6 ms·

Step 1: Require companies to submit product for "review" Step 2: Complain about how the OSS/Chinese/whatever models are doing releases without approval Step 3

Step 1: Require companies to submit product for "review" Step 2: Complain about how the OSS/Chinese/whatever models are doing releases without approval Step 3: Prohibit, because "safety" and "financial risks"(?) So this is the door-shutting Altman et al have been pushing for eh?

supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.
- davidkwast 4mo ago
  As what we say here in Brazil: "The world doesn't go round. It flips over!"
- yoyohello13 4mo ago
  American companies are interested in cashing in, not making a good product.
- treis 4mo ago
  Llama?
- ndiddy 4mo ago
  One of the main reasons why companies start new open source projects is because having a good open source option in a given category will usually push the market value of software in that category to $0, and this can be strategically valuable. For example, Google released Android as an open source operating system because they make their money from ads and data collection, not from selling operating system licenses. All the cell phone companies switched from Windows Mobile and Symbian to Android, which gave Google a ton of user data to sell. For AI, the most profitable part of the value chain is selling inference. None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0. Meanwhile, open source AI models are a huge strategic initiative for China. Having commodity Chinese models that are as good as the leading edge American models from 6 months ago forces the American companies to keep paying more and more money to train better and better models since the amount of time they can collect rent on a model they've previously trained is limited to 6 months.
  - mullingitover 4mo ago
    > None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0 Meta/Llama: "What am I, chopped liver?" I thought the thing keeping inference above $0 was the hardware, and even if that were free there's still the tyranny of the Landauer Limit.
    - nradov 4mo ago
      Meta Llama is free for many uses but it doesn't even remotely meet the definition of "open source".
      - h8hawk 4mo ago
        They are useless and outdated by today standards.
    - sofixa 4mo ago
      When was the last Llama release? Meta have abandoned it and reportedly they've had a shift in their AI strategy.
  - nradov 4mo ago
    In business strategy terms this is known as "commoditize your complements". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
    - jdironman 4mo ago
      Thank you for this article link! I had not seen it before. will be printing it off to read later.
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    Google had to release at least the core packages in Android regardless because it is based on top of Linux and the GPL license would require it.
- philipkglass 4mo ago
  They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago. https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/ https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/ https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemotron,-The%20NVIDIA%20Nemotron https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasoning-vision-and-the-lessons-of-training-a-multimodal-reasoning-model/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin... https://www.ibm.com/granite https://www.ibm.com/granite https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    I was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though.
    - philipkglass 4mo ago
      I think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time.
  - 0xpgm 4mo ago
    Perhaps, the issue is that the pace at which they release open models compared to their closed ones, shows that they are more committed on the closed ones and are not interested in advancing the state of the art of open models.
    - no-name-here 4mo ago
      Should companies like Google and OpenAI be more interested in building open models than the ones they make money from? Should they be interested in advancing state of the art open models?
- an0malous 4mo ago
  No one open sources their core competencies, GitHub never open sourced their networked filesystem and Heroku never open sourced their dyno sandboxing code. They open source ancillary tools.
  - 0xpgm 4mo ago
    I'm curious, what would you say is DeepSeek's core competency?
    - floam 4mo ago
      Distillation attacks. The weights are just a proof-of-work hash
    - LadyCailin 4mo ago
      Devaluing American companies, perhaps.
    - an0malous 4mo ago
      Since it’s probably a state sponsored project, it is the open source ancillary tool to China’s core competencies
- fireant 4mo ago
  OpenAI & Anthropic are winning right now. I suspect if Chinese companies get ahead in the race the cards will reverse, OpenAI will restart farming goodwill with open models and then winning companies will be releasing closed models.
satvikpendem 4mo ago
> Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to prevent. https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
- smallmancontrov 4mo ago
  > cyber misuse He who controls the porn controls the universe. - Baron Amodei
- sterlind 4mo ago
  I loathe Anthropic. many companies don't contribute to open-source, but for one to be actively hostile to open-source, to the degree they're lobbying the government to ban it, is uniquely evil. at least these gatekeepers call themselves what they are. scraping CoT won't stop the advance of Chinese models. neither will a US "ban" on using such models. at this point I'm cheering for DeepSeek or Qwen to catch up to Anthropic. I support anyone who releases open weights.
  - xoxolian 4mo ago
    Is OpenAI significantly better so far regarding this, at least publicly? I'm increasing my LLM spend this weekend, and this could impact my decision. And I'll prioritize supporting open-weight models moving forward — already Chatgpt's censorship and surveillance dissuade from asking it genuinely helpful questions.
    - sterlind 4mo ago
      OpenAI seems marginally better. they did release gpt-oss-120b, which was decent at the time. but certainly not much better, and they seemed even more on board with fully disabling guardrails for Uncle Sam than Anthropic was. then again, rumor has it that Anthropic's AI selected that Iranian elementary school as part of Palantir's Project Maven pipeline, so.. I strongly recommend open-weight wherever you can. assume any data you pass to a closed model (including opinions or political positions you intimate) will be retained and analyzed in unfriendly ways, either now or ten years from now.
slicktux 4mo ago
Seems to be. What better way to secure your companies future by limiting open frontier models. Government sponsored monopoly?
- PearlRiver 4mo ago
  The US can't limit anything beyond their borders. We ae living in the twilight of the white man.
  - iso1631 4mo ago
    Well it can, from Kim Dotcom to Bin Laden. But it's harder thanks to US actions in the last few years, and especially in countries which can bite back.
an0malous 4mo ago
This entire year with the IPOs and now this is because there's a trillion dollars betting on AI and they all know they have no moat, there's no more training data and they're seeing diminishing returns on scaling anyway, and it's inevitable that smaller, open-source models will catch up and become competitive. It's a complete disaster, the tech industry is broken.

