There are no open source models. Only open weights. No one is giving you the source (training data). And yeah, no one is giving you the compute to train the models.
Yes, there are. But that's not what I was saying. I'm talking about harnesses, tooling, sharing training data, the shared research, and the list goes on. Frontier labs are already trying to move everyone into the cloud so their harnesses and surrounding tooling can be hidden away. We need to make sure there are strong open-source competitors to this model that keep the power on the local machine.
Does Nvidia's acquisition put the open-source ecosystem at risk? I remember what Oracle purchased Java. IMO, it was a mess for many years after that. It is a strategic move for Nvidia, but I see it harming open-source AI options.
1. Download ollama and give it a try. It doesn't have to be that one but it's an easy on-ramp. Just get a feel for what open source/open weights is capable of
2. Mention it whenever it comes up. Most people have no clue this is a thing and I think it's useful to make people aware. We need access to uncensored / unbiased LLM models - information wants to be free but there are plenty of businesses gunning for regulatory capture as these are very powerful tools.
3. If you're in a position of developing any project that makes use of AI in any form, check the open source models first, unless you absolutely require the best of the best, these other models are pretty dang capable of almost everything any commercial model can do.
4. If your state or {insert legal jurisdiction here} attempts to regulate access to open source tools for this, oppose it with your vote and your voice.
5. Opposed laws that grant commercial AI suppliers any priority or premium access under government purchasing programs.
I'm sure others will chime in, those are a few that pop the mind.
Weren't people pissed off at them for a variety of reasons? Not giving attribution etc.
In case anyone wants other good alternatives, there's llama.cpp and vLLM, each harder to setup but opens the door for squeezing more performance out of your hardware.
You could also vote with your valley and support orgs that release open weights of their near-SOTA models, though nowadays that means giving cash to primarily Chinese companies (e.g. Moonshot and Z.ai). For what it's worth, people are also complaining about them decreasing usage quotas on their subscription offerings as well so seems like the squeeze is everywhere, even DeepSeek raised their prices (which is better than them going broke, I guess).
One issue is that models are only one part of the equation. Search is also extremely important, and for that you pretty much have to depend on a third-party service.
Unsubscribe from Anthropic because they block third party harness on subscriptions.
As long as you keep providers replaceable things will be fine.
Google, Facebook, Apple etc were much better deals around 2010 before they became entrenched and irreplaceable, and thus able to extract & enshitify without people leaving.
In many countries Meta platforms—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApps—are primary means of communication. If you want to find interesting events happening this weekend, you need to be on Facebook. In this regard, Google and Apple are much easier to leave because they offer personalised services, and you can always move your email and photos elsewhere. But you cannot move other people from Facebook or Instagram.
It’s not that easy to leave Google or Apple. As an example I wanted to leave iCloud and stop paying storage tax for Apple. But they have made it almost impossible to migrate the photos. There is no API to download the photos programmatically and the only way is to sync all the photos to MacBook and then move it. However, the photos are close to 1TB of storage and my MacBook doesn’t have enough storage to sync all those photos locally.
Same goes for Gmail. I have used my Gmail address for countless services and it’s almost part of my official identity. The benefits of moving away from Gmail doesn’t justify the effort I have to put in
> I have used my Gmail address for countless services and it’s almost part of my official identity.
This has been a topic for over a decade now, I think. People have been recommending getting your own domain. Best time to do that was ten years ago, and the second best is today.
For you, sure. But there are a lot of communities running entirely there. Our local farmer's market is preorder only, and is entirely run off Facebook. I would have to skip going there altogether.
And it's not viable to propose any alternative. There is no platform, closed or open, where there are enough people registered to be actually usable, and nobody will make a separate account for this.
By sending some cash (and maybe some non-sensitive training data too) the way of labs creating open models? At work we have expensive Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions but also have some in house workflows plugged into DeepSeek and GLM APIs.
A pull request is a communication to the project. AI or no AI, a poorly communicated request is a burden. IMHO AI prs are fine as long as the submitter has done the work to refine that communication to make it easy to read and assess.
A large submission without a breakdown or explanation, or a pass to minimize the code change is junk. The operator can literally ask the ai to compose it better, refactor in to smaller PRs, or do it themself. The annoyance is to have to communicate and enforce expectations to drive by submitters. In the end every project has to figure out what they accept. If, at a glance the PR is drive by junk being thrown over the wall, a response of this doesn't meet our pr submission standards delete, or try again, to me is not overly burdensome.
I for one am running what I can on my aging 1080Ti(!!), namely a Qwen2.5 14B (4-bit quantized). It’s not great, and the only other card I have is a 3070Ti but I need that for gaming. :(
What a terrible card that 3070Ti is. Mad regrets buying it because I wanted to save $400 compared to a 3080Ti.
I really don’t understand why this is being downvoted? Did I say something wrong / controversial? Or is it because I’m not using my resources the “optimal” way? Is it because my models aren’t open weight? I was only trying to contribute my experience :(
