I think the argument is that decentralization leads to deceleration because it means less centralized funding and data. Those are the two primary ingredients for accel.
The problem with the decel/accel rhetoric is that it lacks nuance.
the argument is that we should all fold and let sam altman burn trillions of dollars on naive scaling and pay monopoly prices for their closed APIs until the models are good enough to be closed off for "safety" reasons so that they can take an even larger cut by competing directly with us
If your worldview is “most of the progress is made by closed labs, then open labs fast-follow” (which isn’t implausible given the documented distillation of Fable), and further that open labs cannot make make meaningful progress vs the closed labs except by fast-following and that they won’t pick up the ability to make progress after the closed labs are gone, then driving closed labs out of business slows down overall progress.
I think it's pretty hard to hold that worldview: Anthropic couldn't ship a reasoning model until they copied DeepSeek R1's homework, and they've all copied DS-style super-sparse MoEs at this point too.
Open Source models decelerate growth of closed AI. For people who think (or want) AI = closed_AI then that argument has weight. Good luck getting them to update their priors.
Open source AI is actually a lot less "powerful" than genuine frontier models, i.e. it has a much tighter inherent capability ceiling. This is "decelerationist" from a purely AGI-pilled point of view but it's actually great if you're worried about a capabilities arms race putting AI Safety at severe risk.
Kimi K3 is plausibly a lot less dangerous than a totally jailbroken ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude Sonnet (let alone Opus or Fable!) and it's quite deeply weird how no one seems to be calling for those models to be banned or restrained by further regulation. Why the double standard against the less concerning (but more efficient!) open weight models?
It’s a different topic but it’s correct imo. Open sourcing things is the best way to accelerate development.
Put another way, if you want to slow things down, put it behind a paywall, tag ideas ans “intellectual property” (meaning you’re the only one who can use it) and get the lawyers involved (injecting our slow legal system).
None of the above is a judgement call on whether development should be accelerated.
I know it's a hard ask on this site, but I need you to start parsing content and not tone. It was a helpful bit of context, even if it was a bit vitriolic.
Because discourse around tone isn't productive. You could wipe this whole comment thread, starting with the parent of mine, and lose exactly zero information.
The content was 'you need to get your head checked'. That isn't tone, that directly implying that if you hold that position, there is something wrong with you. It's rude and unnecessary.
I'm not sure I understand the case for open-source models being decelerationist, is this it?
Decel:
- Potentially reduces investor appetite for funding big labs.
- More risk of powerful AI getting in bad hands -> more regulation.
Accel:
- More competition so big labs can't rest on laurels.
- More research in open, so all labs can accrete advancements faster.
I feel like open-source = acceleration has a much more clear argument. (and how bad would deceleration be in any case?)
I think the argument is that decentralization leads to deceleration because it means less centralized funding and data. Those are the two primary ingredients for accel.
The problem with the decel/accel rhetoric is that it lacks nuance.
the argument is that we should all fold and let sam altman burn trillions of dollars on naive scaling and pay monopoly prices for their closed APIs until the models are good enough to be closed off for "safety" reasons so that they can take an even larger cut by competing directly with us
If your worldview is “most of the progress is made by closed labs, then open labs fast-follow” (which isn’t implausible given the documented distillation of Fable), and further that open labs cannot make make meaningful progress vs the closed labs except by fast-following and that they won’t pick up the ability to make progress after the closed labs are gone, then driving closed labs out of business slows down overall progress.
I think it's pretty hard to hold that worldview: Anthropic couldn't ship a reasoning model until they copied DeepSeek R1's homework, and they've all copied DS-style super-sparse MoEs at this point too.
1 reply →
I think it's basically open weights => more inference competition => less profit from inference => less training competition
> less training competition
I think you meant less research and experiments in big labs because they don't get all the AI money.
Training is expensive, but they also have more than 10 000 of employees combined and they cost a lot of money.
Open Source models decelerate growth of closed AI. For people who think (or want) AI = closed_AI then that argument has weight. Good luck getting them to update their priors.
Open source AI is actually a lot less "powerful" than genuine frontier models, i.e. it has a much tighter inherent capability ceiling. This is "decelerationist" from a purely AGI-pilled point of view but it's actually great if you're worried about a capabilities arms race putting AI Safety at severe risk.
Kimi K3 is plausibly a lot less dangerous than a totally jailbroken ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude Sonnet (let alone Opus or Fable!) and it's quite deeply weird how no one seems to be calling for those models to be banned or restrained by further regulation. Why the double standard against the less concerning (but more efficient!) open weight models?
Do you think they are inherently less powerful? I'd imagined that closed labs have a head start / more funding so the open labs are playing catch-up.
Is there a world where open source models end up at the frontier, or do you think there are structural/first-principles reasons why this won't happen?
1 reply →
Why? Absolutely correct, especially considering the position of the person they're referring to
It’s a different topic but it’s correct imo. Open sourcing things is the best way to accelerate development.
Put another way, if you want to slow things down, put it behind a paywall, tag ideas ans “intellectual property” (meaning you’re the only one who can use it) and get the lawyers involved (injecting our slow legal system).
None of the above is a judgement call on whether development should be accelerated.
Why?
[flagged]
I know it's a hard ask on this site, but I need you to start parsing content and not tone. It was a helpful bit of context, even if it was a bit vitriolic.
Why should I waste time parsing content and not tone? Why can't the commenter just avoid the tone? It even saves time since you can write less!
Because discourse around tone isn't productive. You could wipe this whole comment thread, starting with the parent of mine, and lose exactly zero information.
[flagged]
2 replies →
Some battles are simply not going to be won.
I, for example, dislike reading comments complaining the submission (or another comment) is LLM generated. Focus on the content, not the style.
I'm not going to have my way, and nor shall you.
The content was 'you need to get your head checked'. That isn't tone, that directly implying that if you hold that position, there is something wrong with you. It's rude and unnecessary.
It depends on if we expect posters to be informative and include nuance.