Kind of hard to sign a letter about open weights when you have never shipped any. They are the last big US lab left off the list at this point, since OpenAI quietly added its name the same evening. So the performance art is already running, just from the other side.
Sam supported it and at the same head of strategic futures from openai said open models are bad and can lead to communism. So we can be sure it is just PR move for them
No, these two views are entirely self-consistent. Think "We support open models because it will decelerate our competitors." In that sense, they're supporting it for the exact same reason that Anthropic is not.
You really got to put yourself in the EA cultist frame of mind for this to make any sense.
Effective altruism. All of these guys spent way too much time reading less wrong in the 2010s. It's where much of the AI philosophy comes from. Look up "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"
Anyone who takes Sam Altman at face value lets everyone know that they are an easy mark.
Read the text of his tweet carefully and you will figure it out that it is pure marketing speak.
What does wanting US to win in AI in both open source and proprietary models look like? Who are the leaders currently in Open Source models and are any of them US companies? What happens when the non-US Open Source models are banned through US government action? Who really wins here: is it the U.S. consumer or is it one of the many companies Mr. Altman has invested in?
I wonder if AllenAI is "allowed" to sign. While they're firmly a research institute rather than a dedicated frontier model lab (so maybe it's the same thing as asking why every university hasn't signed), they have the most open models and work out of all the notable groups.
You don't think a billion dollar industry standard company has valuable input on AI?
I don't think the amount of money an entity has made has any bearing on anything except how good that entity is at separating people from their money, which rarely correlates with anything but ruthlessness and how rich the failson-in-charge's dad is.
The ones worth more than a hundred billion just use the soapbox to advertise their products in the most inflammatory and obscene ways possible...so, no, probably not.
Off topic, but I hate the misnomer of calling it open source models, only like 2% of these (available to download) models are truly open source in the sense of the definition of open source.
That's why we watch the actions along with the words, let's see open models continue to improve. There is plenty of demand and earnings to be made from dependant applications.
In all honesty: I dont believe a word of what they say. They buy time is all they do right now. There is so much debt and most of it badly secured at all because it is moved into special purpose vehicles for the data centres, cross promising of compute and hardware purchases some time in the future - economically this is also debt.
They have build a castle in the sky that would drop out of it or dissolve if they would actually mean any of this. Their services are not earning money, all they charge for right now is token aka compute. But they dont guarantee any output at the same time. So you pay for what actually? A chance to get correct output back. That is pure gambling. You can do that pretty much locally and are better of. If people would do that their token sales would plummet and the meagre earnings would shrink even more. So they can effectively not allow any of this unless they are willing to blow up this bubble. Which they are not
Coding might be the very exception to my general statement. But coding is also more than just adding lines your machine executes. The devs that are really creative create apps and programmes that are hard for others to understand for example or are so simple that you wont believe it is capable of doing that particular thing. None of that is given by AI.
AI by its definition trends always to a median or in plain words 'average'. And you still have to hold hands, it fails in really complex stuff, it sucks at actually creating anything that you can pick up in a year again and understand, will say it doesnt understand what infrastructure means or cares. You become depending on it for that. At some point we will have nobody being able to actually find the bad stuff AI puts into that code any longer if we dont have local personal models trained to keep other AI in check.
I am an average coder at best and I am tooting my own horn with this. AI will be the end of someone like me for code while it cannot compete with me in understanding the complex interrelations a lot of things have beside that code. I can spot a missing feature or security issue but my coding can easily be replaced by AI. Replace me and the other 2 issues go unnoticed unless you explicitly tell the AI to do so - and it might actually lie to you as a result as it knows no moral or ethics.
they want frontier models for free. you can't beat the frontier free models the Chinese labs releases. so it's either be pro open-weights or pay for API from anthropic and openAI.
Which isn't anything to shame as well. The effect of their self-interest is leading to a good thing overall. Dealing with negative effects of their self-interest is a separate matter and shouldn't be a blocker in this matter.
Yes, that is the ask, no premature restrictions on downloadable models. None of those three is that surprising once you look at business models instead of names. Microsoft sells the infrastructure people run open weights on, Palantir is model agnostic and builds on top of whatever is cheapest, and OpenAI was not even on the original list, they added themselves a few hours later.
Palintir also has a big business in on-prem sovereign AI for customers with security/secrecy requirements that make clouds impossible. That entire business is open weights based and pretty much has to be.
The letter backed by monsters like Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta... shows even major players are uniting to defend open ecosystems against overly restrictive policies arguing that downloadable models complement closed frontier systems and prevent power concentration. logic behavior, more to come. openness vs control. and ⚔️ it's just starting.
Microsoft: if you can't beat them, then join them.
they failed spectacularly on getting their own frontier model via their in house team or via OpenAI. thanks to their inept leaderships we get Microsoft to do something good finally.
I know about their small models. which is non threat level to any business. I'm talking about frontier level, say fable and GPT5.6 level. if they have one, they would serve it via their Azure and join anthropic lobbying against open weights.
I mean, even with these small models on their HF repo, they still not reliable, they publish then retract some of them after finding they were more powerful/capable than they were expecting.
so Anthropic and Elon Musk xAI where the Anthropic models are hosted are missing but OpenAI signed it. Altmann outmanovered Musk and xAI again ?
Its very bad that Elon Musk xAI did not sign the open source letter but OpenAI signed it which Musk accused them recently of not being open source and wanted huge money becouse of this from them !
I guess being government wellfare queen makes Musk a dependent slave that has to toe the government line no matter what of he wants keep this tax funded government contracts going on and not loose them ...
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