Open source AI must win

I've been contemplating a decentralized model training system for some time using volunteer machines that we all contribute. But, it is astronomically difficult. The communication speeds are untenable.

And, there is the issue of data poisoning from untrusted nodes. I've almost cracked that last issue with a self-healing checkpointed rollback system that doesn't have to throw out anything that follows the corrupt datum.

But, I'm just one person with an idea and I don't have infinite funds to make this happen. This isn't a small project.

Maybe there would be interest in something like this, now that entire frontier labs are being banned from making further progress.

The total power of all GPUs on the planet dwarf their capabilities, if we had a way to harness them in a distributed way efficiently. We wouldn't be able to train a Fable as fast as them, but eventually having access is better than never having access.

Who is going to fund it? Training is unfathomably expensive.

You have either VC funded models looking for a return on investment, or CCP funded models looking to solidify authoritarian "model Chinese society".

Maybe there are some university 4B models, but I doubt those will carry far.

Where does Anthropic or OpenAI winning leave us?

Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work?

It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc.

Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.

Open-source AI can, by definition, never "win". AI is just hillclimbing today, and closed labs can always absorb everything the open world does and build upon it.

It doesn't really matter for most use cases, because the way AI is working is capability saturation. https://www.delanceyukschoolschesschallenge.com/the-rising-t...

The only exception to this is fields that are inherently adversarial (to nature or others) and an edge relative to competition matters.

I'm assuming this is popular because of Fable restrictions. AFAIK, open source is not excluded from ITAR / EAR restrictions (or other export restriction in other countries).

So the real solution you're looking for is technology that can't be arbitrarily gatekept by a sovereign nation.

With open-weight AI, there might not be an incentive to put large sums of capital towards training / research. There might be a donation fund of some sorts, but it certainly won't reach the level of fundraising that the frontier labs are receiving.

Because of this, I think it might not be possible to have AI *only* open-weight; major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google will likely stay for good, with better models than open-source versions.

I think it might look something like Photoshop & GIMP, with Photoshop being a frontier lab, and GIMP being the open-weight model. GIMP is decent for many different image editing workflows, but Photoshop is just better.

I would definitely prefer to have an open-weight model better than frontier labs'. Though I don't think it's possible.

I vote that you become the next Richard Stallman

I agree with sentiment and mission, but the goal is inseparable from politics at this point.

Being Open Source (tm) will not protect you from the government/others imposing controls on your silicon or what it is allowed to do, which is already happening around the world.

Even having the models be open source won't fix the regulation or economic incentives. Which is not something you can compress into a couple of paragraphs.

AI is civilizational infrastructure and it needs civilizational solutions. Not just source.

Are there any platforms to discuss this? (Like matrix/zulip?)

what is Open Source AI even?

to me Open Source, like Free Software, is something i can run on my own computer. any AI system that runs on a computer that i do not control is by my definition not Open Source.

so how then can Open Source AI win? it can't even compete. even if we collect enough money and create a dedicated Open Source organization to build and run a community owned AI datacenter, how does that help?

so what exactly is the demand here?

If any AI wins, how can that be good for humans? It's high minded but if any AI wins, why would any of "The ability to study, build, repair, deploy, audit, adapt, teach, preserve" be important? Is the real problem to be solved something else, if you want those things?

I think articles this light on content should not be upvoted to front page.

I have been working on this exact problem, and I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about it.

To make any agent "good", there are two components: the model and the harness. Very few companies can train models, but anyone can build a harness. How much does the harness matter? Can I build a harness that's good enough that I can use open source models with opus level performance? That's the question I've been trying to answer by building better harnesses. None of the existing frameworks have the functionality I need to build a good harness. The features I need are language-level... and so I started building a language called Agency[0].

It's been six months and its going well. Some of the things Agency can do are wild:

- It can pause and serialize execution at any point, making HITL easy

- It has some neat safety capabilities such as handlers[1] and PFA[2]

- You can bundle up any agent as an HTTP or MCP server[3]

- I'm now working on a built-in optimizer to optimize agents (think DSPy).

Obviously, it's a huge undertaking, but having worked with the Agency for six months, I can't imagine going back to another framework. It makes things so easy. I'm working on its built-in agent now [4]. My goal it to get it to be as good as Claude Code, but using open source models. It's still early days, lots of rough edges, but if this sort of thing interests you, I'd love to have a few more people test it out.

[0] https://agency-lang.com

[1] https://agency-lang.com/guide/handlers.html

[2] https://agency-lang.com/guide/partial-application.html

[3] https://agency-lang.com/cli/serve.html

[4] https://github.com/egonSchiele/agency-lang/blob/main/package...

