alt Hacker Newsthe succinct argument: I don't want arguably the most important invention in human history to be gatekept by a small handful of oligarchs.
I don't trust Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk to act in my best interests. Closed models will have an incredible centralizing effect, and concentrate power like we've never seen since the feudal ages.
If you want to see what it's like for the economy to collapse into a single, extremely valuable commodity, under the control of a small elite, look at Saudi Arabia.
also, I just value freedom tremendously. I want to tinker with model weights. I want to build my own stuff. I don't want to sharecrop in someone's walled garden.
I also worry a great deal that OAI and Anthropic will bow to political pressure and make Claude and ChatGPT push certain political agendas, to report biased information, or refuse to help with legal requests that conflict with corporate values. I also worry about privacy and mass surveillance - chat logs are far more intimate than my search queries or selfies.
I agree with all of these points, my view is just that open source doesn't really do much to prevent it. I also think it adds the additional danger of making dangerous capabilities widely available to anyone, like the ability to design novel viruses which is something that we can't really defend against once it's out there. If anything, putting this kind of capability in the hands of anyone with a GPU could create justification for a mass surveillance state or further concentration of power.
I also just don't think the open source movement has much chance of competing with the city sized data centres owned by Anthropic and OpenAI, or the hundreds of billions of dollars they have available to hire the best researchers. It costs hundreds of millions to train a frontier model, this kind of compute isn't available to the open source community.