merelydev

This will be used as an argument to ban opensource models.

There has always been room for both closed and open source software.

In this context, open source/self-host means do it yourself, closed source means you trust someone else to do it for you.

In the long run open source always wins because of the community effort, customization, network effects and price.

Internet protocols are open, anyone can setup a website, host their own email server..., but most people don't do that, they rely on someone else to do it for them.

People still pay for Windows rather than use Linux because most people and companies have better things to do.

The main threat to American AI companies is not that consumers will self-host, but it's that new hosting companies will appear that will host open source models and offer them (cheaper) to consumers. It'll be like the web hosting market before the era of cloud computing.

If they outlaw open source models that'll just handicap American companies, the rest of the world will be running open source and have an arbitrage against US companies.

So what now? USA blocks Chinese AI. US companies use expansive closed source AI while the rest of the world use cheap self hostable open source AI from China?

How will this be enforced, at least with financial markets money is discrete, can largely be counted. This seems like a slippery slope to full blown surveillance of the internet and in general computing.

If AGI is truly imminent and will collectively effect all of us why not apply democracy to it, and vote for new AI models?

I don't think that's their biggest mistake. Their downfall was because they where mainly a hardware company without any network effects. Customers could easily switch from Nokia to any other hardware without an issue.

Because of asymmetric differences, I don't have access to powerful LLMs but attackers might. And also the complexities of software dependencies (supply chain vulnerabilities), my software depends on packages not in my control and I don't have time to audit the entire stack.

"one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them" - Claude Shannon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

Fair point but it assumes we all have access to LLMs with the same capabilities.

Most of the exploits are for opensource/free software.

I don't know what methods where used to find these exploits but I am starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing in this day and age, where someone can just let bots loose on your codebase.

The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.

Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.

Yes exactly, and theoretically if there was a functioning market that should have driven prices way down, because the marginal cost to enter the market is so low. However, the non-functioning anti-trust laws as well as the expansion of ip laws as allowed a few enormous corporations to essentially control the market and keep prices up.

What? Software is not expansive, most of it is free. Its just that the same code can be used by more than one user, unlike hardware. The high profit margins come from economies of scale which is greater than whats possible with hardware.

There are hardly any hardware companies where the hardware is ever complete. Disregarding the fact that many hardware products contain some form of software that needs to be updated. In pretty much any field hardware companies need to continue developing new revisions/improvements on the hardware to stay ahead of their competitors, however those revisions/improvements are significantly more complex to put into reality.

Most of the deployed hardware is complete. The RAM in my PC is complete but the software running on it needs to be updated every month or so.

It's funny how everyone (especially here on HN) accepted (and expected) extremely high profit margins from software businesses

Because software you build it once and can resell it as much as you want, a stick of RAM is only sold once.

The same was reflected in engineering salaries, with software engineering salaries being often a multiple of hardware engineering ones.

Arguably software is much more difficult to build because it is never complete.

Wiregaurd, postgres replication and load balancing can do the job?

Lets go: https://matrix.to/#/#hostpool:matrix.org

I volunteer my laptop, I suggest you and others do the same. We can hook them up in a VPN with E2ee. We just need 1 public IP. Lets Go!

The beauty of supply and demand magic is that the market is now open for anyone that can provide server hosting cheaply.

Clearly the system has vulnerabilities. Billionairs managed to exploit these. Asking whether this is good or bad is liking asking if hacking is good or bad for society. If vulnerabilities exist someone will exploit them, thats the arbitrage.

Instead of hating the hacker, we should ask can we have a system that is not vulnerable to"exploitation", which naturally leads to the old Capitalism vs Communism debate.

Capitalism is still the most decentralized system we have, if a worker is feeling exploited they can leave and work elsewhere but most importantly they have the option of starting their own business and utilize their skills. But capitalism's main vulnerability is that of investors that can buy up whole industries and collude and bring centralization.

Communism is inherently centralized, only works on a small scale like a village, on larger scale it requires strong leadership that can resist the temptations that come from centralized power, but strong leadership doesn't last forever.

That's a fair argument.

I agree, generally competition is a good thing, but in this case I think we're having a divide and conquer scenario that works in Google's advantage.

We're seeing that compute and investment liquidity is effectively a zero-sum game and by having Google go after the excess compute and liquidity (which they don't really need) will most likely weaken the competitors to the point where they aren't competitive. But if OpenAI and Anthropic merge they can pool resources and be more competitive.