I feel with current government decision to block Fable, this is not a mere opensource issue, considering how US government restrict frontier models, what we need is sovereignty for every country. If not they will release every model with a kill switch in future like F35.

If open source AI was better than what it is currently chasing, wouldn’t that take away the incentive for these companies to give it away for free? Training is expensive and companies will need to recoup those development costs once it stops being about jockeying for position.

In the US -- once our nation finishes attacking our own education system -- this is definitely something a group of academic institutions could get together and accomplish. I assume the same is true in other countries. Companies like Nvidia and AMD might even support that effort, as they make money on the hardware and would probably be more than happy for there to be more reasons to use it. There may have not been a compelling enough motivation to achieve this before, but "models" didn't have this level of strategic relevance until relatively recently. Nvidia has been fairly good about releasing open weight models in the last few months.

There is nothing more surreal in AI chat than entering your own name and being told you are a banned topic. Open source models must win. There is no alternative.

what if grok went open source and was on par with open chinese models? the business play may not be the models themselves but owning the data centers and running infrastructure for all models from all companies? a lot of people could then be rooting for xai and elon could ironically save face by actually implementing an open model

At d5s.tech we are recreating the layers built on top of models, working on dogfooding our own product to run a large chunk of the company.

I feel extremely strongly that a future in which most companies depend on one or two large AI-megacorps is going to lead to excessive rent seeking sooner or later.

I remain positive that the long term steady state will consist of proprietary models, -but- with open source AI models statistically close.

If compute keeps growing the relative cost of training current frontier models will decrease. An open source Fable/Mythos model simply seems inevitable.

This should be the top post. Not Anthropic or OpenAI marketing plots. This is existential.

Well, the crazy thing I'm working on (100% self-funded thus far): https://trivyn.io. The main idea is moving most of the reasoning to the symbolic layer so the "neuro" piece can be a small model able to be self-hosted on reasonable hardware.

As an person whos getting into tech and already developing a game, the fact that laptop prices since 2020 have increased by 20-40% is insane. It's delaying the time to create my game. I researched the reason for the cost spike, and most of it is from the excessive money put in ai Technically, the owners of AI could slow down the amount of GPUs and RAM they buy because AI has almost reached its most usable peak. Everything they add just introduces more bugs, so instead of building more AI centers, they should focus on improving the main AI model with bug fixes. There's no need to give it more unnecessary power. Most people don't care; the entire business is run by a few old men who think AI is everything and invest huge sums of money to show other AI companies they need to improve to get more funding from old people. We just need to find something new and innovative for older investors to focus on, so not everything is about investing in AI like Roblox, OpenAI, Google, etc. The extreme amount of reasoning power given to AI is causing bugs, and the moments when AI had outbursts towards people are related to this.

What does the author mean by "win"?

Does he mean that the _best model_ should be an open source one (eg: today, something better than Fable 5), or just that open source models should be the default choice for most task?

The former seems an impossibility, closed labs can work off of open and their own closed research. Closed source will always be better. Well, at least until some late-stage enshittification dynamics cause the providers to hobble them.

The latter, becoming a default, not so much. But considering the deep-rooted nature of (for instance) Google, it certainly won't be a walk in the park. This seems to be a similar hurdle as dethroning Chrome as the default browser.

For the average ChatGPT user, I surmise that open-source models are already capable enough. Most people I know who use it (me included) are not paying for it, they are routed to the cheaper models.

What's needed here is everything else other than the model to be in place. Which is to say there isn't a sufficiently good open source ChatGPT app, every open source option requires more fiddling than the ChatGPT app.

No precedent comes to mind for non-tech-user software that is open source and also a default choice. The limitation is rarely from the core-tech capability; core-tech is often the same as what closed source uses.

I think models will be a commodity sooner rather than later. This whole race doesnt matter. First mover advantage is real, but over enough time it wont matter.

Not to distract from the message, but I appreciate that this is largely plaintext not React vibeslop.

Civilization is at a crossroads, or will be soon. Democratization of AI can be good up to a point, but existential threats can also be real, and democratization of existential threats is not a survivable policy.

If we can't stop these big AI companies, we must to put force that everybody can see what they are hiding from us.

Don't worry, open source AI will win. There's a reason everybody is desperate to IPO fast and get an exit, their competitive advantage is not lasting long.

Available components must win. I’ve often been a critic of open weights and open architectures that give very few normal people access. What’s the point of releasing the plans for a nuclear reactor if no one can have the fuel?

I hope so. But how? Who gonna fund these projects and how to coordinate with every sides. This is complex. I only believe that the open source AI won’t lack users.

