The frontier is open-source today | Hacker News Reader

The frontier is open-source today

southbridge.ai

29 pointshrishi16 comments

I've been driving glm-5.2 for a day or two now. It feels like a mature, seasoned colleague.

It could be luck, but I don't know -- it keeps one-shotting relatively hard stuff. And taking initiative to think about what potential regressions it should look out for, and choosing to do strategic refactoring when it should do. It is not confidently incorrect hardly at all, doesn't tell me that it's fresh risky pile of changes is ready for production without having exercised all the code paths and writing a bunch of tests, etc.

We might be reaching the next level here...

What's your hardware stack?

Which harness are you using?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm totally out of my field here but what's the point of sota models that can be run only by hyperscalers? I mean, glm-5.2 is open source but with 1.5TB in weights who can run it really? It still needs dozens of H100s. Those 753B quantized down to Q4 (~400Gb) would require datacenter levels of hardware. Down to Q2 still would require serious hardware, way out of reach for most users, and you'll be far from the sota benchmark of the full precision model. I get it, it's open source but not quite democratizing LLM for everyone except compute providers. It's no like, let's say, Kubernetes. I can run k8s fully in my shitty homelab, without "quantization" exactly like Google does in their datacenters.

If you have a ton of capital, you still can't spin up Claude Opus and compete on price with Anthropic with your new fancy optimizations. With open models you can and that is great for consumers.

>If you have a ton of capital

That's my point. This "open source" doesn't feel like the real open source. It's open just for the few ones with ton of capital, and mostly in the US, or US adyacent markets. It's like if SpaceX publish an open source rocket design and people celebrating like it's the new Linux. Feels more like a goodwill gesture than something with real impact for the benefit of mankind, like the spirit of open source software as commonly understood.

The point is that you need several orders of magnitude less capital to run GLM-5.2 compared with the investment needed to train a model like Opus or GLM-5.2 from scratch. To do inference of GLM-5.2 you'd need an investment of roughly less than €300k (8x H200 at GLM5.2 FP8), which is completely feasible for a lot of hosting businesses.

Even if end-users can't run these models themselves at home, there are a lot more and varied options to choose from, especially considering privacy and data protection.

You can apparently also do GLM-5.2 at Q4_K_XL with 2x RTX 3090 and lots of RAM [1], but I don't think that counts as a potential frontier model.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639186

dont compare with training compare running glm 5.2 with paying for claude enterprise subscription right?

SOTA models can be run by anybody with compute capacity. You can pay for GLM 5.2 inference right now via Fireworks AI and presumably several dozen other providers. So if you don't want vendor lock-in and rug-pulling (Anthropic has churned on their subscription model like 4-5 times in the past month) you can just pay an inference provider and have far more control over your environment.

Anthropic and OpenAI window for a successful IPO is reducing day by day. All that pressure from their debts, compute costs, infrastructure investments, training costs, and open weight models continuing to improve. I know the stock market is all about hype and isn’t rational, but there will be a point where the hype will fade away, and they have no moat that will differentiate them from the rest.

Good for consumers, it’s competition at its best, we get cheaper, better services. But I would be pretty concerned integrating an AI lab products into my business without having a good abstraction that makes it easy to swap between vendor.

> But I would be pretty concerned integrating an AI lab products into my business without having a good abstraction that makes it easy to swap between vendor.

I’d look for OpenResponse-compatible endpoints in your shoes. These are meant to be plug and play.

Never stop cheering for open source . If you were a human 3000 years ago ,you wouldn't want fire to be controlled by two chiefs.

Actually i bet there were people back then who were worried about the wrong people getting access to fire for various reasons

I don't know, maybe everyone shouldn't have a magic lamp that they can use to wish for whatever they want?

Seems like it depends on what you can wish for?

The analogy doesn’t work because when fire was invented the infrastructure to spread its knowledge everywhere wasn’t built yet.

Also it was always going to be rediscovered on its own: the possibility of igniting a fire from sparks is learnable by watching lightning strike a tree. And once someone sees that - or sees someone else make fire - they can copy it, no language needed.

How much of why glam 5.2 is good today is due to open source contributions? Is the two-way-street-ness of it already pushing it to be better or so far it’s mostly a nice to have?

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