6 ms·

I don’t get it. So many here are saying open weight models will kill the frontier labs. But open source and similar have tried to beat private companies everywh

I don’t get it. So many here are saying open weight models will kill the frontier labs. But open source and similar have tried to beat private companies everywhere all the time, and people still buy the best products even if great open source alternatives are available. Why wouldn’t this be the case for AI too?

drudolph914 3mo ago
I feel like this comment is just engagement farming, but I'll bite anyways there is a larger appetite for something like open source AI mostly b/c of price. we all know these labs have not figured out their pricing model, and we're all holding our breath out of fear of what the prices could be. also, if you consider that the only toll to knowledge work before was personal time, and now you need to pay $100s month just to keep up with the baseline speed. it makes sense people are looking for something that gets them back to a workflow where the price to do work is near $0.00. I think for a smaller group though, it's more to do with a certain combination of principles. Some people don't want censorship, other's want ownership, some want the knowledge of working on LLMs to not be gate kept.
- dominotw 3mo ago
  ppl buy iphones over cheap android phones . android phones can do everything that an iphone does ( and better)
  - 05 3mo ago
    Which cheap (or expensive) phone does better log/raw video than iPhone 17 pro max?
  - mxschumacher 3mo ago
    there's still some lock-in here: data storage (iCloud), the broader Apple ecosystem, certain apps, user habits (I'm a lifelong Android user and am having trouble using other people's iPhones)
an0malous 3mo ago
The closest example I can think of is using a proprietary hosted database versus a self hosted open source option, like Oracle vs Postgres. OpenAI and Anthropic are each individually privately valued over $1T and Oracle is currently valued at half that. They’re not worthless, but they’re severely overvalued.
- aldonius 3mo ago
  Oracle's not a good comparison though, because it's getting valued as an AI compute provider as well as for its traditional business. At the end of 2021 Oracle's stock was about $100 (all-time-high in nominal terms at the time), its current ATH was October last year at $292.
tuatoru 3mo ago
Yes. Many industries are zero-sum-ish in nature,have winner-take-all dynamics or reputational costs for cheaping out. Financial trading. Big law. Military. National Security. Big insurance. Management consulting. Advertising. For others even a small edge can be important. Pharma and Biochem research. Research in general. Any industry where there are major reputational risks. It may not make sense to use the most expensive model to replace your payroll clerk, but there are plenty of use cases for the best available.
mxschumacher 3mo ago
the difference here is that switching is trivial due to standardized APIs to the underlying LLM capability. harness <-> gateway <-> inference provider Easy to switch any of them and (mostly) possible to combine any with any Replacing something like Excel is crazy-hard because of network effects, replacing an Enterprise CRM is akin to a removing a metastasizing cancer

drudolph914 3mo ago

I feel like this comment is just engagement farming, but I'll bite anyways there is a larger appetite for something like open source AI mostly b/c of price. we all know these labs have not figured out their pricing model, and we're all holding our breath out of fear of what the prices could be. also, if you consider that the only toll to knowledge work before was personal time, and now you need to pay $100s month just to keep up with the baseline speed. it makes sense people are looking for something that gets them back to a workflow where the price to do work is near $0.00. I think for a smaller group though, it's more to do with a certain combination of principles. Some people don't want censorship, other's want ownership, some want the knowledge of working on LLMs to not be gate kept.

dominotw 3mo ago
ppl buy iphones over cheap android phones . android phones can do everything that an iphone does ( and better)
- 05 3mo ago
  Which cheap (or expensive) phone does better log/raw video than iPhone 17 pro max?
- mxschumacher 3mo ago
  there's still some lock-in here: data storage (iCloud), the broader Apple ecosystem, certain apps, user habits (I'm a lifelong Android user and am having trouble using other people's iPhones)

an0malous 3mo ago

The closest example I can think of is using a proprietary hosted database versus a self hosted open source option, like Oracle vs Postgres. OpenAI and Anthropic are each individually privately valued over $1T and Oracle is currently valued at half that. They’re not worthless, but they’re severely overvalued.

aldonius 3mo ago
Oracle's not a good comparison though, because it's getting valued as an AI compute provider as well as for its traditional business. At the end of 2021 Oracle's stock was about $100 (all-time-high in nominal terms at the time), its current ATH was October last year at $292.

tuatoru 3mo ago

Yes. Many industries are zero-sum-ish in nature,have winner-take-all dynamics or reputational costs for cheaping out. Financial trading. Big law. Military. National Security. Big insurance. Management consulting. Advertising. For others even a small edge can be important. Pharma and Biochem research. Research in general. Any industry where there are major reputational risks. It may not make sense to use the most expensive model to replace your payroll clerk, but there are plenty of use cases for the best available.

mxschumacher 3mo ago

the difference here is that switching is trivial due to standardized APIs to the underlying LLM capability. harness <-> gateway <-> inference provider Easy to switch any of them and (mostly) possible to combine any with any Replacing something like Excel is crazy-hard because of network effects, replacing an Enterprise CRM is akin to a removing a metastasizing cancer