alt Hacker NewsThe sentiment in this article is nice. But open source software is a weak analogy for frontier models. Principally because software requires zero capital investment (actually zero) while frontier models demand billions. Open models can only survive in the long run if they can (eventually) generate significant cash flows or if they are paid for by governments. Now China essentially has a monopoly on open weight models. And so supporting open source models means either supporting long term economic capture by China or supporting Chinese government control of your intelligence. Both of these outcomes are unequivocally bad from an American perspective. If you live in the valley and benefit from the US venture ecosystem you should be highly skeptical of open weight models. Banning them may very well be the best course of action.
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"Open source" open models can also survive if they are seen as a necessary cost of doing business. Same logic as tech companies working together on Linux. "We need an operating system. But an operating system is expensive to make on our own and does not really provide an edge. So let's just work on and use the open source one."
Open Source is free as in speech
Open Weights is free as in beer
Hilariously bad take. Open weight models can be retrained of fine-tuned, that's the entire point. The idea that the "Chinese government controls your intelligence" is laughable in the case of open weight models. Once the weights are released you can do whatever you want with them. The idea that there's economic capture by the Chinese for products they're literally giving away is stupid to the point of inanity.
I can only assume this account is pure shilling for the closed-source AI labs.