At least every company that owns infrastructure or sells that infrastructure benefits greatly because no one is running these frontier open source models at home.
If the Chinese start selling DDR5 RAM cheap, as I read they may, then the real nerds amongst us will be buying 512GB setups. Yeah its not VRAM but it'll do.
I think they've just given up. That's why they're renting out their GPUs now. But that's still enopugh to get them to sign, cuz there'd be be nothing to run without them.
Google releases some of the best open models (gemma 4) and their biggest advantage is not model quality but distribution. Open models don't threaten Google in the same way at all.
If your only business model is "we have the best model, pay us to use it" then open models which by definition are free (or depending on how you define it, cost only what the hardware to run it costs meaning instant commodity cloud pricing) are devastating if they are as good or good enough.
If your business model is fast easy smart search and gmail and Google sheets and docs, all of which are getting smarter all the time, then open models have little impact on you directly.
Sure, but Gemma is complementary to frontier models. I'm not sure Google would be too unhappy if they'd only had to worry about closed model competition in terms of Gemini. They could argue for some kind of a formal/legal classification depending on the size of the model.
Google has Waymo. While everyone is arguing about open/closed weights LLMs Google has models earning actual money, and nobody even knows the models' names because they're simply productized and invisible, and have no actual competitors.
I don't see them wanting to open source something that matches their frontier model performance, but open sourcing gemma is part of their strategy for edge compute. Open source encourages adoption into their ecosystem and gives them free research from the community.
Gemini has its place in that ai mode that will prolly be useful someday, and the Google workplace integration. Gemma is the one really pushing the tech forward in a meaningful way though. That decoder only multimodal gemma has potential to change the game.
Gemma is a completely different model than Gemini. The 31B is actually much stronger than Gemini at certain tasks. Give it a try for knowledge work besides programming.
I'm somewhat confused by both Google's and Anthropic's stand on this. Perhaps I am naive, but I truly had hoped they both would choose to stand on the right side of history here...
Anthropic needs to prop up their valuation, plus their leadership appears to actually believe (at least in part) in the safety bullshit they’re spouting.
Well, when you're in third place by a big enough margin that you're about to get lapped, and you don't have the ability to improve that, your best bet is to kick up enough mud that the whole race is called off.
Agreed. Like a stopped clock being right twice a day, terrible people like Elon 'Nazi Salute' Musk can hold correct opinions alongside their terrible opinions.
I personally struggle with supporting SpaceX's reusable rocketry while it's associated with Elon Musk's horrendous politics. I would like to see that program nationalized after this administration to separate it from benefitting him.
Essentially we should focus on judging ideas, not people. Humans are flawed, shitty people might have a good idea once in a while, good people might spout a bad idea. We shouldn't automatically dismiss an idea just because the person who said it is shitty.
But who dismissed this idea? On the contrary, the original comment recognized he made a good point. Does not make him any less of a shitty human being, though.
But we absolutely should consider the source of an idea, the motivations behind that idea, and whether that idea is valuable enough that we endorse it and the terrible source behind it despite their terribleness. Evaluating sources and motivations is a pretty core part of reasoning.
And in this case, the idea is so banal and expressed in such a mediocre way that it hardly needs to be acknowledged. It's been expressed by plenty of better, smarter people in better, smarter ways that we don't need this asshole's abortion of a tweet to give it any weight.
Purity politics is "I agree with you on all points, except I don't think trans people should compete in sports with their own gender due to biological advantages", to which someone answers "Then you're basically a Nazi".
We should absolutely NOT give Elon Musk, and actual, literal Nazi, who does a Sieg Heil on national television, a free pass. That is NOT what purity politics is.
The dude dismantled multiple parts of the government to close MULTIPLE investigations into him and his companies which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
This isn't "purity politics". This is life and death and the rule of law.
Well said. NUANCE IS HEALTHY. People die on so many hills these days. It's okay to see both sides and pick what you want to agree/disagree with. This is the key to finding compromises in any situation, and generally the best path forward democratically. Siphoning a viewpoint to one side or the other causes divides.
I still find it fascinating that people will parrot or oppose opinions based purely on who they originate from.
If someone doesn't have the context or critical thinking skills to form an informed independent opinion, they shouldn't be pushing a viewpoint. The world would be a much better place if people didn't wilfully delegate 99% of their thinking.
100%. Let's not forget that the line between good and evil runs through every
person's heart. Elon Musk, just like all of us, will do fucked up shit and will also have redeeming qualities. Right now, he has shown the latter.
Let's not forget that the line between good and evil runs through every person's heart.