supriyo-biswas 4mo ago

It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.

davidkwast 4mo ago
As what we say here in Brazil: "The world doesn't go round. It flips over!"
yoyohello13 4mo ago
American companies are interested in cashing in, not making a good product.
treis 4mo ago
Llama?
ndiddy 4mo ago
One of the main reasons why companies start new open source projects is because having a good open source option in a given category will usually push the market value of software in that category to $0, and this can be strategically valuable. For example, Google released Android as an open source operating system because they make their money from ads and data collection, not from selling operating system licenses. All the cell phone companies switched from Windows Mobile and Symbian to Android, which gave Google a ton of user data to sell. For AI, the most profitable part of the value chain is selling inference. None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0. Meanwhile, open source AI models are a huge strategic initiative for China. Having commodity Chinese models that are as good as the leading edge American models from 6 months ago forces the American companies to keep paying more and more money to train better and better models since the amount of time they can collect rent on a model they've previously trained is limited to 6 months.
- mullingitover 4mo ago
  > None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0 Meta/Llama: "What am I, chopped liver?" I thought the thing keeping inference above $0 was the hardware, and even if that were free there's still the tyranny of the Landauer Limit.
  - nradov 4mo ago
    Meta Llama is free for many uses but it doesn't even remotely meet the definition of "open source".
    - h8hawk 4mo ago
      They are useless and outdated by today standards.
  - sofixa 4mo ago
    When was the last Llama release? Meta have abandoned it and reportedly they've had a shift in their AI strategy.
- nradov 4mo ago
  In business strategy terms this is known as "commoditize your complements". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
  - jdironman 4mo ago
    Thank you for this article link! I had not seen it before. will be printing it off to read later.
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  Google had to release at least the core packages in Android regardless because it is based on top of Linux and the GPL license would require it.
philipkglass 4mo ago
They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago. https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/ https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/ https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemotron,-The%20NVIDIA%20Nemotron https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasoning-vision-and-the-lessons-of-training-a-multimodal-reasoning-model/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin... https://www.ibm.com/granite https://www.ibm.com/granite https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  I was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though.
  - philipkglass 4mo ago
    I think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time.
- 0xpgm 4mo ago
  Perhaps, the issue is that the pace at which they release open models compared to their closed ones, shows that they are more committed on the closed ones and are not interested in advancing the state of the art of open models.
  - no-name-here 4mo ago
    Should companies like Google and OpenAI be more interested in building open models than the ones they make money from? Should they be interested in advancing state of the art open models?
an0malous 4mo ago
No one open sources their core competencies, GitHub never open sourced their networked filesystem and Heroku never open sourced their dyno sandboxing code. They open source ancillary tools.
- 0xpgm 4mo ago
  I'm curious, what would you say is DeepSeek's core competency?
  - floam 4mo ago
    Distillation attacks. The weights are just a proof-of-work hash
  - LadyCailin 4mo ago
    Devaluing American companies, perhaps.
  - an0malous 4mo ago
    Since it’s probably a state sponsored project, it is the open source ancillary tool to China’s core competencies
fireant 4mo ago
OpenAI & Anthropic are winning right now. I suspect if Chinese companies get ahead in the race the cards will reverse, OpenAI will restart farming goodwill with open models and then winning companies will be releasing closed models.

satvikpendem 4mo ago

> Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to prevent. https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership

smallmancontrov 4mo ago
> cyber misuse He who controls the porn controls the universe. - Baron Amodei
sterlind 4mo ago
I loathe Anthropic. many companies don't contribute to open-source, but for one to be actively hostile to open-source, to the degree they're lobbying the government to ban it, is uniquely evil. at least these gatekeepers call themselves what they are. scraping CoT won't stop the advance of Chinese models. neither will a US "ban" on using such models. at this point I'm cheering for DeepSeek or Qwen to catch up to Anthropic. I support anyone who releases open weights.
- xoxolian 4mo ago
  Is OpenAI significantly better so far regarding this, at least publicly? I'm increasing my LLM spend this weekend, and this could impact my decision. And I'll prioritize supporting open-weight models moving forward — already Chatgpt's censorship and surveillance dissuade from asking it genuinely helpful questions.
  - sterlind 4mo ago
    OpenAI seems marginally better. they did release gpt-oss-120b, which was decent at the time. but certainly not much better, and they seemed even more on board with fully disabling guardrails for Uncle Sam than Anthropic was. then again, rumor has it that Anthropic's AI selected that Iranian elementary school as part of Palantir's Project Maven pipeline, so.. I strongly recommend open-weight wherever you can. assume any data you pass to a closed model (including opinions or political positions you intimate) will be retained and analyzed in unfriendly ways, either now or ten years from now.

slicktux 4mo ago

Seems to be. What better way to secure your companies future by limiting open frontier models. Government sponsored monopoly?

PearlRiver 4mo ago
The US can't limit anything beyond their borders. We ae living in the twilight of the white man.
- iso1631 4mo ago
  Well it can, from Kim Dotcom to Bin Laden. But it's harder thanks to US actions in the last few years, and especially in countries which can bite back.

an0malous 4mo ago

This entire year with the IPOs and now this is because there's a trillion dollars betting on AI and they all know they have no moat, there's no more training data and they're seeing diminishing returns on scaling anyway, and it's inevitable that smaller, open-source models will catch up and become competitive. It's a complete disaster, the tech industry is broken.