Comment by rayiner
1 month ago
This is why I don’t understand the concerns about “our AI overlords” monopolizing all the gains from AI. It doesn’t seem like there’s much of a moat around the models themselves. So the race is mainly about compute. But compute is subject to power law effects. I remember Intel building the first Teraflop computer (ASCI red) in 1996. It was the size of a house. By 2014 you had more compute and 50% more memory in an off the shelf dual processor server system.
The openness of AI is currently being held up only by Chinese companies (previously Meta, but they stopped). They're not saints, but there is not even a question in the open weight/HF community that the immense mass of Chinese talent, knowledge and resources are the only thing stopping a monopoly/duopoly from forming. In a very Cathedral vs Bazaar-esque way, China severely lacks compute, but are extremely ingenious in coming up with new optimizations, architectures, etc, which they all detail in their papers.