Winning is a tall order. I'm just hoping it'll get good enough while allowing us to run it locally with no idiotic "safety" controls or censorship of any sort. Looks like the best open weight models are at Sonnet level, if they get to Opus 4.6 level it's gonna be perfect.

It can't.

Hear me out, economies of scale can only be met when there is a large enough liquidity for it.

The amount of people willing to purchase multiple hardware releases year after year just to run LLM is already tiny and businesses already do use their own hardware and there is no desire for manufacturer to reduce their own margins.

i guess this fits: https://thealliance.ai/projects/tapestry

This will never work - a strong enough LLM model will also let you synthesise bioweapons etc.

How can you release this to public?!

Why else do you think Anthropic is heavily restricting Fable? You can’t just handwave safety concerns.

Definitely, but I see the gap widening everyday, especially while commercial AI models have started converging towards AGI. However I do believe and support the cause, as it's the next big thing as developers we need to take to prevent a complete monopoly in the coming few years.

Did open source phones win? No, iPhone is pretty dominant.

Did open source operating systems win? No, MacOS/Windows are pretty dominant.

Does open source... cloud hosting, social media, ride sharing apps, you name it win? Not in my experience?

I fully support this. How can I help?

So I've long said that the valuation of OpenAI at a trillion(ish) dollars depends on OpenAI "winning" and "owning" AI and there being a sufficient moat to stay ahead of competition. Without that, the company is worth a fraction of that. Anthropic is probably positioned better here actually but it's still kinda true there too.

Ever since a Chinese firm released DeepSeek I immediately came to the realization that any US tech firm "owning" AI is simply not going to happen. China will make sure of it. It's in their national security interest not to let that happen.

From the POV of geopolitics, IMHO the US shot itself in the foot by banning the export of the best chips to China. The US also somehow has the power to prevent a Dutch company (ASML) from selling to China too. That makes a little more sense to ban but the combination of banning EUV exports AND banning the best chips sowed the seeds for the destruction of all of this.

By banning chip sales, the US inadvertently created a captive market for Chinese chips with Chinese companies. If there were no chip ban, Chinese companies probably would've bought US chips. But they can't. So they can only buy from Huawei and SMEE (indirectly). The US forced China to realize it was in their national security interest to copy the best lithography and, by extension, the best AI chips.

So DeepSeek was reportedly developed on either older NVidia hardware or smuggled newer NVidia hardware but that won't last either. At some point it'll be completely Chinese made chips that are doing this.

And what's the biggest cost for a model? Training. But you do that once and the model like any software is infinitely copyable so China can under OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX (xAI) and that's what they're doing.

But it gets worse for the AI moat. Local models are going to get cheaper and cheaper to run. You can already run 31B models on sub-$5000 hardware. What do you think it'll cost in 5 years? Will larager parameter models keep getting better or will there be a law of diminishing returns? What is a B100 workload now, will be a Macbook Pro workload in as little as 5 years.

What if all these AI data centers are ultimately just going to be commoditized cloud hardware like AWS in the not too distant future? We already see Google renting big from SpaceX. I think the writedown on all these data center investments and the companies that are doing them is going to be extreme in the next 5 years.

Open source ai will win.

Anthropic just kneecapped themselves, and possibly OpenAI and Google as well, with their FUD strategy that got fable shutdown by the government.

But that doesn't impact Chinese providers. Then can US companies get investments for expensive model development if they can't actually sell those models-as-a-service?

In the meantime, open source will continue its march onward because while slower, it's completely open source, and the models are already good enough to improve their own work as well as build out the next gen of models.

it is inevitable that it will win

information wants to be free

our dependency on US AI will lead to data concentration in hands of few megacorps.

I mean, even if the frontier labs opened their frontier models, only nation-state level actors are capable of running them. A lot of the tech is very open and known, its putting it all together that's the struggle.

Totally agreed!

Given that it's most public use in open source so far is to whitewash GPL code into MIT code, no, I'm sorry, I don't think "open source AI" is particularly important.

It’s the GPUs, not the weights that are the key.

As long as these models require a lot of computing power, the best models open source or not will be served by corporations who can afford the infra.

It likely won’t based on how SOTA are developed.

I hope the news moves this debate past "open weights vs. closed APIs" as the only axis. Open weights matter, definitely, but applied AI also needs open infrastructure around the model and it feels a bit like I'm yelling into the abyss highlighting the future we're incentivizing - cognition rented from a few institutions with access changing based on policy, geopolitics and platform incentives like advertising

But if "they" stay on the current trajectory we'll never own hardware capable enough to run the open source AI. They want us to rent everything from the cloud and never own it. If a government-supported cartel forms around this idea (which appears to be the case) that's the end of it.