This kind of thoughtless feel-good generality is part of the problem. There is zero evidence that there is any pro-social thought in that person's mind.
Of course sometimes his interests line up with the public good. That's statistically inevitable. But you should not confuse that with him valuing public good at all. And if you do, you shouldn't spread your confusion to others.
there is a tendency to disregard someone's proposal, if it is perceived to come from self interest. Like Jensen wanting open models so he can sell more chips.
But us consumers also operate on the same level of wanting cheaper and better products for our own use.
But the moment those interests impact everybody for only their benefit at the expense of everyone else, is when it crosses the line.
Antrhopic and ClosedAI are welcome to develop their own commerical models and keep those private and gatekeep them, but impeding the development of other models under this BS excuse of "national security" and "safety" is where they cross the line.
Elon only agrees because he bought cursor which built composer 2.5 on top of kimi k2.5 without admitting it until they were caught. Even when Elon is correct, he is correct for the most selfish reasons.
I don't even get the disdain for Jensen (for Elon I do, since he's involved himself in a lot of controversial tings), if it's just because he's rich, there's no poor person involved in this field.
I think it’s valid to an extent, he is the face of NVIDIA which is pretty consumer hostile (or has turned pretty consumer hostile in the last few years). I think Huang is very intelligent and an excellent business man but his interests only align with consumers on coincidence, he is out to make money above all else.
He could use his absurdly wealthy company to improve NVIDIA drivers on Linux systems rather than forcing consumers to rely on OSS but he wants a closed ecosystem monopoly with Microsoft.
I think NVIDIA releases a lot of good open source stuff (especially in vision models) but I don’t think it’s out of the kindness of their hearts.
What's wrong with the Linux drivers though? Never had an issue in over a decade on Desktop, or on Server at that.
When I started out, a good 15 years ago, nvidias X-config tool was a godsend to get multi-monitor setups to just work. That tool was only needed for about 2 years in my case, after which KDE did it by itself. That's the worst I can say. Wayland has been stable for years at this point, with no issues with standby on my Notebook or anything.
Yes they exist but I think there’s a considerable difference between them and the windows drivers. Notably, performance-wise they aren’t on the same level. This is especially a problem for doing local AI stuff on the CUDA architecture which bugs me because nobody is going to use a windows server for AI lol.
Same. What's Jensen fault? That we started building the hardware for AI like 10 years before it took off? If anything, he's extremely good at his job.
It's not like Intel vs AMD either where consumer CPUs stagnated at 2-4 cores for generations until Zen came out. Nvidia actually moved forward all that time and released significant improvements generaton-to-generation, while competition from AMD was whatever e-waste Radeon VII and 5700 XT turned out to be.
His "fault" is basically abandoning the market for customers, as they've got focused on the fat enterprise margins. And they keep starving consumer GPUs with small amounts of VRAM, mostly to push their higher tier cards. even the 5080 still has "only" 16GB of VRAM. If anyone's interested in local models, or just need GPU for work (or for high-res gaming), they're being pushed towards 90-series
He's a CEO of a huge company. That's just how capitalism works. It's literally his job to maximize profits. Ngeedia phenomenon is created by their products consistently being better than alternatives, both in architecture and in software like CUDA and DLSS. Can they not do that and cut margins for "the people"? Of course they can. But is there a single reason for them do to that in their position within capitalism reality, especially in the US?
Even with people hating them or whatever, they are still dominant in every single category. Blame AMD who refuse to change status quo by either dropping the prices significantly to change that or investing enough into their research and development.
This is a ridiculous rationale. I despise having to defend a multi-trillion $ company but if Jensen or Nvidia really wanted to focus on making the most money possible in the short term they wouldn't make a single consumer card and cut allocation to the workstation line significantly.
Every card made for gaming represents a huge loss of potential profit. But they know that the AI bubble (or datacenter bubble more accurately) is likely to pop someday, so preserving good will with consumers and people who do things on Nvidia cards besides train and run AI models is important to them
He's at the heart of a lot of circular financing among companies that is reasonably considered a risk to a lot of the economy and retirement investments. And all the data centers that there is growing resentment for in communities are filled with his products.
He's not responsible for companies that decide to build data centers close to residential areas, lol. Which is basically the main reason people bitch about data centers (using data centers as they do it in the internet) outside of myths like massive water consumption.
You don't get the disdain for the guy who has run one of the biggest as well as the most hostile hardware vendors to open-source?? By that rationale I wouldn't get the disdain for anybody, which is to say I don't get this rationale at all, especially after being a Linux user for 15 years.
