For all intents and purposes you'll be able to move an open weight model wherever you want.
I really dislike this rhetoric, you sound like the FSF guys who are like "you're not free until you're running coreboot with zero binary blobs". Sure they have a point but also, most people are fine running regular linux.
Reading your comment made me realize that I love that the position of the FSF is held by someone, in the interest of stretching the Overton Window to that side.
Very much with you on that. It’s not a position I personally hold by any means, but I appreciate its existence connected to a prominent long-standing organization.
> For example: the Free Software Foundation only purchases desktop machines which support Libreboot, and Thinkpad X200 and X60 laptops with Libreboot. All desktops and servers we buy are KGPE-D16 motherboards, which are supported by Libreboot. As a result, all of the workstations used by the FSF staff have a free BIOS.
> Except where noted, all of the distributions listed on this page fail to follow the guidelines in at least two important ways:
> ...The kernel that they distribute (in most cases, Linux) includes “blobs”: pieces of object code distributed without source, usually firmware to run some device.
They are extreme, uncompromising, and live by their principles.
They are also the reason you can buy a computer meeting those requirements instead of being a pipe dream.
When attacking archetypes of people, there is some responsibility to make clear who you’re attacking and why, even to someone who’s not being hyper-open-minded. At least if you want them to learn from you: which may or may not be your goal. When you attack/signal you’re on the offensive, it is foolish to believe that they won’t knee-jerk attack back and become closed minded at least a little.
Regardless, the “misinterpretation” of the parent comment is actually a plausible interpretation. I suspend my judgement on what the actual “correct” interpretation of the original comment is: there are too many plausible interpretations to deductively decide. But I do know that since they first comment brought up a contentious issue, they should have put more work into crafting their message so there aren’t so many plausible interpretations that are contradictory. Or alternatively, they should have specified more precisely who they were talking about without a shadow of a doubt. That is if the commenter cared to be properly interpreted, but that may not be their goal. There are many reasonable reasons why that wouldn’t be their goal.
When you read someone's comment there is some responsibility to read the words they wrote and not attempt to attack them for an argument no reasonable person would extract from those words.
Reasonable people could interpret the original comment in many other ways than was probably intended.
I like when people are open minded to people who are closed minded/attacking them. It’s an admirable and difficult trait to attain. But to expect that from others is foolish. Most people can’t stay objective/curious after being punched in the face.
good luck doing it to inference companies in singapore or the netherlands. or one of the decentralized networks that dont look useful right now. the world is already sick of america acting like it can do whatever and force their rules on the rest of us.
Still, with the same model being served by multiple providers, it is much less likely to disappear entirely, even if you would like to keep using a cloud provider. Worst-case scenario, you change providers. Or you use OpenRouter as a proxy.
There's really no comparison between a model that Anthropic allows Google and Amazon to host with one that has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and has dozens of public inference providers.
I don't think they "allow" Google or Amazon to host them so much as Anthropic itself is deploying and managing their services on multiple cloud providers just like every other global scale business. Even the models served via OpenRouter are just being routed to compute under Anthropic control. Same with OpenAI. They aren't going to hand the world's most valuable intellectual property at the moment to some third party to run independently.
Now for the Chinese models on OpenRouter, yea. Those providers could be legit. Or it could be a failed crypto mining operation pivoting to providing AI compute. Who knows.
Yes. The difference is obviously that full, fat Linux runs on a superset of anything a layperson would call a computer, and can be built from source on roughly the same set of hardware. Running the full, fat Deepseek (as in the 1.6T model, unquantized) is too big to run on anything a layperson would call a computer, and being able to actually build it is even harder.
For all intents and purposes you'll be able to move an open weight model wherever you want.
I really dislike this rhetoric, you sound like the FSF guys who are like "you're not free until you're running coreboot with zero binary blobs". Sure they have a point but also, most people are fine running regular linux.
Reading your comment made me realize that I love that the position of the FSF is held by someone, in the interest of stretching the Overton Window to that side.
Very much with you on that. It’s not a position I personally hold by any means, but I appreciate its existence connected to a prominent long-standing organization.
Most FSF guys actually have very nuanced views on the topic and you’re doing everyone a disservice by reducing it to an extremist sound bite.
That's literally the official FSF position.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw
> For example: the Free Software Foundation only purchases desktop machines which support Libreboot, and Thinkpad X200 and X60 laptops with Libreboot. All desktops and servers we buy are KGPE-D16 motherboards, which are supported by Libreboot. As a result, all of the workstations used by the FSF staff have a free BIOS.
https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html
> Except where noted, all of the distributions listed on this page fail to follow the guidelines in at least two important ways:
> ...The kernel that they distribute (in most cases, Linux) includes “blobs”: pieces of object code distributed without source, usually firmware to run some device.
