what if grok went open source and was on par with open chinese models? the business play may not be the models themselves but owning the data centers and running infrastructure for all models from all companies? a lot of people could then be rooting for xai and elon could ironically save face by actually implementing an open model

Winning is a tall order. I'm just hoping it'll get good enough while allowing us to run it locally with no idiotic "safety" controls or censorship of any sort. Looks like the best open weight models are at Sonnet level, if they get to Opus 4.6 level it's gonna be perfect.

If we can't stop these big AI companies, we must to put force that everybody can see what they are hiding from us.

I think it's enough to use Open Router to encourage competition in the market place.

For open source AI, AI infrastructure must be public just like roads, rail, ...

i think to create or make opensource ai need competition power and alot of investment to create and use or use it local you need spec pc to run and tune it at minimum 27b model to act good on context and agent work

It doesn't matter if open source models win or not. The bottleneck is the compute. When capital becomes cognition everyone other than the demigod class is cooked. We have a vanishingly small window to make sure that the benefits of large scale automation go to the species and not the owners. Once the owners become more powerful than governments or accumulate enough power to co-opt the governments we're done for. You can already see that creeping in along the edges.

Not to distract from the message, but I appreciate that this is largely plaintext not React vibeslop.

Well, open source AI is mostly coming from China. Title should have been China must win.

This is really a feel good argument and I agree with what he’s saying in principle but it offers zero in terms of a practical strategy or stable state where this is feasible. If you want to jump on the bandwagon then let’s put our pants on and offer a concrete suggestion that is practical and coherent. Otherwise what are we doing. Does anyone have suggestions to that effect?

What’s the world in which frontier model performance is open source? What does that look like? What’s a sensible business model that makes this sustainable? What’s a sensible regulatory framework that doesn’t hamstring AI progress?

Everyone is so enamored with these Chinese lab models like deepseek and qwen and GLM but they exist in a world where the top performance is still claimed by closed source models. These are not developed out of any benevolent commitment to the principles laid out in this article. A world in which OSS is the frontier and its development is controlled and funded by government subsidies of an autocratic government is not reassuring. You can inspect weights but good luck getting the cat back in the bag in terms of capabilities, safeguards, value system, bias, nerfing if it smells American business use cases.

Deepseek was such a darling but guess what, it’s now raising money — 300M at 10 billion valuation. OSS development isn’t sustainable as a business model and in a world where it costs a few hundred million to develop a frontier model, you need a strong business model, or you need strong state subsidies and incentives which introduce a billion new problems.

the most sensible economic picture of OSS models already exist. Commoditize your complement, passion projects for a hedge fund. These are unsustainable and exist at the pleasure of the business or the founder.