Open Source AI

“Open source AI is critical for everyone to benefit from this technology and keep it from being centralized and controlled by a handful of companies and individuals and a small set of governing officials.”

“I'm excited about the wave of open source AI. I think it'll, it'll democratize a lot of the tooling, the resources, I think we'll continue to see the proliferation on, on the hardware side and the capex build outs there. And I think the exciting part to, I thi…”

“I do think that as this debate evolves, most conservatives, most libertarians are going to see the threat to civil liberties, and I think they're going to come out in favor of open.”

“If for many aspects, I think the closed open distinction is almost orthogonal to the safe and safe. People don't understand that, you know, easily because it's easier to do bad mapping than to try to understand the subtlety.”

“Right now, if you pre-train and post-train a model for longer, you very likely change quite a lot of the weights and that it has. So I think there's a lot of way to circumvent that which means that at the moment I'm a bit less worried about that than maybe jus…”

“I don't think open source has to be acceleration per se. Dan was saying this is decelerationist. I don't think it's also decelerationist. I think these are also orthogonal.”

“And I feel like a raised dynamic is usually more in terms of closing the doors of the labs, right? So to me, a slowdown is probably more the opportunity to open.”

“It might end up being a situation like Apple and Android, where Android got a lot of market share, but Apple's where all the monetization was.”

“It's essentially in the beginning, it was like a branding strategy for a lot of these labs. And when I spoke to them, because they said, look, if we want more developers on our ecosystem or on our using our APIs, they need to know what's out there, especially …”

“These proposals to ban open source that are coming from Anthropic. They don't solve the distillation problem.”

“The headlines for Kimi are impressive, but not wildly surprising based on the current trend lines and model progress. But it does seem to invalidate Ah, the thesis that open source would start falling behind, which was something that was start, there was that …”

“Open source and is coming and is here, whether we like it or not. Of course, a lot of it will be from China. We should allow American competitors to proceed on an even footing, but basically the attempt to outlaw it or ban it or use sanctions against it is goi…”

“Jesse's explanation, I think, is the correct one, which is that open source is good for production grade, like production scale workflows. Yet we're so early in this AI journey that there's not that many production grade workflows. And so if you are trying to …”

“And I think the future is open source for all these countries.”

“If you were to do something like ban open source in the United States, you'll put the United States on an island. The rest of the world is not going to follow suit. The rest of the world wants to use open models because of the advantages they offer.”

“If companies or countries cannot rely on the, or their ability to access frontier AI from US foundational model companies, they will rush toward open source. They will rush towards other solutions. They may, you know, not, they may be slower to go to these mor…”

“For our coding agents and, like, for actually developing product, we probably always want the frontier model, but if you're just, Automating a workflow. If the open source one that's basically free can automate it, then I don't, there's diminishing returns to …”

“Because it's more intense, everyone's chosen to go open source, and that creates a system that, in my mind, is capable of innovating far faster Then the competitive system we have here.”

“I think the odds that, that, you know, The US with two, you know, proprietary models can stay ahead of China with 10 open source ones is very low.”

“I think the gap is definitely increasing.”

“Maybe it sounds wrong, but I feel like banding together is not necessarily good by default. There's a lot of different incentives. There's so much noise that no one knows where to focus. I prefer, if anything, I would prefer siloed focused teams who have fundi…”

“They told us that explicitly. And yeah. And they told us exactly what you just said. They told us they're gonna ban open source. And when we challenged them on the ability to ban open source, because it's, you know, we're talking about, you know, math, you kno…”

“We've said that when it gets to the cutting edge, like the absolute cutting edge, the bleeding edge, There, we don't think you should be necessarily releasing open source, and we'll think about that. So I think at the most extreme capabilities, I don't know th…”

“You just have a much more natural environment to have this kind of hyper competition that we talked about in EVs or solar, like having that many open source providers gives you that. I would say even maybe more because of the way the models can help one anothe…”

“If AI is a super weapon that will also be true there, and so if you believe that, then I think what you want is open source, and I think if you want regulatory capture or monopoly for yourself, you want to shut that down.”

“Right now, you know, which I think what you would say is it kind of lags the leading edge proprietary implementations by, you know, six months or something like that.”

“I think, you know, we're basically through that at this point. We're just going to say, we're through that in the US. You know, we'll, we'll see about the rest of the world.”

“I think it's been net positive for the world that China has been so enthusiastic about open source AI coming out of China which has been great.”

“Right now, you know, which I think what you would say is it kind of lags the leading edge proprietary implementations by, you know, six months or something like that.”

“The standard model of open sourcing AI is you open source the smaller model and you keep the more capable model closed source. And it's a way that you get distribution and ran brand recognition, but you don't actually erode your business.”

