> Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software
Compiling/creating the Linux kernel or Chromium is no child's dance either, doesn't make them more/less FOSS than other things. Open Source AI gets its name from the license, not how easy/difficult it is to run/produce yourself.
"Compiling/creating the Linux kernel or Chromium is no child's dance either"
I can compile the Linux kernel on a modest 15 year old laptop. Sure, it took 35 years and thousands of people to build it into what it is today, but anyone with pretty much any computer can meaningfully participate in Linux kernel development, and many Linux contributors have done so using modest hardware. The same is not true of AI. And, the Linux kernel is the biggest open source project, but plenty of small ones with one or two developers are in use on millions of systems.
I have pretty big hardware for local AI, more than most people have (a Strix Halo and a couple of 32GB GPUs in my desktop), but I can barely train anything useful locally; I can do QLoRAs for small models, or LoRAs for very small models, that's about the extent of it. I would need to rent big GPUs to do anything more than an experiment.
That's not comparable.