Mozilla: The state of open source AI(stateofopensource.ai) |
Mozilla: The state of open source AI(stateofopensource.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.
But efficiencies aside; creation of open models still requires a lot of money and compute from a large organisation which is willing to accept zero return for that spend. This largesse is unlikely to continue forever; so the question is which will crack first, the frontier models’ business model or the fast followers’ generosity?
These two types of contributions have very different behavioral profiles, and it doesn't obviously follow that the historical success of getting people to collaborate socially on building software for fun and for the benefit of the community will translate in any meaningful way to the necessity of being able to raise enormous amounts of money to pay for enormous amounts of electricity.
Valve and SteamOS are a good example of what this idea looks like in practice. (Though they may also illustrate a third thing you need: a privately-run company, that has enough profit, and enough commitment from leadership to the company's vision, that they can make long-term bets without having to eventually bow to investors seeking short-term gains.)
The only thing that took us down a different path is the vast sums of VC funding pumped into the AI companies.
I seem to understand open models are mostly coming from China, and the benefit of training and releasing them for 'free' is a powerful geopolitical weapon against the Western/US economy that at this point depends on OpenAI & co. to succeed.
Will the West make open models illegal?
It has the feel of self-improving super-intelligence or bust to me. If you get that, the frontier model(s) run away with a faster exponential. It's a bit like semi with Moore's Law with silicon, GaAs could never catch up. If you don't get it, the fast followers crush the high investment and there's no moat. Not like they can enforce copyright!
A better question is would you settle for o3 now or pay 20$ or 200$/month for fable ? Because o3 quality is available OSS.
It is like the new IPhone, in some sort. At some point come a feature many would like to have, despite diminishing returns.
We will see how long labs can keep up and what the scaling curve look like, but I would be more worried into losing sota status to Chinese companies than letting them take the open non-sota approach.
Open models are indeed very capable, but they will eventually become more specialized to the application to keep an edge. It makes perfect sense that the future shape of AI conforms to the landscape it was born out of.
As for your speculation, I think it's hinging on some companies releasing models for free or no big differences between models. In a world with hyperscalers and companies training models you can quickly recreate Anthropic or OpenAI by having an hyperscaler ally with a model training company, train a good/a better model, and not release it.
oh wait
Was it ever even a claim that open source search engines were trying to outperform google, let alone kill it?
It’s a very new set of technologies, and understanding what is useful to customers and what isn’t is the whole game. Call it, product taste. There were a million cell phones before the iPhone took over the world. Why iPhone? Product taste. There are a million startups, and only a select few become unicorns. Why? Product taste.
You have tripped yourself up there.
iPhone took over as it introduced something innovative over standard phones, but then Open Source (Android) matched the multi-touch and software differences and Apple's branding, lock-in and design etc have managed to keep it as a big player in wealthier countries. IPhone also came on the back of the massive iPod success.
ChatGPT launched the same innovation vs Google Search, but just like Android Opensource AI is moving fast now.
Android has 72.7% market share at present, Open Source AI will do the same unless the frontier labs can continue to do something new.
The frontier labs are saddled with enormous investor and other debts. How long they can keep innovating by spending so much on R&D and paying there staff very high wages remains to be seen.
Once investors cash out via an IPO, the companies are back down to earth and playing in the real world again.
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
edit: this exists https://artificialanalysis.ai/
And look, if you disagree with me PLEASE tell me why. What moat do these companies have? I genuinely want to know because looking at the spend for companies like OAI and Anthropic with no actual moat I can identify is actually driving me insane.
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
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.
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.
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.
Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName("quote")).forEach(p => { p.style.marginTop = "20px"; p.classList.remove("quote", "reveal") })
querySelectorAll('.quote')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.
> The venture-funded open-source ecosystem: total disclosed funding, USD M
> Bars grow as you scroll.
The bars, in fact, don't grow as you scroll. And I don't even see why they should.
On my device, they grow as I scroll to them.
This is on mobile in portrait. In landscape the text doesn't wrap or offset anything.
No idea why they'd be using the display font for the abstract though, that kind of defeats the whole purpose. It's supposed to be quirky and bold, but used far more sparsingly.
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".
Could you explain what is wrong with the accessibility of this page? All the content is included in the html payload, so it is accessible to screen readers and text-based browsers; and as for the "reveal" effect, it seems to respect user's choice of "prefers reduced motion" and is disabled when that is user's preference.
Cool, that I didn't check, because it is impossible to enable that setting, as it breaks _huge_ amounts of websites.
I'm not aware of a way to enable it selectively, but one could also just display the content at all times. It's a static page. It's static content. None of this makes any sense.
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The idea behind that style of gradual reveal is probably some kind of storytelling, but the only story it tells is that mozilla is wasting donations on people with incorrect opinions that could be used on.. idk not building torment nexii?
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.
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...
Claude used to be much worse than it is now, just as bad the open weights models are. And the open weights were worse. The labs will also try to keep the lead, but at some point people start seeing real value from open models. Maybe you say they're not ready yet for medium tasks, but everyone sees the writing on the wall.
The biggest moat of these giant labs and models is increasingly shifting towards deployment capabilities and (debatably) having better (proprietary) harnesses.
The models themselves can be impressive on benchmarks, but unless they can be served reliably to customers either at scale, hosted somewhere, or even on edge with predictable latency and memory usage, then frontier will always be leading.
While the engineering team might need a cutting edge model (with the associated costs), the marketing department will be fine by something that can grammar correct or turn a few bullet points into prose. Likewise you already don't need Fable for Ticket -> RAG -> Reply with Faq knowledge or escalate workflows
That's already the case with other very expensive software like CAD packages were oftentimes you have different feature sets enabled for different employees.
Historically speaking a lot of inventions have come about without things like VC investment. Either way, there’s probably little point in debating it, just because VC funded companies control the market now doesn’t mean they should indefinitely.
Us developer types like to pretend like specs are the only thing that matters? If you could have a 10x more powerful model you could only access running locally through your terminal, versus a weaker model through a clean web interface, normies will pick the web ui every single time. Product experience is simply everything, as much as we like to pretend like nitty technical decisions are the most important thing.
So? The benefit of open source is that you don’t have to worry about making a ton of money. You just need to be viable.
Apple: premium product a minority is willing to pay for
Android: standard product the majority use
I’m sure there will continue to be iPhone equivalents in the AI world, premium bespoke models. But the vast majority of people will be happy with a cheaper offering.
We better not.
> What is the financial incentive to do so?
If we'd been sharing all along (as we should have been), we probably would have gotten even further along in the development of the tech.
Think of everything we could do if every researcher on the planet had first class access to the frontier. No academic fallback models. No crude API access. No limits, but direct access to the weights and the ability to lobotomize, splice, and dice.
We could pour intelligence from one container to the next without paying a tax or wearing a blindfold. All without spilling a drop.
*Open* *Must* *Win*