[HN Gopher] The open-source AI boom is built on Big Tech's hando...
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The open-source AI boom is built on Big Tech's handouts. How long
will it last?
Author : AnhTho_FR
Score : 24 points
Date : 2023-07-02 11:38 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| warning26 wrote:
| It's frustrating to me how many people are upset at Meta for
| releasing Llama (not on HN, but mostly off-HN people.)
|
| Like, do you _want_ big tech to control all AI tech? Meta
| releasing Llama was much better than the alternative.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Big Tech is built on open-source. How long will it last?
| isawczuk wrote:
| It's symbiotic relationship. OS will survive without Big tech,
| I'm not sure it works other way around.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > OS will survive without Big tech, I'm not sure it works other
| way around.
|
| Survive, maybe, but probably not thrive. Big Tech has been a
| major source of funding of OSS foundations, provider of
| infrastructure, and employer of many major contributors for
| decades.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The dotcom boom happened just fine even though open source
| adoption by businesses was pretty limited at the time. Big tech
| can afford to pay for software or build their own because
| they're big; they just like using FOSS because it saves them
| money.
| reedciccio wrote:
| Do you think that Google, the startup of decades ago would
| have scaled as rapidly if they had to license Solaris and
| Oracle? Same question for Twitter and Facebook without PHP
| and Ruby and MySQL and everything else they bootstrapped
| from?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Obviously, yes. I just pointed out the dotcom boom
| companies as examples of that.
|
| Free server hardware would have helped Google, Twitter,
| Facebook, etc. to scale up faster too but they managed to
| grow just fine having to pay for servers. Their business
| models were so incredibly successful that they could have
| afforded to pay for software too without drastically
| lowering their growth.
| zeruch wrote:
| The dot com boom largely happened because of OS, as it
| allowed the fast creation/scaling of businesses in a way that
| would have been impossible otherwise.
|
| Big businesses didnt survive the dot com boom and bust
| because they had bigger budgets. If anything many
| overextended themselves (e.g. Sun) or missed the boat
| altogether and were obviated by FOSS (SGI, DEC, et al)
| jchonphoenix wrote:
| I've been in big tech. They rarely use anything from OSS and
| usually have their own internal version long before OSS has an
| offering. Big tech will have no problem thriving without OSS.
| Their business models and execution aren't reliant on it at
| all. They only use it for recruiting
| ke88y wrote:
| Linux, PyTorch, TensorFlow, literally every programming
| language used everywhere except perhaps MATLAB and CUDA (and
| even there most of the libraries are OSS, and those languages
| aren't FAANG property anyways)
|
| I think there's a kernel of truth to what you're saying --
| namely that big tech would be fine without oss and mostly
| builds out their own alternatives whenever necessary or
| desirable -- but it's definitely not true that BigTech
| "doesn't use OSS", "has internal versions", or "only use it
| for recruiting"
| phyrex wrote:
| PyTorch is a meta project, I think tensorflow is from
| Google. Both companies maintain their own programming
| languages (which they later open sourced)
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| Lol at thinking that pytorch and tensorflow are oss. I mean
| they're definitely free but have you ever tried submitting
| a patch for something that doesn't matter to FB/Google?
| Those projects function as free bug finding programs for
| their respective sponsors.
| vrc wrote:
| They also exist so that infra/hardware is developed to
| support them specifically. The more people that use each,
| the more pressure exists for 3p infra/hw to build around
| them in pursuit of $$.
| [deleted]
| dcreater wrote:
| Really despise these hackneyed and obviously prejudiced
| narratives. Open source AI has been the norm all the while. The
| transformer architecture was by Google but published publicly and
| this just follows the culture that google, meta and co have been
| built on. Big tech is not "handing" out anything
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