They are extreme, uncompromising, and live by their principles.
They are also the reason you can buy a computer meeting those requirements instead of being a pipe dream.
Damn, that's awesome. I suddenly feel like replicating their setup and seeing how it goes.
For even more of a challenge, try replicating Richard Stallman's personal setup:
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
> They are also the reason you can buy a computer meeting those requirements
The latest libreboot-compatible laptop I could find, at https://libreboot.org/docs/install/t480.html, is from 2018 -- not sure if that would still be available?
Thankfully he didn't say that they're all like that. Instead he pointed out the few that are as a well known example of similar behavior.
If you reread the comment with a fresh mind you'll notice that you misunderstood what he wrote
When attacking archetypes of people, there is some responsibility to make clear who you’re attacking and why, even to someone who’s not being hyper-open-minded. At least if you want them to learn from you: which may or may not be your goal. When you attack/signal you’re on the offensive, it is foolish to believe that they won’t knee-jerk attack back and become closed minded at least a little.
Regardless, the “misinterpretation” of the parent comment is actually a plausible interpretation. I suspend my judgement on what the actual “correct” interpretation of the original comment is: there are too many plausible interpretations to deductively decide. But I do know that since they first comment brought up a contentious issue, they should have put more work into crafting their message so there aren’t so many plausible interpretations that are contradictory. Or alternatively, they should have specified more precisely who they were talking about without a shadow of a doubt. That is if the commenter cared to be properly interpreted, but that may not be their goal. There are many reasonable reasons why that wouldn’t be their goal.
You used a lot of words to defend a strawman argument
As you ironically strawman me. Your hypocrisy knows no bounds!
When you read someone's comment there is some responsibility to read the words they wrote and not attempt to attack them for an argument no reasonable person would extract from those words.
Reasonable people could interpret the original comment in many other ways than was probably intended.
I like when people are open minded to people who are closed minded/attacking them. It’s an admirable and difficult trait to attain. But to expect that from others is foolish. Most people can’t stay objective/curious after being punched in the face.
Angry girlfriend SMS essay
You have a lot of angry girls texting you?
It is the FSF itself who has these extremist views.
Unless the US Gov bans inference companies from serving Chinese models to US customers...
good luck doing it to inference companies in singapore or the netherlands. or one of the decentralized networks that dont look useful right now. the world is already sick of america acting like it can do whatever and force their rules on the rest of us.
Still, with the same model being served by multiple providers, it is much less likely to disappear entirely, even if you would like to keep using a cloud provider. Worst-case scenario, you change providers. Or you use OpenRouter as a proxy.
There is actual market competition to host open models. If one provider stops offering a model you likely can find another provider that will
But you have multiple providers, not just one.
And every single one of those providers would buckle under government pressure.
Fable itself is hosted on all major cloud providers. How many offer it today?
This seems a little fanciful.
There's really no comparison between a model that Anthropic allows Google and Amazon to host with one that has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and has dozens of public inference providers.
I don't think they "allow" Google or Amazon to host them so much as Anthropic itself is deploying and managing their services on multiple cloud providers just like every other global scale business. Even the models served via OpenRouter are just being routed to compute under Anthropic control. Same with OpenAI. They aren't going to hand the world's most valuable intellectual property at the moment to some third party to run independently.
Now for the Chinese models on OpenRouter, yea. Those providers could be legit. Or it could be a failed crypto mining operation pivoting to providing AI compute. Who knows.
The providers on OpenRouter are not all in the US.
That doesn’t mean they are immune to US laws. If they want to continue to operate in the largest market in the world they will fall in line.
And if you are a legit American business you aren’t going to illegally bypass import/export controls.
More importantly, the download is out there. You can download it yourself today, and if it's that important to you, you can buy the hardware too.
I'm sure he's referring to the tightening of internet controls around social media as an extrapolation to controlling websites, etc.
Even in that case it can't be taken away; GPT and Claude are banned in China yet there's still a huge black market for tokens.
No. As long as you downloaded the weights, you can run them somewhere.
No it can't you can take it where ever you want. It is yours not theirs.
>Unless you're running Linux yourself, it can absolutely be taken away.
Yes. The difference is obviously that full, fat Linux runs on a superset of anything a layperson would call a computer, and can be built from source on roughly the same set of hardware. Running the full, fat Deepseek (as in the 1.6T model, unquantized) is too big to run on anything a layperson would call a computer, and being able to actually build it is even harder.
It's famously difficult to find people willing to rent you time on big computers over the internet.
Other people's computers famously can't be taken away.
You're right, there is an all powerful wizard who can take away all the world's computers. You got me.
There's a reason Yudkowsky only thinks AI can be stopped by literal missile strikes against data centers.
Popular open models on Openrouter have dozens of providers.
I just want personal agency