It's all extremely dystopian and I don't see how things improve. The handful of megacorps that have access to the compute and troves of stolen IP to train their secret models on have no incentive to contribute back.
They say their models are too dangerous for the public, so they can nerf the GA versions while allowing only their preferred megacorp or nation state partners access to the real secret good versions.
We can hope the Chinese open weight models will catch up, but if/when they really reach parity with proprietary frontier models you can bet they'll stop releasing their weights too. They don't do this stuff out of the kindness of their hearts.
It's tough to imagine what might possibly derail this.
Realistically, local/open weight models will always be limited in idiosyncratic world knowledge compared to the proprietary frontier. There's just very limited upside to releasing tens or hundreds of terabytes of open weights for something that literally can only run in very large AI data centers, and Fable/Mythos is near enough to that class. Smaller models can be smart in very real ways, but the extent to which those "smarts" can apply to real-world problems will be limited.
I think the best bet is that that at some point going from 30B params to 9T params is realistically going to give the closed model a 10% edge in niche tasks, but that the open model would be very useful most of the time still.
I don't know how realistic that expectation is, but if you think about the difference between say 10,000 USD speakers and 50,000 speakers then the 50k ones may sound slightly better but certainly not enough to justify the 40k difference
I don't think this makes much sense. The best filter is money and they're not going to go through this convoluted malarkey to limit their customers.
IMHO this is about protecting their model. If you can get a N-1 model for 1% of the N cost their business breaks down.
> It's tough to imagine what might possibly derail this.
Public utilities?
> The handful of megacorps that have access to the compute and troves of stolen IP to train their secret models on have no incentive to contribute back.
Meta and Anthropic both trained on pirated books and there were not required to destroy their models. I simply don't get it. It just encourages to do things first and see later what happens. Regulations are just a small business cost.
You got it right! Regulations are just for small guys! You don’t see agents after Anthropic’s CEO or after Sam Altman as we’ve seen on Kim Dotcom
> They don't do this stuff out of the kindness of their hearts
No, but they do have incentive to continue to release with open weights because doing so directly affects the US based labs that are doing this for profit and power.
What's likely to happen is import controls on software as a form of US protectionism. It will be the encryption battle all over again, but this time about your right to both run AI models locally on your own hardware (that the labs and big tech would love if you could continue to not able to afford or acquire so they can rent it to you), and a ban on the distribution and use of foreign models.
I wouldn't be surprised of Anthropic and OpenAI also successfully lobby for a limit on how big open source models can be in the US as well in the name of "safety."
Make no mistake, they all fully intend to pull the ladder up behind them, and they intend to do it soon.
You can see already a lot of PR from Anthropic on this(ban the unsafe open source) in all major newspapers(I.e WSJ,Ft etc).
Chinese open weight models will be forced to do the same to remain competitive with other frontier labs. The moat is data going forward.