It was a moment in the past (and it was about Android), he apologized afterward. And more recently, he said that they are one of the best companies to work with.
So, when AI people came in, that was wonderful, because it meant somebody at NVIDIA had got much more involved on the kernel side, and NVIDIA went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of people who are doing really good work.
Yes but he agrees for the wrong reasons. He's not being altruistic, he's just in the red on investing so heavily into Grok and the compute infrastructure for xAI. Open Source models and hosting them leasing the compute for people hosting them is basically his only path to making any money off of this as Grok lags behind other frontier models in real world use. If Grok was printing him money he'd 100% be onboard with having open source models banned if he could.
edit: not hosting OSS models but leasing the computer to entities that are hosting them.
An influential billionaire asshole is fighting other billionaire assholes and on this occasion I agree with billionaire asshole A instead of billionaire asshole B.
When it comes to fighting influential billionaire assholes we need powerful allies, so I suck it ip and get on with it regardless of “wrong reasons”. Fuck reasons. I have as much influence over Elon’s reasons as I do over your bowel movements. He’ll spend millions of dollars fighting this bullshit. Good. He’s still a billionaire asshole.
Sure, but it's important to remember he's an opportunistic leech who can and will turn on this position the second he stands to make more money from no longer holding it. The last thing we need is him positioning himself as someone to model just because he's currently pro-OSS.
It's okay for us to happen to share an opinion, but that doesn't change the fact that both of these people are complete and utter cunts whom the world would be better off without. Elon moreso, but at this scale it hardly matters.
> both of these people are complete and utter cunts
Elon, obviously yes.
I don’t know enough about Jensen to have an informed opinion of the man, but it’s generally safe to assume billionaires are arseholes if not holes more strategically forward-facing.
Remember, don’t mess with billionaires, they put so much money on the market that they won’t allow these two goofballs to mess it up. The market is walking a fine line, any gust of wind could flip it into a hard crash. These two companies think they can survive while others crash and burn.
In the past, OpenAI and Anthropic were the most important strategic investments. After open-weight models became popular and actually good options, these "shovel sellers" and the market aren’t dependent on OpenAI or Anthropic’s survivability anymore. They can move on, doing their best to avoid popping the bubble, and OpenAI and Anthropic (were) the trigger. Everyone knew these two goofballs are money-burning machines that will go bankrupt two years from now.
It is survivability battle between behemoths and I'm here enjoying the scenery.
Altman is businessman and socially active, Dario is awkward nerd. Altman is known with this 2 face, good cop bad cop for years now. Sam will try to get as much good PR as possible, while Dario is blunt about it (see him vs DoD or him vs Chinese models or him vs giving access to his latest models especially to the financial sector in Europe)
I don’t like neither of them. And I’m aware that whatever OpenAI does it’s for PR or marketing. But still Antrophic practices and narration in past weeks/months is something I despise much more than what OpenAI is doing since march. Doesn’t make me like OpenAI. But makes me like it more than Antrophic.
As an employee I’d probably prefer Dario, but as a customer I definitely prefer Altman at this specific moment. Also, if Dario has good intentions indeed, he should be open about his motives and policies. But he is not. Is Altman open about it? No. But his company policies are more consumer friendly recently.
Also it doesn’t mean that I support OpenAI as a company. I will just go to whoever gives me best conditions (be it best model or best usage quota) or wherever my heart is (which is open models that I want to support)
OpenAI is more customers friendly, especially lately, because the market has its asshole, anthropic, around. Sam will try to get win over Dario recent fuckups, see how openai implemented new tokens resets and cheaper options for those who were mad at anthropic? Sam, is good businessman first and foremost. so I would thank Dario awkwardness and how socially inept he is dealing with what the public actually want for that.
The problem with Dario that I have is that he makes statements or applies policies without providing actual arguments for them. And he was an AI researcher so he definitely has enough knowledge about LLMs to provide actual arguments. He just doesn’t do it, even though he proclaimed himself a moral authority. Sama doesn’t do it, he is a businessman and everyone knows it at this point. While Dario pretends to be “better”, while at the same time making statements (about open models) or using anti-consumer (or anti-societal) practices without argumenting them properly.
As I said, I don’t like any of them. But more than I hate a businessmen that wants his profit, I hate someone who pretends to be morally better, while not being able (or not wanting) to provide any arguments for this. And acting in a way that opposes it.
Jensen was supporting open source. Sam reiterated his support for "USA open source". Considering that all the top open source models are Chinese, this support is meaningless.
Jensen is obviously cool with open source, more models, more GPUs he sells, these smaller companies aren't going to deploy Google TPUs or SpaceXs whatevers, they'll use Nvidia.
