Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It won in my house/my business right from the start. (Well, open weights, at least — which is an uncomfortable nuance.)

I have never understood the willingness to make the functioning of or development of a product so completely dependent on the secret sauce of one of two big unprofitable, inscrutable startups.

It really defies sensible engineering principles to do that. So I was never going to do it. I'm exploring AI now but because I have decided that open weights make it a good use of my time.

It's bad enough that any given business often ends up beholden to a single payment platform and the policies of two US credit card providers.

I guess it is the freelancer in me but I always feel nervous when I am asked to put so much energy into studying or learning someone's product, rather than the underlying technology. I still remember the days when Microsoft was pretty much lobbying academic departments with promises of access to the NT source code. I remember a senior figure in our own saying that Linux was a sideshow and access to NT would make us relevant.

More control over destiny is always necessary, and I remind myself and others that the "state of the art" is behind the "cutting edge". Progress is made at the cutting edge, but there is risk of damage. Engineering should focus on building on the state of the art, not on hitching a ride on someone else's progress.

I feel like "open source" in this context is, as you say, an uncomfortable nuance; the tooling (llama.cpp, et al) is open but useless without weights.

The weights are extraordinarily expensive "capital" that is donated by big organizations who are all at war with each other.

I don't know that it will ever be possible for, for instance, archive.org, to make truly open weights. And, other than archive.org, I can't imagine any other "open source" organization (freebsd? apache?) being in any position at all to make truly open weights.

Maybe governments, government organizations, or universities.

None of whom are currently funded, mandated, inclined, or particularly interested in dumping the money into buying the infrastructure needed to make weights.

Yes. The weights war is a much more aggressive war than the war of OSS donations.

In the OSS donations war (Visual Studio Code being a really fascinating example of it) you could see that the taps can't be turned off so easily. Whatever is donated can be built upon forever.

I think there will come a point, soon enough, where open weights models are capable enough that even if they stagnate, they can be augmented with tooling that essentially keeps them current. Maybe we are there now?

But the risk of the taps being turned off is not negligible.

My own feeling is that governments will ultimately ask consortia of universities to train open weights models and support them financially in doing so.

(And for what it is worth, I think diffusion text models are likely to trigger a hardware arms race that makes this possible)

In much the same way that they used to do that for the supercomputer race, which we just don't hear about right now!

Interestingly, I've taken a different approach. AI supplements how my business builds and I'd much rather have all my engineers using Opus 4.8 rather than whatever the best open source models are.

I believe open source is important, but for my business I'm just going to use the best tools I have available to me.

As a business decision it makes sense if you think that spilling out agent-written code to meet some profitable objective is a race you can win?

I know I can't win that race or outspend the competition. So I have to rely on my instinct that in my area of business, people becoming dependent on agent-written code are getting further and further out of their depth, and that slow and steady will win the race. I am going to spend the time trying to integrate the open source tools into the way I work. (I am still working on this; frankly I may have bigger problems on an individual level than they can solve)

To be maximally clear, if this two-inscrutable-megacorps model does survive, and it becomes how everyone works over even the medium term, I'll have to quit tech.

I will probably retire early and just plan for a shorter, quieter life that ends when I am out of money, because like everyone else I won't be able to afford a longer one.

I don't want that "nobody prompts now, we just specify loops" bullshit for myself and I don't want what it will do to me for anyone I love.

Open source and open weights have to win for human culture's sake but in the short term for the sake of the culture of tech work. We need control over how we use these tools, not just to be steered down whichever channel makes the most money for Dario and Sam.

We (a team of 6 developers) win this race day in and day out. We're constantly impressing our clients and delivering outstanding results that improve the business.

Hell, I'd wager there's MORE humanity in what we're building because we can afford (literally) to sweat details that previously we couldn't.

I don't understand the argument that somehow because two mega-corps are duking it out, I cannot use their tools to win in my small arena.

I suppose it's the juxtaposition of saying "I think open source is important" and then building your business criticality on the least open software systems on Earth.

In most organisations which are building on open source there's a pragmatism that some elements ( routers, BIOS, phones ) won't adhere to the philosophy. But it's completely different to make unknowable, solidly opaque systems the core tools of a business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com