Open Weights and American AI Leadership [pdf](images.nvidia.com) |
Open Weights and American AI Leadership [pdf](images.nvidia.com) |
Pure game theory, a bunch of losers in the AI space groveling at the white house to try to stop their competition.
Note: Just pointing out the comment intent and nothing else
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...
This is the correct stance, hopefully this is the stance that prevails.
It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?
And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.
I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)
They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients
(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)
...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned
(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)
...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979269
The arguments against open source AI are bad
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024643
AI Kill Switch Act: Official Bill Text by Reps. Lieu and Moran
Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.
Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?
Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.
All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.
Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?
I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.
Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.
It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.
For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.
See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.
The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.
In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.