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points by hintymad 12 hours ago | 0 comments

> That's why we had huge backlash w

Training a frontier model is prohibitively expensive, so it’s understandable that open weights aren’t truly open source. In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive[1] once the current AI cycle cools down. An even bigger issue is that as long as model development remains this capital intensive, a genuinely open-source community around frontier AI is virtually impossible. That will have massive implications for our careers. The more capital concentrates at the top, the less leverage we’ll have in the job market.

[1] Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand. That said, I'm not sure how sustainable and sufficient that incentive can be.

[–] chaosharmonic 7 hours ago

No, they're still capable of calling it something different, instead of implying open source licenses that they aren't actually using. That's a valid complaint that's kind of unrelated to any of this other stuff.

Whether it's feasible to release everything under open terms is actually a different issue from whether they're being truthful in how they're advertising it.

[–] Conscat 8 hours ago

> Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand

Not speaking on behalf of my employer and I have no insight into this strategy at all, but I feel like the sale of consumer GPUs is so small by comparison to data centers (more than 10x from what I can tell online) that more users of open weights wouldn't likely make much difference in the earnings report.

[–] coeneedell 8 hours ago

There’s no reason to believe that companies running open weights models would use consumer hardware. I can speak on behalf of my employer and say that we’d vastly prefer to have enterprise grade servers running inference on premises.

[–] hintymad 8 hours ago

Not consumer demand. I was assuming that it's Nvidia's interest that intelligence is not only in a couple of frontier lab's hands, or they can choke the demand to suit their needs. If any company can access a frontier model without going through the frontier labs, the ecosystem will be larger and healthier for everyone, including Nvidia.

[–] Computer0 8 hours ago

I think the vast majority of gpu’s serving open models are in those data centers

[–] echelon 7 hours ago

Open weights models in the data center are more important than on consumer devices.

In the future, even consumers will launch weights and fine tunes they own in the cloud.

People don't own the fiber to their home, so why should they expect to run the GPUs? If they want smart coding and video models, they'll need H200s and B200s, and they'll need to rent them.

[–] atomicnumber3 5 hours ago

counterpoint: I have smart coding at this very second, and I am running it on 128GB of ddr4 with a 16GB gpu. (Qwen 3.8 Flash Next).

I expect to continue to have this, and more, as smaller models become even more capable. I also expect hardware prices to resume going down once the supply crunch ends.

I see no need to stop owning things or change my expectations around ownership, nor will I accept something like that.

[–] kergonath 8 hours ago

> Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand.

This does not mean that they would necessarily subsidise consumer demand. They may be very happy to sell palette-loads of GPUs to datacenter and large corporations.

[–] Eridrus 4 hours ago

This has been the standard for a while now.

Kimi/GLM/etc basically all have this. They're not doing this out of the kindness of their own hearts.

[–] analognoise 11 hours ago

We could create an open-source SETI@HOME but for training open source models?

[–] Lichtso 10 hours ago

Covenant-72B

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08163

https://huggingface.co/1Covenant/Covenant-72B

[–] larodi 11 hours ago

Someone’s surely doing it atm we just don’t know yet. And then we scan all books but the stuff stays local. Perhaps possible, perhaps not. But I don’t see why everyone could not run given the epoch on his content only, reporting back findings (loss).

[–] mentalgear 11 hours ago

There is a Swiss model by ETH university completely trained on fair and open data that everybody can use and is from top to bottom open source.

[–] polymatter 10 hours ago

https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus Is the model in question

[–] agumonkey 9 hours ago

is it mathematically viable ? (aka no regression)

[–] make3 9 hours ago

Training neural networks is requires extremely high speed interconnect between the humongous GPUs

[–] glimshe 7 hours ago

The word "open" is misleading and dishonest in this context. Just like "OpenAI".

Call it free, available, downloadable etc, but not "Open".

Either way, Mistral is a failing company with little relevance in the AI space and that's not going to save them.

[–] Woodi 1 hour ago

> Either way, Mistral is a failing company with little relevance in the AI space and that's not going to save them.

Already ? I was wondering when some US based company will buy them including all that "soverignity" prompts :)

Local llms are what we need and to get that we need memory so we need computer builders from outside of US. Why ? Because when something external appears US companies also allows US citizens to have that too at lower price :) Not before external forces force them to be suddenly good hearted to their own peoples...

Can we also have coarser MoE's ? If I want to code I do not need llm be trained on past and present capitol names and chemistry and everything unrelevant to the task ! Watch Matrix again ! We need somewhat "inteligent" llms and knowledge can be uploaded just like Neo learned kung-fu :) - prompts and light tr^h^hweek of learning and some exams, we need kind of university for llms :) So llms finally fit into users computers... And when some grandmas or snowflakes start to whine tell them to learn - llms usage can be a skill finally ;)

Edit:

Wait, can we have something like interchengable weights so knowledge can be just downloaded to model folder ? Common weights format ? Reproducible builds ?

[–] throwaway27448 11 hours ago

> In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive once the current AI cycle cools down.

Surely they'll outcompete everyone on cost alone

[–] judge2020 10 hours ago

Their existence is the only thing keeping costs down across the board. If they had gotten open-weight model importing banned in the US a year ago, I'm sure they'd have 100% increased token cost relative to the advertised 100%+ intelligence improvements.

[–] fodkodrasz 9 hours ago

That would possibly been great news, as it would soon be too costly to use AI to replace the human workforce.

[–] throwaway27448 8 hours ago

This narrative doesn't matter with funding in hand

[–] JohnHaugeland 4 hours ago

it's fine if they don't want to release open source, but if they're not going to, they shouldn't say that's what they're doing

[–] zapataband1 11 hours ago

No it's not understandable, they were created with our stolen data.

[–] throwaway27448 10 hours ago

Ownership of data was a farcical concept to begin with. Now we have a farce squared

[–] jonathanstrange 9 hours ago

I'll remember that next time someone claims I can't just hack an AI company to get their model, training data and research.

[–] throwaway27448 9 hours ago

Ok you can easily do so and you probably should

[–] nbajka 10 hours ago

They stole your data? Like, they took the text you wrote on the internet and removed it and kept it to themselves?

[–] purerandomness 9 hours ago

Worse; they shredded it so no one else can ever read it. [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/08/17/ai-comp...

[–] Micrococonut 9 hours ago

So you are disavowing the concept of intellectual property?

[–] singpolyma3 9 hours ago

Only been hoping to abolish it for my entire adult life.

[–] nbajka 5 hours ago

Yes. I’ve been against copyright my entire life.

[–] formerly_proven 12 hours ago

Open weight models are kind of weird because they're usually just a bunch of weights and maybe a chat template, not even test vectors or anything. Quite odd, and probably one of the reasons why vllm, sglang, the llamas etc. so often produce buggy output. It's actually quite strange how little attention is given to verifying these setups work.

[–] Obscurity4340 12 hours ago

Why cant the community piece together the open-weights using open community-based like, implementation or whatever magic sauce integrates those weights

[–] newswasboring 11 hours ago

It's not understandable for them to lie or mislead. Calling something open weights and not being remotely open in the commonly understood sense is misleading and not ok.

[–] pc86 10 hours ago

I don't think "you can do whatever you want other than just turn around and sell a chat wrapper for this" makes it immediately not open weights. Could it be more open? Sure. That doesn't mean it's misleading or a lie and I would strong disagree that it's "not being remotely open."