whatever, those are mostly purpose-specific packages, some image segmentation model or the like. This is not the case with the wastes-of-petajoules those big corps are peddling.