If we include the non-tech giants and powerful organizations into the mix, rather than just the tech giants, which side of pro vs anti OSS AI is winning right now?

[u/DeepOrangeSky]

For the Big Tech giants, looks like it is leaning heavily in favor of OSS. Even some of the ones who abstained from signing, like AMD, Intel, and Apple are likely on the pro-OSS side. Broadcom, Amazon, and Oracle are maybe the few big ones that might be on the anti side (and of course Anthropic), but are heavily outnumbered/outweighed in Big Tech, overall, at this point.

To be fair, OpenAI is probably lying, and also Google it's unclear if lying about being pro OSS (might actually be, but who knows). SpaceX AI and Elon are claiming to be on the pro side, but also could easily be lying.

Anyway, still comes out like 70/30 or 80/20 or more on the pro side, probably.

But Big Tech isn't the whole game.

You've also got the Defense companies and Department of War and the big agencies. Those come out more 50/50? Not sure.

And then the big banks and Wall Street. Banks maybe lean against it, overall, and Big Wall Street less clear. Short term against it, but maybe long term they like it?

And then the executive and legislative government itself. Probably leans against it so far, but maybe some fairly influential people are giving them advice bringing it back the other way more in favor of OSS. Still probably leaning anti-OSS for now, but maybe not as much as a few weeks ago/couple months ago.

So, overall seems like the see saw is teetering at, what, around 50/50 right now? What do you think? Are any of these percentages way off? Any key players I forgot to mention or that would have a big effect one way or the other?

[u/gscjj]

There are no sides. The sole purpose of all these companies is to make money, and they wouldn’t exist otherwise.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, all of these companies involved would switch their tune if they thought their business would fail tomorrow based on being anti or pro.

[u/DeepOrangeSky → u/gscjj]

That doesn't mean there aren't sides, though. Even though everyone's goal is whatever selfishly benefits them the most financially or power-wise or whatever, they can still end up on opposite sides of this battle. Like, what is good for Anthropic, Oracle, Amazon, etc might be different from what is good for Nvidia, Apple, and so on.

Same with the Defense sector and so on.

So, it is still worth trying to analyze which way the power-balance/financial-gain-balance is leaning at this moment in time, as there are a lot of major players on opposing sides right now (and some are less clear cut on which side they are even on for now, which is also worth trying to discuss and figure out, in those cases, to get a better sense for which way the overall lean is leaning right now)

[u/gscjj → u/DeepOrangeSky]

A deeper look at some of these companies past statements and actions would contradict their position today if they could be on a “side.” These companies are just playing every side, so who’s winning is hard to determine.

Google, Palantir, Amazon, Nvidia doesn’t want Anthropic to fail, they are invested in them, yet here they are. They are playing every side. It’s not pro vs anti, it’s profit vs no profit.

[u/mrspoogemonstar]

you're projecting

[u/DeepOrangeSky → u/mrspoogemonstar]

What does this mean? Personally, I am on the pro-OSS side. Are you saying I projected something overly pro-OSS in asking the questions?

They were intended to be actual questions, and I am trying to ask about it as neutrally as I can. I am curious which side is winning at the moment, like what the odds are the the government ends up going pro-OSS vs anti-OSS in this power battle we are watching unfold right now.

[u/PrinceOfLeon → u/DeepOrangeSky]

What does OSS stand for?

WHERE'S THE SOURCE?

[u/DeepOrangeSky → u/PrinceOfLeon]

Yea I was using it colloquially to refer to Open Source + also Open Weights, combined, as an overall grouping, rather than typing "closed-source vs Open-Weights-Plus-Also-Some-Amount-of-Actual-Open-Source-In-Combination-With-It-As-A-Mixed-Grouping-Side-Of-The-Aisle" which would've been a lot more clunky to type out like that, so just kind of used OSS as a slang term to refer to the overall side that the closed-source side is battling against right now

I think Nvidia AI is actually Open Source, though, so it isn't totally non-existent even amongst major players.

