Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0
But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC
- Soofi S, DE, ~32B
- Apertus 1.5, CH, ~32B
- EuroLLM-22B, EU, ~22B
- LLM-jp-3, JP, ~172B
- K2-65B, UAE, ~65B
There is no question this is true for the Chinese open LLMs. GPT-OSS had a small moment of interest, arguably it was a success as an open model for a while but it’s not relevant now. The early llamas were probably the most successful for their time.
Allenai / olmo was never relevant as far as I can tell. It’s not super helpful, especially as a sovereign government initiative to build an also-ran, they should be going for real relevance.
By releasing models with open-weights, DOE seeks to galvanize the scientific and AI communities around shared infrastructure for science: enabling new workflows in materials discovery, energy systems, earth systems modeling, fusion, biology, high-energy physics, and beyond.
Meta might release something this year. X AI's Grok is still due to release a model, if Elon keeps to his word even if they only release a distilled version. Reflection AI has been quiet, but their access to compute is ramping up. Microsoft's MAI is considering releasing some open weight models which would be great to see!
Ilya's SSI is unlikely to release an open model since he's aiming for radical safety. That bet could pay off if the existing approach produces so much chaos within the next 10-20 years that some global ban is achieved and a super safe model is promoted as the compliant route.
We don't get many huge model releases though. I think it's harder and more expensive to safety align them. Even if you do, people will work around the safety and abuse the models. Plus it makes it even easier for Chinese companies to distill things that aren't as easy over filtered APIs.
There is a lot of internet propaganda to the effect that the US is simply unable to release open weight models or that China has so many more AI companies that the US is drowning in Chinese open weight models, but it's more like we're being careful and China doesn't care. If you host a model in China, it has to be censored and downloading any models requires you to provide your identity. Huggingface is banned there. When they release their open models in the west, they don't have to care whether the models are aligned in any way.
Personally, I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny, the way the second amendment is framed today. Just as encryption has become, which we similarly had to fight for in the 90s. I also understand that some regulation is sensible, but that doesn't automatically mean mandatory restricted or supervised access; any such restriction has to be extremely well-justified as essential for protecting the liberty of the people.
And as far as supervised access, whether or not identification is "handled by a third party" or "data is deleted after verification is complete" is immaterial; a citizen must not be required to trust their government. Any trust can and will be abused given enough time. Our systems must be trustless, and any expansion of government must be matched by an expansion in citizens' ability to check said government, in order to stand the test of time.
So supervised access seems completely off the table. And this can't just stop at access to models. Because linguistic analysis is a thing, and LLMs are scarily good at it (and existing non-AI solutions are still quite good given enough data), even the possibility that a government or other entity can save your messages means you've opened yourself up to deanonymization and surveillance. The chilling effect this has is undeniable, and the Supreme Court has made it clear that we cannot authorize government policy which creates chilling effects against essential liberties. Not to mention the possibilities that each category of users may be served subtly different models designed to influence them or constrain their agency/capability.
We're left with a situation where distributed access to capable open models is the only defense against a government or NGO which has access to billions of dollars of surveillance infrastructure and compute.
China isn't doing well because of their model, they're doing well because of their economy. Their success is in spite of their governmental model, except in as much as having a dictatorship that can, for example, meaningfully deter corporate malfeasance, or do other such things that can help contribute to their economic growth. That part other countries could certainly take a thing or two from - instead, they just seem to want the censorship and surveillance.
However, people are willing to tolerate dystopia when real wages are skyrocketing, your nation is doing wild things (like radically advancing human spaceflight), and more. But as soon as all of this slows down you're left with the same uninspiring directionless stagnation that plagues all nations eventually, and a dystopic social system on top.
Different read: command economies collapse because they invariably have higher levels of corruption and inefficiency.
Both of those are tolerable during boom times of economic growth, and China has kicked the can down the road by pursuing intermittent corruption purges.
Ultimately though, when things start to slow down, the system attempts to conceal the slowdown, which causes even more economic dysfunction, which eventually paralyzes the whole system and leads to collapse.
Making a command economy work sustainably means solving the "People lie to avoid consequences of bad news" problem.
Even politically they're paradoxical in that they're a dictatorship but also quite decentralized. For each instance each 'region' down to a few thousand or so people has a local representative who has meaningful political power. It'd be like if the House of Representatives had actually continued growing with population, as was initially envisioned.
There's really quite a lot to learn from China in things that they're doing right, but stagnating Western powers only seem able to see what they want to see - the censorship, surveillance, and propaganda apparatuses which are largely uninspired and more likely to cause their downfall rather than meaningfully contributing to their rise.
