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I feel like "open source" in this context is, as you say, an uncomfortable nuance; the tooling (llama.cpp, et al) is open but useless without weights.

The weights are extraordinarily expensive "capital" that is donated by big organizations who are all at war with each other.

I don't know that it will ever be possible for, for instance, archive.org, to make truly open weights. And, other than archive.org, I can't imagine any other "open source" organization (freebsd? apache?) being in any position at all to make truly open weights.

Maybe governments, government organizations, or universities.

None of whom are currently funded, mandated, inclined, or particularly interested in dumping the money into buying the infrastructure needed to make weights.

by dofm6 hours ago|

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Yes. The weights war is a much more aggressive war than the war of OSS donations.

In the OSS donations war (Visual Studio Code being a really fascinating example of it) you could see that the taps can't be turned off so easily. Whatever is donated can be built upon forever.

I think there will come a point, soon enough, where open weights models are capable enough that even if they stagnate, they can be augmented with tooling that essentially keeps them current. Maybe we are there now?

But the risk of the taps being turned off is not negligible.

My own feeling is that governments will ultimately ask consortia of universities to train open weights models and support them financially in doing so.

(And for what it is worth, I think diffusion text models are likely to trigger a hardware arms race that makes this possible)

In much the same way that they used to do that for the supercomputer race, which we just don't hear about right now!

by adamtaylor_134 hours ago|

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Interestingly, I've taken a different approach. AI supplements how my business builds and I'd much rather have all my engineers using Opus 4.8 rather than whatever the best open source models are.

I believe open source is important, but for my business I'm just going to use the best tools I have available to me.

by dofm4 hours ago|

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As a business decision it makes sense if you think that spilling out agent-written code to meet some profitable objective is a race you can win?

I know I can't win that race or outspend the competition. So I have to rely on my instinct that in my area of business, people becoming dependent on agent-written code are getting further and further out of their depth, and that slow and steady will win the race. I am going to spend the time trying to integrate the open source tools into the way I work. (I am still working on this; frankly I may have bigger problems on an individual level than they can solve)

To be maximally clear, if this two-inscrutable-megacorps model does survive, and it becomes how everyone works over even the medium term, I'll have to quit tech.

I will probably retire early and just plan for a shorter, quieter life that ends when I am out of money, because like everyone else I won't be able to afford a longer one.

I don't want that "nobody prompts now, we just specify loops" bullshit for myself and I don't want what it will do to me for anyone I love.

Open source and open weights have to win for human culture's sake but in the short term for the sake of the culture of tech work. We need control over how we use these tools, not just to be steered down whichever channel makes the most money for Dario and Sam.