Hacker News Reader

Comment by knowsuchagency | Hacker News Reader

I've had high hopes for this project since its announcement, but until it's open-source, I'm not investing any time in it. That's the only announcement I care about

View on HN

Their FAQ says this:

  Over time we expect to open-source core parts of Mojo, such as the standard library. However, Mojo is still young, so we will continue to incubate it within Modular until more of its internal architecture is fleshed out. We don’t have an established plan for open-sourcing yet.

I read this as:

"There are parts of Mojo that we are not planning to open source"

Which makes this a non-starter for me as well

I believe that Chris Lattner (Mojo lead) has said that its going to be open-source eventually. He's followed the same process as with Swift, where they did't open it up until major design decisions had been worked out with the core team.

I can see why they might wait to open-source things, but I guess part of what gives me pause is the "parts of Mojo" statement, as in "we expect to open-source core parts of Mojo." Not "we expect to open-source Mojo", but "parts of Mojo".

Yeah – I'll wait to see how that spins out. I'm under the impression that they're making their $$$ from AI tooling, so I'm sure there will be some "secret sauce" optimisation tools that'll be held back from public release.

In my understand the sauce they want to sell is the multiprocessing/cluster management software that builds on top of Mojo. If they do it like that it would be fair game imo

This is true, he talked about this recently in a livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQh9es5gfpo

Disclaimer: I work for Modular

Then why not just be open source from the start?

What benefits does one get from starting off closed and transitioning to open source?

Maybe you don't want the peanut gallery commenting/complaining/whatever about your architecture until you are ready (otherwise architect astronauts could inundate your comm channels with suggestions, comments, PRs, etc)

What's the specific threat you're worried about? Abandonment and needing to port to some other language eventually?

Same, and even worse, the playground requires you to be logged in. That's like the initial step of a demo and requiring an account is simply nuts.

The same is true of GPT. Just sayin.

Actually GPT is worse because they demand both a phone number and an email. Still haven't signed up because of that nonsense.

LLM inference takes up some scarce GPU time and many people are trying to use free entrypoints to build services instead of the intended paid APIs, so I understand why those services want to put limits on usage.

Programming playgrounds however are freely available for pretty much every mildly popular language, and these days many toolchains can even be compiled and run with JS or WASM so one could just serve some static files to host it. This is definitely more suspicious than what OpenAI and other ML companies are doing.

There is no parallel. If meta required you to be logged in to run local inference with llama, that might be similar. Your using openai's cloud so you're logged in.

I can understand why openai requires phone number. With how much resources they spend on each prompt, they want to limit abuse of their systems. Also ChatGpt is not available in many countries and a phone number is reliable enough test of location. I am myself in one of these countries, but I also care about my privacy, so I use services that use chatGPT indirectly instead: https://you.com with disposable email and https://phind.com

Given the iris-cataloguing efforts of Altman's Worldcoin, and Microsoft's intrusive telemetry-surveillance, I would doubt that's the only reason.

I appreciate you offering an alternative that preserves a small measure of privacy.

That's why I don't use GPT.

I agree. And I'm in the same boat about JAI.

No open source--no attention.

Otherwise, you get stuff like the "Our Machinery" fiasco: https://www.reddit.com/r/gameenginedevs/comments/wd3o33/deve...

That engine popped into my head again today and I'm pretty sure that we're still no closer to finding out what actually happened.

Most likely some beef with Autodesk.

Also I'm not sure whay JB is expecting in 5 years when he releases a paid version and all the languages that were inspired by it are more commonplace.

I dunno, remains to be proven, but if you managed a commercial python code base and could get a 2x performance improvement across the board by switching interpreters, wouldn't you at least give it a shot?

Yea DOA for me too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com