randbyte

Long history of open source projects already have answers on how to monetize a free and complex open source product.

- Low development cost: collaborative efforts from open source contributors, innovative model training and serving for llm (Chinese models costs a fraction to train and their local chip design and manufacturing are catching up, plus cheap electricity)

- monetizing by selling hosted services, while leaving the core product free to tinker with / self host. China’s gdp is 2/3 of the US and it’s already a huge market for AI - which OAI and A\ don’t enter.

- for (the US) market that they can’t enter, let the US cloud providers to do free marketing / advocacy for them. Gaining share of mind. It costs them nothing.

When people say “US government” they usually mean the federal government…

Bibi tried many times. Every president before Trump understood the risks and refused the wild plan. Only Trump fell for it.

China’s factory outputs are in fact increasing. So is their export. You wouldn’t see this if they are energy constrained. China’s problems are weak consumption and deflation. It started way before this year and has very little to do with Iran.

You think too much. Trump got duped into a gamble and didn’t win as he thought. If the hope is to hurt China it’s unlikely to be working very well. Their energy sources and oil sources are very diversified.

In your example, service providers may be allowed to collect IP address or cookies or referer which are either critical to how they provide service (IP and cookies) or part of the established norm (browser sending referer).

That doesn’t mean they are allowed to go beyond and scan user’s environment variables

a model that runs on my own machine will never have the capacity of a model that runs in a datacenter.

I don’t think so. A local run model only needs to serve one or a few people. It seems possible to run a DeepSeek v4 model at full capacity on a server costing 200k usd. Very expensive but not impossible.

Factor in hardware and software improvements over time, and the fact that most people may just need to run a smaller and quantized model, it should take a pc at 10k usd scale.

Releasing open weights seems to be an effort to slow down competition.

Why? I don’t get it. Open weight models enabled a lot more foundational model trainings. I believe R1 was benefited from llama.

The proliferation of alternative, open weight models in turn put heat on the leading labs and forced them to make better models, or squeeze more out of slowing improvements on model capabilities through innovation on harness.

And eventually we the common people benefit, exactly from these competitions

Instead we got home solar system become very affordable over the past decade.

And driving out US manufacturers isn’t even the main goal for China. They know their huge risk on reliance on petroleum and was doing everything they can to mitigate that. Building out a huge solar manufacturing base is their answer. Now they are reducing petro imports YoY.

I never say these pieces are the equivalent of a cloud platform. What I said is that with them, it is entirely possible for someone to build their own.

Why someone wants to do that is not my concern. But not being able to is.

If you see this as people just want free stuffs you are missing the point. There is an entire different level of danger to allow a few entities to completely own a day to day technology.

Imagine personal computers and open source operating systems completely don’t exist. What you can do on a pc today, you have to always do it on a thin client always connected to a main frame run by a selected few. Everything you do is recorded and subjected to at least 30 days of retention and inspection.

Imagine every car is completely not customer serviceable and have to be connected to one of the three manufacturers in order to operate. Everywhere you go is recorded. The manufacturer may decided the place you want to go is inappropriate for you to go.

cloud providers should be commodity

They are already.

and should open source all of their platforms

Most of the cloud platforms are open source. Linux, container, k8s… it’s entirely possible for someone to build and deploy their private cloud if they have the resources.

and eliminate egress fees

What does it mean? If I sign up for cloud service I am only bound to the contract terms. If I am PAYGO I can switch anytime.

More like Anthropic’s priorities are not everyone else’s priorities. They are in the consistent culture of being in absolute control and dictating what is good and bad, while taking any opportunity to trash and crush potential competitors (open source models happened to be mostly developed in China). All these in the name of safety and anti-authoritarian.

The day self hosted models catch up with Anthropic’s capabilities is when they will fully lose their shit. This day can’t come soon enough

You examples are great… at supporting my points. CRWD ipo’ed at 7bn and NET at 5bn. Unlike the mega IPOs like abnb and uber and now 10x worse spacex. There is very limited upside left after high valuation milking.

What’s your argument besides name calling?

Please have it all, as long as don’t force my passive investments to be part of it.

If price is fully discovered right after ER then you will see price stabilized right after ER. But in fact post ER prices can wildly differ from the next minute, next day and next week price. It’s speculation and anticipation.

it doesn't really matter because the float will be tiny due to the 6 month lockup.

Not really: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/spacex-allow-early-...

Not after the insiders and investors milked most of the upsides already. As of today:

- ABNB right at around their IPO price. - Uber is 75% up… after 6 years. - SNOW came back to break even only after the recent surge.

By the time they drop and being kicked out (if they do) the insiders already dumped their shares. Not to mention now all the index fund holders will rush to sell creating even more price pressure.

Shorting (itself being a bad idea for regular investors) also breaks the mantra of passive investing, 401k or otherwise. It’s almost impossible to short right after IPO because of low float and high margin risk.

These mega IPOs are just using passive investors as backstop.