alt Hacker NewsI hope that open models will dominate. The difficult part to reconcile for me is the amount of compute that's required to create and run such models. Small models are fine, I run local llms 27b param on a gpu, but it's not even close to frontier in capability. Who wants to drop $40k+ on hardware to run these things. Companies, maybe/perhapts. On the other hand, to run a DB I can get a server for $3k and handle tons of traffic on it and other things too.
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They never will. The only reason China releases open weights is because they can't compete on frontier models. Whoever has the frontier model has no incentive to give it away for free.
There might be a community effort at some point. This happened in chess where the community recreated and then improved on Alpha Zero. You could run small training chunks on your machine. Some people donated thousands of hours of server time.
I believe until the hardware designs catch up to be more commodized ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos. Designs (like Google TPUs equivalent) would also need to evolve to be more memory dense to be able to handle them. Untill then it seems will be system time shares for the larger models , probably with a bring your own model and pay as you go.