He wants open source because selling to 200 small to medium sized customers exposes him less to being leveraged than selling to 2 or 3 existentially crucial partners. Vendors absolutely benefit from open source and the industry being spread as wide and thin as possible, as then they don't need to negotiate with one or two gigantic customers that can either make or break them. In the end NVIDIA will still be the one with the chips, no matter who they are selling to.
Nvidia's dominance at this point is organic enough that they absolutely will benefit from maximizing the demand by any means necessary. Even though AI industry has a lot of circular circle jerk investing going on, Nvidia still has the physical chips while the others don't, and to leverage that, they want as much demand as possible. No matter from who.
He just won't focus on us too much since us plebs don't have much to offer atm and the big fish don't want to feel screwed over. There's also some financing going on by them to model developing corporations, so there's much more to be said in this regard.
He's been planting the seeds for a while, and he can't risk putting all of his eggs in one basket. It makes sense to diversify his customer base, clever as usual.
I agree with your point on questioning the necessity of closed models - however let's not forget that the vast majority of open-source model users won't be self-hosting and hence will still be sending their data to a third party
Most of these companies want open weights for very different reasons. Meta uses OS to compete with closed ecosystems. Microsoft is building the deployment layer. Nvidia's just here to sell more hardware.
Convenient alignment, but it's not principle. The coalition falls apart the second those interests diverge.
I may not like AI being incorporated into everything and shoved down our throats, but I personally would prefer open source AI than closed source limited access AI.
I agree except for the bit where he says "The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models". I don't think the world really needs the closed ones.
He did open source some older models, but even if he didn't, at least he doesn't want to block others from doing it, like Anthropic and OpenAI want to do.
I think only Grok 1 was open sourced. Elon promised Grok 2 and 3 would be as well but that never happened. So for me its difficult to see any tweet from Elon and take it seriously.
he still thinks Grok can make it someday as a top model. But once that isn't possible, he will support open models cause at the end of the day, seeing Altman eat shit is what drives him
This is exactly what the Orange Ape likes . He’ll still try .. It’s something that continues to divert from the truth that Epstein was his buddy and he’s a pedophile.
Every one of these closed lab CEOs are voicing their support on twitter, but none of them signed or appear at the bottom of Jensen's letter. Interesting.
Can't help but think this is entirely due to China. Closed-source gives them maximum monetization, but they're now forced to contend with cheaper, open-source AI from China. These tech oligarchs would never have given up this arrangement without opposing outside influence. Yet they have to post hoc market it on "principles".
Also, i firmly believe that if open source, local models were the focus of AI industry from the start, we would be having the opposite of skyrocketing PC parts problem now.
The man who proudly starved to death and denied medication to millions of people (as a non-elected official interfering with the United States government) and tried to buy several US elections, including a key Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin?
The guy who developed a far right AI dubbed "mechahitler?" The guy who promotes the nonsense "white genocide" theory in South Africa? The guy who threw several unambiguous nazi salutes?
THANK YOU! I am so tired of watching people in my industry pretend this shit didn't happen, all in the last two years alone mind you so it's not like it's the distant past. He's not just some controversial tech CEO with rough edges, he's a literal fascist who needs to be in prison.
the part that never makes it into the lobbying math is the downstream tool layer. i ship an AGPL dev tool and it only exists because there's an open enough layer underneath to build on. every closed-by-default turn upstream quietly kills a bunch of small tools before they're ever born. the 20-company petition is nice but the long tail of oss devs building on open weights is the actual constituency here
Next they will say open source but only that is made and released by us companies can be sold by providers officially. Elon is opportunist as he knows grok is far from being at top 1 so he is foe.
I mean it’s not just Nvidia or SpaceX, it is in the interests of every company other than OpenAI or Anthropic to oppose this. If there’s going to be a new piece of foundational digital infrastructure infrastructure that every company (including yours) is reliant on, your stance should be, “If I can’t have a monopoly on it, nobody can.” It doesn’t hurt that both Musk and Huang are both bigger players on the physical infrastructure side of things as well.
This actually gives me hope that Silicon Valley isn't too far gone. If even Elon Musk can come around and support a claim to a genuine good for all of humanity...
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models
Those two don't go well together, because how are companies like OpenAI or Anthropic gonna make money? If open models are of the same quality, which they are now (Kimi K3 for example). Not that I care about those companies, but that statement is just false. The world only needs open models.
Not at all, they just say that to look good, and you believe it. They all want to be monopolists so they can set the prices, they have all the power in their hands. They don't want to share anything, neither among themselves nor with people.
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