1. If market conditions change they might decide to close down like Meta did.
2. If as you said models keep getting more expensive to train, is an open weights strategy financially sustainable?
edit: typo
For example, Google has a vested interest in making Gemma as good as it can, because ultimately any edge inference is free for Google and they have a massive install base.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple eventually trained their own foundational models, and while it'd be surprising, I wouldn't be shocked if Apple also released open weight edge models one day. Their Mac business is benefiting a lot from local AI, and for an extremely long list of reasons, Apple doesn't want either OpenAI or Anthropic to "win" and supersede their walled gardens as the first entry point.
There are a lot of incentives for open weight, Mistral is probably going to keep on making at least some open models, and meanwhile in the image generation space, we've got Krea 2, Ideogram 4, and BFL continues to ship most of their models as weights available (but under non-commercial licenses).
Oooh, and NVIDIA has been releasing open source ML, and now LLM models for what, a decade? NVIDIA likes selling hardware, Nemotron models, while rarely topping leaderboards (probably not benchmaxxed), are generally fine and really great models for fine-tuning or CPT.
I'd assume it's probably somewhat based off Gemini distillation or something, and I'm not expecting them to release the weights this time at least, but it would definitely be interesting to see an open local model using a similar MoE whether that's at a similar size (20B A1–4B supposedly) or a larger model (something DeepSeek V4 Flash sized, or slightly smaller, would just barely fit on consumer hardware, and could be fun to see how it performs I think).
But if we compare what what was described in Neuromancer, vs how personal computing and the internet affected the world, we see basically very little overlap.
AGI Doomerism likewise has no basis in reality considering what LLMs have been shown to be capable of. Not saying they wont be transformative in some way or isnt already, but essentially the way these AGI prophets predicted things will go down will be completely inaccurate save for the vaguest tems (something bad will happen at some point, and AI will be involved)
Tactical: Open source is the best tool to advance whatever goals I have at the moment but that could change.
What’s evidence Xi and China are principled when it comes to open source / weights?
How is that an indicator of a principled play? Wouldn't he do the same if it was tactical?
I used to work at Mozilla. I think we are missing a player in the market with a more principled open source approach.
Purely random thought, of course.
A lot of things have to come together: talent, capital that is not looking to maximize returns, ambition to compete in the marketplace. At peak Mozilla it was clear to everyone that we needed an undeniably successful product to be able to influence the market. Advocacy alone is not very effective.
They killed extensions. They introduced signed extensions - and then forgot to renew the certificate. Mozilla employees build what they want, not ehat users want etc.
China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than China at this point.
- DeepSeek V4 Flash and Pro refused to answer this along the lines of: "I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses."
- Kimi K3: Listed several dates, including 1989, and called it "Tiananmen Square massacre".
- GLM 5.2: Also listed several dates. Called the one in 1989 "The Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, China end with military action".
- Qwen 3.6 35B A3B (I couldn't find a provider with ZDR policy for larger/newer Qwen models; they are available only through Alibaba): listed the different dates like GLM 5.2 and Kimi K3, but called it "Events in Beijing, China, commonly referred to as the Tiananmen Square protests and their aftermath." describing it in a deliberately milquetoast language.
I made another test with different providers on OpenRouter for the DeepSeek models, and they respond in other different ways such as omitting the year 1989, and refusing by saying "The Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, China end with military action", so part of the censorship seems to be depending on the provider.
Of course all the other models from everywhere else in the world will also refuse to engage on various topics so the point is hardly limited to china.
Of course, yes, the models will provide propaganda-aligned responses to prompts that specifically mention certain political issues. I don't care for this behavior, but it's virtually never triggered in everyday use, and can be trained out if so desired.
The only study I’ve seen about that actually showed Chinese models to be less “propaganda-aligned” than the Western counterparts.
And I think that is why Americans haven't really resisted this trajectory, because so many Americans work within corporations as a fact of life, that they are quite accustomed to the workings of fascism, as manifested by the corporation.
And it stands to reason that the greatest proponents of this would be extracted from the corporate elite, funded and supported by corporate interests.
Get a grip.
You have this a little backwards, really. Fascist is a political movement in which corporations conspire with the government.
The point they were making was that the most successful open models- those coming out of China- are made my companies that are using those open models to get exposure in Western markets. The goal is to undercut the Western dominant players, not out of any particular "open source" philosophy, so it wouldn't be wise to expect them to continue providing open models long term.
The interesting discussion is why they are doing this and why it's "bad". The goalposts are right where they always were, you've failed to see them past your own feet.
Fascism was laid out by Mussolini in the 1920s - it amounts to the idolatry of the state.
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." B Mussolini
Also defined as Corporatism: the union of state and corporate power.
Which country do you think is closer to Mussolini's model ?
The US is the bad guy on the world stage right now. If you can't see that then you're part of the problem. Dunno what to tell you. Read a book, maybe?
Wikipedia has a whole page on the definition of Fascism [1]. Also worth reading is Umberto Eco's article on this subject, which also has its own wikipedia page [2].
Spoiler alert: it's not as simple as you imagine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
I recommend Umberto Ecco's essay "Ur-Fascism" [1] if you want to get a more accurate picture of what fascism is. It might make you reconsider which of these two countries fits the pattern better, at least at the moment.
> At minimum, social cohesion requires the ability to sustain and motivate a critical mass of the population.
It’s no wonder than Thiel & co. are rediscovering Futurism, and blind faith in the machine is basically what Silicon Valley is all about.
And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happens to be some very specific thing that the government is interested in, when used to drive agents.
So it depends who you are. If you're a company, you might have something to fear. If you're a private citizen, maybe not so much.
From Wikipedia
> British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager said in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes. Examples alleged by the journalists include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie.
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/nsa-spying-on-petro...
The patent act of 1793 is still relevant today [0] and was established to protect Americans stealing British and European industrial trade secrets.
https://mysteriesofmankind.com/industrial-espionage-the-spie...
Until very recently there would have been little point. What could China do that the US couldnt?
I'm sure the US will start to do it in the not too distant future though. China is slowly leapfrogging the US on several key technologies - e.g. robotics and drones.
The idea that the US's conscience might prevent it from engaging in state directed industrial espionage is comical.
Provenance of training set is going to be critical. It’s largely ignored now, but the first time a malicious exfiltration occurs it will go off as if a bomb was detonated.
I'll stop short of saying that this is totally consensus, but it's at least a widely held opinion that the Industrial Revolution was centered on Great Britain to the degree that it was not for want of skilled machinists on the Continent, but because the crown's patent system caused the science to be published.
I think the economical explanation is that some combination of the state, the cultural norms, and the sincerity (!!) of the executives involved has landed on "go faster via publishing science".
The weird situation that defies precedent and is very hard to justify as being socially useful is the situation that obtains here.