I'd argue that the US and Europe are bad benchmarks, given the entrenched quasi-monopolies the governments refuse to break up.
But we'll see how that goes for China.
It's still early days for their capitalistic ambitions, and tensions between party and corporations are starting to show (Jack Ma et al.).
Personally, I think the more destructive moment is going to be after they have large national champions competing globally. Is the CCP going to have the discipline to let an Alibaba, BYD, or SAIC be supplanted, if an external or internal more efficient competitor starts growing? Or will they become too big to fail and intertwine with government?
By contrast in the US whether we have a vegetable or a clown in the driver seat, the system remains relatively more stable. But that also means that even if somehow we managed to find a skilled and benevolent leader, the amount of good he'd be able to really do is just as limited as the amount of harm the aforementioned can do.
China is an authoritarian government and its policies have no more bearing on what people settle for than the currently socially unacceptable regime in the US.
In my opinion, if one lacks the motivation or resolve to fight for these rights, they should do so quietly and not attempt to patronize others who still stand by these rights as not being "realistic".
What specific examples of this do you have in mind? I can’t think of any liberal democratic countries converging on a combination of (a) single party rule, (b) nearly universal intrusion of state or party actors into private sector entities, (c) financial repression of private investments, and (d) the associated suppression of domestic consumption.
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.
This is an interesting statement at a time where we’re seeing unprecedented levels of lawlessness by the U.S. government (breaking contracts, depriving citizens of their liberty or lives under false pretenses, etc.) and not only is the right to bear arms not doing anything to stop it, exercising that right has been used to justify killing armed citizens.
The US is applying unitary executive theory to bypass gridlock in congress while still trying to operate within the law. They are surrounded by lawyers and thinktanks to work through this, which is far from lawless. The reason we're doing this is to deter China and push back against what they're doing in the world.
We're in a moment very much like the moment before World War 2. It's not the same, but it's similar enough that action is warranted.
As for guns, generally if someone is shot while having a gun it's because of all the other things they did that led up to that moment.
This is so naive I struggle to believe you can possibly believe it. For example, there is a legal requirement that Congress authorize military action longer than 60 days. They’re advancing a theory that this is unnecessary or magically resets a timer anytime a cease fire is declared but that doesn’t make it lawful, any more than those guys saying they can only be tried in admiralty courts are lawful just because they don’t want to stop what they’re doing.
> The reason we're doing this is to deter China and push back against what they're doing in the world.
We’re deterring China by losing to a much weaker opponent while simultaneously giving China a huge economic and political advantage? Giving Iran the ability to tax shipping for the first time and doing it in Chinese yuan is a deterrent in the same sense that you deter a dog by feeding it sausages.
> As for guns, generally if someone is shot while having a gun it's because of all the other things they did that led up to that moment.
I can see why you prefer to believe this but it sure is striking to see that politically-incorrect gun owners have their guns used to justify killing them while politically-correct ones are seen as having a right to carry theirs even when actively making illegal threats. There’s definitely a principle on display here but it’s not the one you think.
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
"With minor variations in emphasis, basically all administrations since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution10 in 1973 have maintained that Con gress cannot constitutionally restrict the President’s commander-in-chief powers grounded in Article II of the Constitution."
This is not new. It is not Republican or Democrat and pressing harder on this point prevents Iran or China from thinking they can simply wait 60 days. That would not be good for the military in harm's way or for encouraging negotiation.
> We’re deterring China by losing to a much weaker opponent while simultaneously giving China a huge economic and political advantage? Giving Iran the ability to tax shipping for the first time and doing it in Chinese yuan is a deterrent in the same sense that you deter a dog by feeding it sausages.
The US attacked Iran to achieve a set of goals. The strait was not really a primary part of the initial goals, but still it's a forced issue. They are losing so badly that their only remaining option is to harass their neighbors, which will further weaken Iran's position in the region for the next 50 years. China was sanction proofing itself so that it could have breathing room to take Taiwan, but attacking Russian oil infrastructure, attacking Venezuela and attacking Iran now has China drawing from its strategic oil reserves. The less reserves they have, the less sanction proofed they are. The less likely they are to make an attempt on Taiwan. Still, we're not attacking Iran only to deter China. Remember, Iran has attempted to assassinate the US president multiple times as well as Netanyahu on top of all the other awful things they've done over the past 50 decades.
> I can see why you prefer to believe this but it sure is striking to see that politically-incorrect gun owners have their guns used to justify killing them while politically-correct ones are seen as having a right to carry theirs even when actively making illegal threats.
