alt Hacker News> That's why we had huge backlash w
Training a frontier model is prohibitively expensive, so it’s understandable that open weights aren’t truly open source. In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive[1] once the current AI cycle cools down. An even bigger issue is that as long as model development remains this capital intensive, a genuinely open-source community around frontier AI is virtually impossible. That will have massive implications for our careers. The more capital concentrates at the top, the less leverage we’ll have in the job market.
[1] Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand. That said, I'm not sure how sustainable and sufficient that incentive can be.
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> Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand
Not speaking on behalf of my employer and I have no insight into this strategy at all, but I feel like the sale of consumer GPUs is so small by comparison to data centers (more than 10x from what I can tell online) that more users of open weights wouldn't likely make much difference in the earnings report.
> Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand.
This does not mean that they would necessarily subsidise consumer demand. They may be very happy to sell palette-loads of GPUs to datacenter and large corporations.
This has been the standard for a while now.
Kimi/GLM/etc basically all have this. They're not doing this out of the kindness of their own hearts.
We could create an open-source SETI@HOME but for training open source models?
The word "open" is misleading and dishonest in this context. Just like "OpenAI".
Call it free, available, downloadable etc, but not "Open".
Either way, Mistral is a failing company with little relevance in the AI space and that's not going to save them.
> In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive once the current AI cycle cools down.
Surely they'll outcompete everyone on cost alone
No it's not understandable, they were created with our stolen data.
Open weight models are kind of weird because they're usually just a bunch of weights and maybe a chat template, not even test vectors or anything. Quite odd, and probably one of the reasons why vllm, sglang, the llamas etc. so often produce buggy output. It's actually quite strange how little attention is given to verifying these setups work.
it's fine if they don't want to release open source, but if they're not going to, they shouldn't say that's what they're doing
It's not understandable for them to lie or mislead. Calling something open weights and not being remotely open in the commonly understood sense is misleading and not ok.
No, they're still capable of calling it something different, instead of implying open source licenses that they aren't actually using. That's a valid complaint that's kind of unrelated to any of this other stuff.
Whether it's feasible to release everything under open terms is actually a different issue from whether they're being truthful in how they're advertising it.