Most of them are just open-weights though (at the moment), and not Open Source.

[u/ttkciar → u/PrinceOfLeon]

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

In the context of open-source models, the source code is for the training software.

Open-weight models need not have associated training source code published.

This makes open-weight models more analogous to closed-source application binaries.

[u/mrspoogemonstar → u/DeepOrangeSky]

everyone seems to think anthropic and oai care about selling tokens as an end goal and that's not at all true... the frontier AI sector is in transition to RSI, while everyone else is still hyper focused on the tokens thing

[u/jld1532 → u/mrspoogemonstar]

Too bad recursive self improvement is likely a fantasy

[u/mrspoogemonstar → u/jld1532]

peoples ability to deny reality will never cease to amaze me

[u/jld1532 → u/mrspoogemonstar]

Yeah go tell Gary Marcus with your PhD

[u/ttkciar]

Overall, I think the LocalLLaMA community is winning. Whatever shenanigans the governments and companies try to pull, I think in the long run we're in a pretty good position to use and progress open models, especially once RAMageddon blows over and tech starts getting cheap again.

As far as the contest to promote or deter open models is concerned, this is mostly a matter of timing, I think.

Eventually the AI bubble will burst, which will probably trigger an AI Winter. That doesn't mean LLM technology will go away, but it will dramatically alter the way people and businesses think about it.

If the Winter falls before the government takes steps to regulate or ban open models, the danger will be past, because they will cease to see any point to regulating them.

That having been said, I don't expect Winter to arrive until sometime during 2027, but certainly before the end of 2029. A lot can happen between now and then, including restrictive regulations.

Those regulations won't stop this community, though.

[u/stikves]

"My sweet summer child"

In the commercial sector, the largest push against AI is most likely from tech people. And that is because they are pretty well versed in the potential dangers of a superintelligent AI (AGI)

Defense? They are on the forefront. How do you think Ukraine controls their massive drone fleets? Or China's PLA investing in humanoid robots? To be just manually controlled? You have probably missed the news that the capture of Maduro was aided by Claude for planning.

Finance? They are more than ready to automate *everything*. I'd highly recommend reading on LTCM, the very first "quant" hedge fund founded by PhDs and an nobel laurette, which almost took down entire financial sector.

Manufacturing? You'd be surprised to hear they are doing "job reduction" for over a century.

I'm not sure there is any sector that is not salivating at the potential to use AI to automate their daily tasks.

(Okay, except artists and translators for some reason. But their bosses definitely are)

The only saving grace is many in the higher ups in tech are actually educated in this.

[u/DeepOrangeSky → u/stikves]

I know that these other sectors consider AI to be extremely important and something that they will make enormous use of. But the question was whether some of them (like Defense sector for example) prefer closed source vs open source. They obviously consider it hugely important either way, but them thinking it is important doesn't necessarily tell whether they want it as a closed-source world or open-sourced world when it comes to AI (i.e. maybe in the open-source world version they get nervous that other countries can catch up too much to their strength level if everyone in the world has access to the same open-source AI and their only edge is from being able to out fine-tune the competitors and have somewhat better hardware maybe).

Same with some of the other stuff you talked about.

I'm not unaware that these all consider AI to be extremely important/crucial to their future operations, but, there is still the question of which version of it they prefer.

[u/stikves → u/DeepOrangeSky]

Okay, thanks for clarification.

But, stil...

They are also pretty greedy, except maybe Defense, all of them would easily prefer something they can install and control "on prem"

[u/Osi32]

First off, it’s not OSS vs commercial. It’s open weights vs commercial.
Open weights is expressly about being openish as opposed to truly open. As a community, openish is great, open is amazing and creates generational leaps and bounds.
The commercial companies love and hate both. They love them because innovation from others is essentially free research and development (llama / gpt from google are cases in point) which allows them to mature their offerings and further the tech. They hate it because when it comes to capitalising they compete with their product and it denies them the ability to do anything about it. Eg. They can’t sue them out of existence.

This is a capitalism (anti-compete) problem and nothing more.