Comment by culi
17 hours ago
With other software, devs convince their managers of the importance of using open source stuff in their stack. With AI, it's usually managers choosing what models to use for the devs. The US labs don't need to give a damn how much devs like open source
I was dev, and now I am Senior level manager. Open Weight models are current main focus for many companies with full alignment with top management for very simple reasons: - stable and predictable performance (no pre-launch models degradation) - ability to tune them for specific business cases (though still rare tbh) - better (at least 60% Opus vs Kimi (real,3rd party)) and more competitive pricing - flat pricing if tokenusage is big enough to justify renting GPU - decent quality - much higher guarantees that data will not be sent somewhere (assuming 3rd party inference providers) - and cherry on top: flat and minimal pricing with absolute confidentiality using Alibaba Apsara stack of recently released AMD Instinct Coder box[1]
[1] https://www.amd.com/en/ecosystem/oem/supermicro/amd-instinct...
This isn't about liking open source. This is about the labs just being cool and doing cool shit instead of the opposite which is Anthropic where all they talking about is killing everyone and taking everyone's job.
These labs are still (for the time being) made of people, who reflect their lives onto the work.
The US population is much more pessimistic and doomsday driven these days, whereas the Chinese are more optimistic and future driven.
> The US labs don't need to give a damn how much devs like open source
In the short term, true.
In the long term, unknown but typically when you hold progress that way while other countries don't you at best end up becoming siloed while the rest of the world continues on without you.