Comment by hereme888
4 hours ago
They already invest in open-source AI, but nothing is truly free. Commercial AI will usually dominate because devs are paid to make it their primary effort. Goodwill and part-time contributions cannot reliably compete with livelihood and profit incentives.
That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS
OSS only dominates for software that is commoditized and the published computer science research for that software domain is close to the frontier.
OSS struggles at being relevant when software is non-commodity e.g. office suites. In software domains like databases where the state-of-the-art computer science research is often unpublished, OSS struggles to be relevant at the higher end of the market on technical merits.
When deciding what should be OSS, it is useful to consider the preconditions that have made it successful.
I personally expect token production to commoditized like mobile data. It's already happening.
See open weights gaining adoption, OpenAi talking about how 5.6 is cheaper than Fable, people are taking multiple approaches to reduce their token spend, expectations for progress in hardware and algos, and certain Ai leaders talking about how token prices should be 10-100x lower than they are.
AGI is not software
on the small chance that the four billionaires who currently have near-exclusive control of closed sota models, (that is altman, amodei, zuckerberg and musk), are not fleecing their investors and actually build AGI, closed source leaves a choice of powerful government or powerful oligopoly/monarchy.
further explanation of this list:
musk - structural command
zuckerberg - structural command
altman - de facto command after purging rivals and privatisation, loyalty of personnel
amodei - influential, could potentially overthrow current governance