Not all of them. Only those who outspend all the others and then you never really hear of any others. It's like the most basic requirement for the job.
Isn’t that what it takes though? Doesn’t startup culture celebrate this attitude?
Some do, unfortunately. But that's not all of them.
I think this might genuinely going to become a problem for them in the long run. People just absolutely hate their guts. That's a very strong motivator to do everything possible to get rid of them.
We'll of course see in 5-10 years if the doom PR will work out, but that always was a rather high-risk gamble, and it already looks like it might not.
There is a significant amount of businesses and people that are very willing to switch to literally anyone else just out of spite alone.
My country has no frontier models; since I've no national grounds to support one provider over another, a strong degree of provider diversity is an obvious benefit to me. I also think a highly competitive global market is a good thing for mankind in general, any hegemonic power having a monopolistic or oligopolistic position in AI provision is probably the 'bad ending' for most of us since it represents an enormous concentration of democratically unaccountable power regardless of the power which 'wins'. I'd argue it's rational, not spiteful to favour provider diversity on those grounds.
I really don't see any situation where local AI doesn't absolutely eat the big labs' lunch. They can't compete and the only way it makes any sense for them to exist is if the government somehow tries to ban local AI, which likely wouldn't work in the first place.
Someone like me who spends a lot of time in the anglosphere puts faces on companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. I doubt that's true for most people, especially outside of the USA. They're just big companies, like 3M, DHL or Toyota. Who knows what the management of these companies think of the future of humankind?
I would expect than personality-driven rejection of American tech from abroad nowadays is driven mainly by Trump and, to a much lesser extent, Musk. Everybody else is just "some guy" to 99% of the population.
Decisions in tooling are not made by the 99% of the population, but a subset that is likely a lot more tuned-in to all this. After all, that is kinda their job so that they can make good decisions
Our modern capitalist societies are, at the very least, amoral.
And back then, the world was very different. ZIRP, cryptocurrencies, infinite highs, peak social media. All that stuff
German here, every stupid utterance of at least the orange clown makes national headlines here. Frankly I wish our populations were more exposed to the utter buffoonery of the rest of the American wannabe elites, maybe people would then not go and type their deepest fears into ChatGPT.
So I'm doing what I can - I only use local models for 100% of my personal coding. (And their capability is amazing! Qwen 3.8 Flash Next leaves me wanting for nothing at this point.)
And I know open weights aren't enough. I'm ready to support open training if/when we get around to that. I hope once hardware prices ease, we can see homelabbers building small AI hosts (small by homelab standards yknow. So let's say 512GB host ram and 1-2 32GB cards, though i hope we also start to see AI cards with lots of vram but less compute cores). Then maybe we can do folding@home style distributed training.
In a time when software freedom is perhaps more threatened than ever, I'm happy to see that information still WANTS to be free, perhaps even more than ever. Look at how easy it is to distill claude! Despite, presumably, anthropic working very hard to prevent it.
In theory, things will become even more free, because you can copy whatever code you like, it's all in the public domain because it was all written by an AI (or enough of it was that a court will decide that copying the whole code base is fair).
And the ability of AI's to reverse-engineer binaries means that even hiding the code won't be enough.
Companies may write T&Cs that try to cover some of this, but they'll still have lost the biggest protection they have.
So, in theory, we move to what the FOSS movement have always wanted: all the code available, all the time, with anyone able to change whatever they like about the software they run.
Somehow I don't think anyone is going to be happy about this, though.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/beware-gpu-scammers/
Crazy times!
Congrats on getting rid of the debt, that's really a great feeling.
I really want to build something less scuffed, but, yknow. So I'm making do atm.
Is engineering the factories that make the hardware not nuclear engineering? Even if not, considering there exists only 1 supply chain in the world capable of making them, it seems pretty revolutionary. And that moat seems pretty big, given that it hasn't been crossed for many years.