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Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

Over the long term, it seems like open models must win out. This feels like it rhymes with the story of operating systems. Despite the enormous financial contributions of Microsoft and Apple, linux still won because control matters over the long term.

I predict that mech interp and things like Neuronpedia will matter more and more over time, and the frontier providers are disincentivized from providing those tools

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depends on what you mean by winning out most of the profits will be hold by closed proprietary models and open sourced models will be barely able to fund their own research and development cost just like how apple has barely 10-15% of market share of smartphones but takes away 80-85% of all profits. I kinda see a similarity of this may turn out for AI as well.

> linux still won because control matters over the long term.

what has Linux won? Servers? sure

Yeah. I would expect that Samsung or Apple’s bundled AI things (whatever those end up being) will be good enough for consumers, and open models will be the things that actually get used in the products of the future because they will allow technical people to alter models in ways that specialize them for whatever use case they’re building for. They will also be the onramp for engineers/data scientists of the future, and thus will have more available, specialized knowledge over time.

The bitter lesson would claim that we only need one model with more data thrown at it, but I’m a bit skeptical that we’ll end up with “the one true way” of building a model, and I think there will be model tradeoffs that we can pick from as the industry matures.

Laptops with Chromebooks. Mobile with Android phones. Game consoles in Steam decks and now Steam Machines. The things linux appears on are growing. The things proprietary OSes appear on are shrinking. Losers and victors in a war are often defined by who loses and who gains the most.

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