“I think we'll have both. It seems like the balance is that there's reasons to have both, but the importance of having open source as an option forces all of the closed source vendors to be honest, right? Like if they start censoring the models, they start You …”

“I think open source is, should be protected. I think if there is efforts of open source, both in public sector as like academia, as well as a private sector is so important. It's so important for the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It's so important for public sect…”

“Scaling to, like, million token contexts is, like, really, really hard. There, I don't think there are real, like, open source replications, open token context scaling, Beyond, like, tiny, like, academic model sizes.”

“I think audio is like very underexplored. I think there's a lot of opportunity for open source models in that space. But I don't think we've seen anything really cool yet.”

“Anthropic and their investors like Eric Schmidt have been some of the people that have been encouraging, you know, more and more AI oversight and AI regulation and trying to make it such that open source AI would not be legal.”

“So it's a gradient, right? Openness is a gradient from kind of like full open source AI, which would be considered kind of like a practice where you share the weights, you share the data sets that you use to train the model. You usually share the training scri…”

“China has been publishing much more open source AI lately. I would argue that they're probably the leader today of open source AI which is surprising to some, but for example, in, in video, they've been leading in, in open source AI.”

“And they do it like the really kind of nasty thing is they claim, oh, it's for safety. You know, we've created an alien that we can't control, but we're not going to stop working on it. We're going to keep building it as fast as we can. And we're going to buy …”

“With kind of misguided regulation You know, we could actually force our way from something that, you know, is open source, open weights. Anybody can build it. We'll have a plethora of this technology. We'll be like, use all of American innovation to compete, o…”

“This open source part was, I believe, a good enabler for the community and made people realize that they could build very interesting technology by modifying the models themselves instead of depending on the APIs of a couple of providers.”

“So eventually there'll be a power law and all the things”

“If it's banned, which I think some places seem to be moving towards, that will end up in a very different world. It'll end up in the world where you have five companies that control the technology and just a very different economic structure.”

“Vinod has been lobbying to ban open source AI. And by the way, he denies that he's been doing this, but I saw him with my own eyes when the US Congressional China Committee came to Stanford I was in the meeting where he was with, you know, 30 20 or 30 congress…”

“Even if the weights and biases are open source, I don't know how much you can modify it. Right? So it almost feels like we're going back to this old mainframe day where, like, it's great to have it, and you can operationalize it, but you're not going to have t…”

“The one thing that would cause us to get way behind China is if we played without open source and they had it like us.”

“The open source thing will be very much in line with getting to AGI, because open source has that, like natural selection effect. Like, if a better open source model comes, Really no one says, huh, I don't want to use it because there are ecosystem effects, I'…”

“You know who the big winner is going to be in all of this? Chamath is going to be open source. Like, cause people are just not going to want a model that has all this baked in weird bias, right? They're going to want something that's open source.”

“We want all consumers to be able to have from the bottom up, ah, the same access to that same technology. And that's, ah, yeah, the best insurance against tyranny.”

“And I think that, you know, that's probably the most important policy question that people are getting caught up in this other question of you know, safety and alignment, but the more important question I think is probably open source and decentralization.”

“By doing what we do, by being much more open about the technology we create, we want to steer the community into a regime where things just work better, where things are safer because put under more scrutiny, and really our intention there is to, well, to take…”

“They're spreading a negative open source message, and I think it's precisely because they know it's their biggest threat, and I think what Meta's done with Llama II.”

“As there has been, there will be a big ecosystem of open and closed of, you know, People who aren't sharing their secret sauce with, and people who are sharing all of their secret sauce and the ability to mess around with things at a small scale is going to le…”

“And I think we'll see that a lot of harmful use of these technologies will emerge from kind of like the open source world.”

“You're going to invest in a company at a five hundred million dollar valuation and six weeks later, it's going to be worth zero because someone open source the exact same thing that you can now do for a hundred K.”

“The truth is that there's always going to be both, right? I think if you see most, most technologies, you know, if you look at search, you always have the elastic search, the Algolia, or like, if you look at databases, you have that MongoDB and the proverter a…”

“They would be so pervasive, so much will ride on, on those systems that I don't think anyone will accept that those assistant being behind Event Horizon in a private company, they will insist that the infrastructure is open.”

“And what we're seeing now is sort of a retreat of that open culture where models are now being only accessible via APIs. We don't really know all the secret sauce that's going behind them, and there's sort of limited access.”

“And indeed the whole problem I had with the whole concept of AI safety and AI ethics was like, this stuff is all fundamentally open source. So aren't five companies that can do this. Anybody will be able to do this. So you're not going to be able to sit and wr…”