Look, the number of people that die this way is so infinitely small that it is not a remotely relevant part of life. You are more likely to get struck by lightning or die in a commercial airliner accident. It is not some standard policy to simply go around shooting people who have guns and have some kind of political leaning. That would probably be a hate crime. I don't doubt mistakes happen, but the few people dying this way are generally violent and not innocent. People spread video clips and sound bites that intentionally encourage a certain interpretation in order to promote hate and distrust. It's almost always propaganda. This is not simply some Rublican/Democrat thing, this is propaganda and psychological manipulation funded by countries like Russia, China and Iran.
Not sure many outside the US would agree with these statements.
> People should own a gun for self defense and a car to get where they need to go.
Nor these.
Never felt the need to own a gun. I don't know anyone who does. Haven't owned a car for 17 years. I get along fine.
Many people don't own guns, partially because violent crime in general has declined significantly over the past 200 years. The justifications for ownership still exist, though.
What? US laboratories are currently unable to contain their agents while doing security testing, and besides that, time and time again US labs seem to put short-term money above long-term safety.
Wasn't that literally why they tried to oust Altman from OpenAI, as he basically was 100% focused on profits and tried to cut down on safety across the board and lied to get his way?
> If you host a model in China, it has to be censored and downloading any models requires you to provide your identity.
I'm not disagreeing with that first part (obviously that's about inference hosting, not creating/training weights or hosting those weights), but the second part I'm not so sure about. AFAIK, ModelScope (which is the Huggingface in China) seems to allow downloads without verifying any identity and also hosts a bunch of abliterated weights.
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.
Is it not illegal to "hack others" and "defeat protection/defensive systems" in the US already, including for both individuals and companies? Regardless if it was "by accident" or not?
Besides that, it was also discovered that their suggested inference parameters were wrong and led to worse behavior. Eventually someone discovered these works best (so if you have the issue with looping right now, try these, helps a lot for me but not 100% still) and was also what the evals used apparently: temperature: 1.0, top_p: 1.0, top_k:20
Now we're waiting for RC3 which Poolside said will come at one point, and hopefully also brings down the size again NVFP4 weights + full context can load properly again even on "smaller" hardware.
If you watch it think, which you can, unlike American closed models, you can steer it. You can provide a a massive rocket ship stratospheric boost to help it orient itself. You have no self correction, there is no multiplayer in American proprietary models.
Sure it's great having super powerful mystic oracles that have the "right" answers. But I love respect & revere the open thinking. No it's not automous. But it is brilliant. And it considers. A lot. Deeply. It chases. That to me is the most human of models, even as it falls far astray.
You should help it. You can. Unlike these vicious dark surfaces which yield and tell you nothing. I think this is the actual meta-core-super-point of "The session you cannot take with you" (link below). It's the session that does not care about you, will not interact with you, will not peer with you, that is a dead remote far off oracle to you. Fuck these "oracles". They are a plague against the human spirit. We should alloy humanity and AI to Augment Intellect (Engelbart). (To do less is species treason.) https://earendil.com/posts/session-portability/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118781
But as a pure coding model, pretty good.
Deepseek v4 Flash 0731 is so much better if you can run it, though.
Grain of salt, I think I grabbed Laguna after they fixed the initial looping issues, didn't notice those, but there might've been other fixes since.
Yeah, this is my perspective too on Laguna S 2.1. Works amazingly for coding, pretty bad for pretty much anything else. I don't do a lot of advanced math, supposedly it's good for that too.
I don't think it's all resident in memory on the 3090 but it runs fast enough for use, I'd have to check but it's like 30 t/s or so, fast enough that it doesn't bother me.
Looks like on <https://arena.ai> agent arena (grouped by lab) Nvidia is 15/15 (much worse than Thinky and Mistral) and on text arena it's 18/27
On <https://openrouter.ai/models?order=most-popular> I definitely see usage though (probably mostly cause Nemotron 3 Ultra is free) the grouped order is DeepSeek, Tencent, Xiaomi, OpenAI, Z.ai, Nvidia
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.)
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-american-deepseek-project
https://www.cs.washington.edu/research/artificial-intelligen...
I'm sure there are several other universities doing the same.
Why phrase it "Chyna" when it's an actual legitimate concern?
What's the concern with China?
AllenAI and IBM are two companies that release open weight models every couple of months. There are others if you look. OpenAI releases ML models on the regular (not LLMs).
The American open weight and open source AI/ML landscape is very healthy.