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Comment by derektank | Hacker News Reader

>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier

Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?

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Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.

In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.

Well maybe they should find better training methods or architectures

Tough shit welcome to capitalism

It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.

Chinese providers are actively debunking that argument by innovating on and releasing open weight models.

The difference might be the immense cost of physical infrastructure needed for AI training. People would make open source contributions for free, TSMC, NVIDIA and power companies seems less likely to make free contributions to AI.

Here's his original post https://x.com/i/status/2078133895766114412

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