In the last week Alphabet has positioned itself to go on the offense, going after exccess liquidity and excess compute.

I fear that OpenAi and Anthropic would not be able to compete against an adveserial Alphabet which owns it's own models, hardware, large corpus of data, talent and network effects. My prediction is that OpenAI and Anthropic will eventually be crushed by Alphabet as they run out of investment and compute, leaving Alphabet to have a monopoly on AI, at least in the west.

This is why I think OpenAI and Anthropic should really be one company, if they join forces and pool together investments and compute they'll stand a chance.

Opensource doesn't mean open to contributions. The source code is available, you can fork it and apply your patches there.

This is the way to go to reduce supply chain vulnerabilities and to reduce time of mainters reviewing LLM slop.

That's 80B that doesn't go to OpenAI or Anthropic.

Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history.

Yes. But modern technology, especially software doesn't have the high barrier to entry like being a feudal lord, but successful software can be just as impactful, tie in economies of scale and network effects and it can be even more powerful, which has allowed the producers of such software to wield significant power and as a result bypass democracy. And this ties in with your point:

The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?

It remains to be seen if this era of LLMs and datacenters raises or reduces the barrier to entry for software production and in general technological innovation. The marketplace is always hungry for innovation and those that can deliver and control it will be in a position of power.

Would you agree that to some extend, the ability to control technology is an incentive for companies to develop/innovate, and the more control they have the more profitable it is?

What does "democratic elections" even mean in this new world where traditional politicians don't understand these dynamics?

I believe the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology.

The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role.

So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?

This is beyond resepectless and shameless to the bones. I don't care about that converted code, what i see is an embarresment.

I disagree, as a programmer having my code being used long after I am gone would be a great honor.

The specific video is also picked for that reason: to let the deceased developer look bad and make fun of him.

I believe the linked video is Terry's last video that is why its so special.

There is a whole sub-culture, cult following lore around TempleOS, some of us used to watch the live-streams when Terry was coding in real time. Terry appreciated it and even when he was homeless, he tried very hard to reach his audience.

I agree with you and the article. I was just pointing out though, that the main innovation in bitcoin is not the cryptography, but the game theory which goes far enough to allow adversaries to work together, follow the protocol/law. There are very few mechanisms that allow this type of adversarial coordination, another one is nuclear weapons which somewhat prevents war between nuclear states because of mutually assured destruction.

Except when game theory does not account for externalities. As a follower of Doctorow myself, I have to point out that everyone is rent-seeking and that the forces that restrain it are abolished by systems like Bitcoin.

Yes most definitely. Decentralization is a spectrum. A village can be decentralized because everyone knows each other, and they trust each other to follow the protocol. But when you scale it up to a nation or global level where people don't know each other, you get people that don't want to follow the protocol for whatever reasons. Some attack the participants (wrench attacks) or some directly attack the protocol itself.

Usually the way to mitigate this is by adding a sub-system to filter/moderate out the bad actors. This sub-system than ends up with so much power it centralizes the system. Another way is by federation, which can decentralize the filtering. But the federations can also collude and centralize the network like the centralization of bitcoin miners, as you point out.

When someone is attacking the protocol this is the time when coordination is needed the most. Decentralized coordination on a large scale is hard, though bitcoin solved it for a very narrow use case (but not full proof since miners can collude and centralize).

So yea I agree with you, and with the article. Centralized governance might be a requirement for large scale coordination. But I cant help but see the beauty in in Satoshi's game theory, it being the key innovation in bitcoin and not the cryptography.

As someone who is somewhat a long time disciple of Cory Doctorow, having read his book Little Brother, when I was 17, which introduced me to Linux, Privacy/Cryptography and the Surveillance State. I think he is really downplaying the core innovations of bitcoin, which are the incentives and game theory it uses to allow adversaries to play together.

For example in bitcoin if you have enough resources to spam the network, you are incentivized to mine instead, thereby securing the network and produce new blocks.

So I think game theory and aligned incentives can be used to address the law issues, allowing different entities whether its States, Corporations and individuals to work together, even if they absolutely hate each other.

Game theory takes over where cryptography ends. Bitcoin gives us a glimpse of this.

Yes, the UI/UX of decentralized systems is so difficult for users that it creates demand for centralized systems to manage it for them, Coinbase, Gmail, Github, Twitter, The Pirate Bay.