U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

At this point, Nemotron 3 is really an 8 month old model series. That's when Nemotron 3 Nano was released, and the Nemotron 3 Super/Ultra models this year are obviously based on that recipe, mostly just bigger with a few tweaks here and there. Against today's models, no, not that interesting. Each of the Nemotron 3 models were briefly competitive when they launched, but never exceptional, and less competitive with each scale up. The fact that it took so long for Nemotron 3 Ultra to launch really hampered its competitiveness.

The Nemotron 3 series is extremely open about training recipes and training data, far more open than most open weight models, and that is valuable.

Before Nemotron 3, Nvidia had never released a single LLM that I would consider interesting at all, so Nemotron 3 was a big step up. The closest thing was Mistral NeMo, but a significant part of the credit there goes to the Mistral team, not Nvidia.

Given how much Nemotron 3 improved, I'm curious to see if Nemotron 4 will take them to a leading edge level instead of just briefly competitive.

(Nvidia released a Nemotron 3 and a Nemotron 4 like 3 years ago... this year's Nemotron 3 is entirely unrelated. Nvidia's naming schemes leave a little bit to be desired.)

Alternative interpretation: US labs are using the supposed inability to control their frontier models as simultaneously marketing for the capability of their models AND as manufacture evidence to support their lobbying the government on the “safety need” to create costly compliance barriers to smaller competitors and open models.

Oligopoly isn't going to maintain itself.

People need to have the power to influence their government and the government largely needs to operate in the interest of the people. It doesn't have to do what the people want, but I think governance needs to understand what the people want and interpret how best to address it. Kind of like how developers think of what users want.

The right to bear arms is critical. That is a form of power and self defense which can save your life, your neighbors life, or millions of lives from some kind of tyranny. The governmental structure of the US is so good, there is no comparison anywhere else in the world and we're not even remotely close to some sort of totalitarianism like China has.

At the same time, we do have surveillance capitalism accelerating and privacy is a form of power too. Even though I dislike it, in the current moment we're in I feel like it is unavoidable. When the threats against the state increase (whether the power of the people, or otherwise), the defenses increase too. I think most people who gravitated to HN understand the risk of threats leading to safety solutions that kill freedom and privacy a little more each time.

Iran built out a huge camera surveillance network to track their people, then Israel hacked it and used it to track them back. Surveillance capitalism is a double edged sword. You catch some types of crime, terrorism, whatever. That is great. At the same time, it opens up a huge vulnerability allowing the destruction of your whole state.

So then what about open weight models? People really do not understand the enormous scale of the threat. We do not let regular civilians run around with nuclear bombs or develop biological weapons or any number of things. It's not that the people want them and the government doesn't let us, it's that basically universally people do not want any other people to have that power either.

AI is like... mass manufacturing someone smarter than the smartest human that ever lived and allowing an infantile 16 year old with raging hormones to send a swarm of them off to cause chaos like some kind of necromancer. There are things these models know how to do that the citizens of any given country should want to largely be kept in responsible hands.

This is actually a double sided issue too, because you don't simply give everyone infinite power so they can defend against tyranny. If you've ever seen ideological activists, then you know people can be tyrannical too. Silencing you, cancelling you, ending your career, livelihood, disturbing the peace and so on. The government isn't the only threat. If the potential power of AI causes too much chaos, then the government has little choice but to crack down on society in more ways and AI can be the very thing that caused what you wanted to avoid.

I think open weight models are great, up to a point. People should own a gun for self defense and a car to get where they need to go. It's great to be able to ask private health questions to an open weight model in an era where everything you tell your doctors goes into some online database to be stolen by China. AI can help people be better at the essential things and fill in gaps where they're lacking. There are measurable points though, where models are just force multipliers beyond any reasonable norm for problematic types of tasks.

We don't need nukes. I don't need a carrier group and spy satellites. The people who control those swore to defend the constitution, which defends the people. Some people disagree that AI can ever be good enough that these scale of threats are even comparable. It's ok, they're just actually wrong in a fully logical, serious and non-rhetorical sense. The problem is that with open weight models you only have to be wrong once. That floppy someone copied in the 1990s is still floating around somewhere. In that sense it may be inevitable, but if we allow ourselves a head start then perhaps we can manage it better in the future when we're more ready.

There are a couple current mitigating factors, for now. One is that a lot of safety training and filtering is occurring, so even if some companies distill from the big companies they are getting filtered results. Another is that any model big enough to be dangerous is hard enough to run that the threat can't easily scale up in a residential or private company scenario.

None of this is going to help us from countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and so on using powerful models to crack down on their people while accelerating chaos around the world if they choose. So long as countries have nukes and can maintain ways of accurately measuring interference, there will be red lines we tell each other not to cross.

What do you mean by "basically"?

Why are Anthropic's and OpenAI's annualized revenue about $50B each?

LLMs need massive amounts of compute to compete, so I wouldn't claim that the great (and leading, and likely to continue to lead) LLMs are commodities end-to-end, even if the non-executing-at-scale LLMs files and IP are commoditized. The execute, the compute, that is what breathes life into the model, which is otherwise weak or dead.

The American business model is exceedingly efficient at building large businesses from zero. I wouldn't dismiss it as just a jobs creation thing.

That's it. That's the whole stance. Most sane normal people agree with this stance, the techno-libertarian crowd find it egregiously offensive.

As an added complication, some of the DOE labs do have civil servant scientists, for example National Energy Technology Lab and National Renewable Energy Lab are like 50/50 civil servants and contractors. And most of the funding arm of DOE are career civil servants. LANL, Sandia, Livermore, Argonne are all staffed by contractors