alt Hacker Newswhat 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?
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Qwen models are actually very competitive with frontier models, and you can run them on your local computer. Gotta have a decent graphics card and by that time the current cost of the rig may not justify it over paying $100/month for cloud model but it’s all out there.
> any AI system that runs on a computer that i do not control is by my definition not Open Source.
This is not true at all. It would be open source if you could download it and run it anywhere that is capable, and are free to move it and modify it as much as you want.
Just because you don't have a computer at home powerful enough doesn't mean it isn't open source.
Projects like pluralis agora solve this problem. Really what you want is the model to be collectively owned and governed, not local
LLMs that you can run locally on hardware that is not out of range to acquire is already a thing for some time.
Huh? Open source is a quality of the software, not specific to the hardware used to run the model. The demand is that model weights are openly available for anyone to run and fine tune without restriction. Has nothing to do with the hardware it runs on.
Call it open weights if you must. But even with OSS just because you have the source code doesn't mean your machine is high performance enough to run it usefully this has always been true.
When kubernetes was released there were very few people who could run it, and even less that could run it usefully.
Right now there a few people who can run a 1T model at home, even less who can run a 5T model and probably single digits who can run a 10T model.
But if an open source 10T model was available you can be sure people would find new ways to quantize it, new ways to configure hardware and and new ways to think about problems that would make it useful.
1T+ models (Deepseek v4, Kimi K2.6 etc) are available as open weights now, and for ~$5000-$10000 you can run them usefully at home. 2 years ago no on was contemplating that.
$250K to run a 10T model might be possible now. There are many companies that will pay that, and that will push the tools and techniques downwards for the rest of us.