For all intents and purposes you'll be able to move an open weight model wherever you want.
I really dislike this rhetoric, you sound like the FSF guys who are like "you're not free until you're running coreboot with zero binary blobs". Sure they have a point but also, most people are fine running regular linux.
Reading your comment made me realize that I love that the position of the FSF is held by someone, in the interest of stretching the Overton Window to that side.
Very much with you on that. It’s not a position I personally hold by any means, but I appreciate its existence connected to a prominent long-standing organization.
> For example: the Free Software Foundation only purchases desktop machines which support Libreboot, and Thinkpad X200 and X60 laptops with Libreboot. All desktops and servers we buy are KGPE-D16 motherboards, which are supported by Libreboot. As a result, all of the workstations used by the FSF staff have a free BIOS.
> Except where noted, all of the distributions listed on this page fail to follow the guidelines in at least two important ways:
> ...The kernel that they distribute (in most cases, Linux) includes “blobs”: pieces of object code distributed without source, usually firmware to run some device.
They are extreme, uncompromising, and live by their principles.
They are also the reason you can buy a computer meeting those requirements instead of being a pipe dream.
good luck doing it to inference companies in singapore or the netherlands. or one of the decentralized networks that dont look useful right now. the world is already sick of america acting like it can do whatever and force their rules on the rest of us.
Still, with the same model being served by multiple providers, it is much less likely to disappear entirely, even if you would like to keep using a cloud provider. Worst-case scenario, you change providers. Or you use OpenRouter as a proxy.
There's really no comparison between a model that Anthropic allows Google and Amazon to host with one that has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and has dozens of public inference providers.
Yes. The difference is obviously that full, fat Linux runs on a superset of anything a layperson would call a computer, and can be built from source on roughly the same set of hardware. Running the full, fat Deepseek (as in the 1.6T model, unquantized) is too big to run on anything a layperson would call a computer, and being able to actually build it is even harder.
For all intents and purposes you'll be able to move an open weight model wherever you want.
I really dislike this rhetoric, you sound like the FSF guys who are like "you're not free until you're running coreboot with zero binary blobs". Sure they have a point but also, most people are fine running regular linux.
Reading your comment made me realize that I love that the position of the FSF is held by someone, in the interest of stretching the Overton Window to that side.
Very much with you on that. It’s not a position I personally hold by any means, but I appreciate its existence connected to a prominent long-standing organization.
Most FSF guys actually have very nuanced views on the topic and you’re doing everyone a disservice by reducing it to an extremist sound bite.
That's literally the official FSF position.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw
> For example: the Free Software Foundation only purchases desktop machines which support Libreboot, and Thinkpad X200 and X60 laptops with Libreboot. All desktops and servers we buy are KGPE-D16 motherboards, which are supported by Libreboot. As a result, all of the workstations used by the FSF staff have a free BIOS.
https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html
> Except where noted, all of the distributions listed on this page fail to follow the guidelines in at least two important ways:
> ...The kernel that they distribute (in most cases, Linux) includes “blobs”: pieces of object code distributed without source, usually firmware to run some device.
They are extreme, uncompromising, and live by their principles.
They are also the reason you can buy a computer meeting those requirements instead of being a pipe dream.
4 replies →
Thankfully he didn't say that they're all like that. Instead he pointed out the few that are as a well known example of similar behavior.
If you reread the comment with a fresh mind you'll notice that you misunderstood what he wrote
8 replies →
It is the FSF itself who has these extremist views.
Unless the US Gov bans inference companies from serving Chinese models to US customers...
good luck doing it to inference companies in singapore or the netherlands. or one of the decentralized networks that dont look useful right now. the world is already sick of america acting like it can do whatever and force their rules on the rest of us.
Still, with the same model being served by multiple providers, it is much less likely to disappear entirely, even if you would like to keep using a cloud provider. Worst-case scenario, you change providers. Or you use OpenRouter as a proxy.
There is actual market competition to host open models. If one provider stops offering a model you likely can find another provider that will
But you have multiple providers, not just one.
And every single one of those providers would buckle under government pressure.
Fable itself is hosted on all major cloud providers. How many offer it today?
This seems a little fanciful.
There's really no comparison between a model that Anthropic allows Google and Amazon to host with one that has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and has dozens of public inference providers.
1 reply →
The providers on OpenRouter are not all in the US.
1 reply →
More importantly, the download is out there. You can download it yourself today, and if it's that important to you, you can buy the hardware too.
I'm sure he's referring to the tightening of internet controls around social media as an extrapolation to controlling websites, etc.
Even in that case it can't be taken away; GPT and Claude are banned in China yet there's still a huge black market for tokens.
No. As long as you downloaded the weights, you can run them somewhere.
Popular open models on Openrouter have dozens of providers.
No it can't you can take it where ever you want. It is yours not theirs.
>Unless you're running Linux yourself, it can absolutely be taken away.
Yes. The difference is obviously that full, fat Linux runs on a superset of anything a layperson would call a computer, and can be built from source on roughly the same set of hardware. Running the full, fat Deepseek (as in the 1.6T model, unquantized) is too big to run on anything a layperson would call a computer, and being able to actually build it is even harder.
It's famously difficult to find people willing to rent you time on big computers over the internet.
3 replies →
I just want personal agency