[HN Gopher] Mistral Remove "Committing to open models" from thei...
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Mistral Remove "Committing to open models" from their website
Author : smy20011
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-02-26 21:36 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| samketchup wrote:
| I hope they keep tweeting magnet links for model releases :(
| cdme wrote:
| Time to build a moat.
| jampekka wrote:
| Competition is for losers.
| firebaze wrote:
| good thing that
| https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/dolphin-2_2-yi-34b-GGUF surpasses
| even Mixtral MoE. Let's hope this continues.
| xg15 wrote:
| Waiting until Huggingface pulls the same stunt. "Oh, all those
| models and datasets you uploaded? They're ours now. Thanks! ^_^
| "
| orra wrote:
| I'm afraid I don't share your enthusiasm. There are open source
| Dolphin models, but the ones based on Yi are not, because Yi is
| not.
| omeze wrote:
| Seems like "open source" as a marketing tactic (or perhaps
| strategy, if they do continue to release open models) has peaked.
| I'm not really complaining, we get a lot of stuff for free as
| engineers (especially software), but it does seem different for a
| company to release an open model without any future commitments
| (e.g. Google) vs making open weights your raison d'etre and then
| pivoting quite quickly. The first feels transactional but honest,
| and the other a bit too... machiavellian?
|
| I do think it's too soon to pass judgement; this could just be a
| normal "freemium" strategy from days old, where you just pay up
| if you like the smaller/cheaper/free versions of their models.
| kromem wrote:
| I think we'll continue to see _n_ -1 open models used to build
| momentum to closed _n_ models for the foreseeable future.
|
| Which is fine, as it will accelerate to diminishing returns on
| the _+1_ difference.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Maybe it was required per the Microsoft investment. I wouldn't be
| surprised.
| jampekka wrote:
| That company does try its very best to keep computing crappy.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| If you put 13 billion into a moat to be threatened by an open
| source competitor what would you do?
|
| An extra billion or two to protect the interest of your
| trillion dollar company seems well worth it.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| That's a shame--we cannot allow a handful of companies and VCs to
| capture most of the value of AI, especially if it actually starts
| replacing human jobs, it'll just accelerate wealth inequality and
| social unrest.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| The economic prospects are grim. Couple that with creating a
| world where humanity is both at the whim of these tuning
| systems, and fundamentally unable to observe and learn about
| this golem, where IP keeps it as magic in our world: it like
| the most infernal of machines.
| ysofunny wrote:
| I cannot let me get tired of repeating this:
|
| the underlying fundamental problem is that capitalism does not
| play nice with digital assets.
|
| an AI model is a very valuable digital asset right now, so
| there's a covert war being fought over public access to this.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The real fundamental problem is that "digital assets" are
| bullshit.
|
| An AI model is literally constructed by explicitly
| disrespecting copyright. The idea that a company gets to turn
| around and demand respect for their AI model's copyright is
| patently absurd.
| mlazos wrote:
| I feel like this can be trivially worked around by fine
| tuning from the initially copyrighted weights. They're not
| demanding copyright, they're just keeping them secret. If
| Meta keeps releasing high quality open source models, I don't
| expect the closed source models to have an advantage for
| long.
| jampekka wrote:
| Intellectual property itself is a bad concept. Capitalism works
| for squeezing margins for bulk commodity production (largely on
| the expence of the worker), but for zero-marginal cost stuff
| it's a huge hinderance for progress.
| candiodari wrote:
| But if you have cloud based models ... same with mainframes
| 30-40 years ago ... it doesn't matter. Because the power
| cloud gives to the model owners is 10x more than the
| strictest intellectual property laws do.
|
| I don't believe, for example, that there's any intellectual
| property law that would let me yoink my intellectual property
| from you for any reason after you've bought and paid for it.
|
| In other words: I think the capitalism discussion is kind of
| pointless here. Capitalism isn't what gives these companies
| power. It's the cloud. Mainframe computing 2.0.
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| It seems to me that large software companies often adopt an open-
| source approach initially to attract enthusiasts and stand out
| from leading competitors, but tend to adopt similar philosophies
| as their rivals once they achieve significant recognition or
| investment.
|
| It's all a marketing tactic, and I ain't for it.
| gwern wrote:
| You can see this as an endgame of 'commoditize your complement'
| (https://gwern.net/complement): you're happy to contribute to
| commodification while _you_ are the small scrappy player, but
| at some point, if you are really successful, you will want to
| pull up the ladder after yourself, as it were.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Mistral just doesn't seem like an interesting company to me any
| more.
|
| They started off as the kind of people who released their models
| as magnet links and made them actually user-aligned instead of
| California-aligned. This is what I like to see from an AI
| company. Now, their models are no different from Open AI,
| Anthropic, Google, Meta and everybody else.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Meta actually releases the weights though (for now)
| gumby wrote:
| Could you expand more on what you mean by "California-aligned"
| (especially if you are thinking beyond AI models, though that
| alone could be interesting).
| tazu wrote:
| I assume they mean "generate images of ethnically diverse
| Nazis"[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/technology/google-
| gemini-...
| impossiblefork wrote:
| But surely they're still remain as they were, i.e. not
| California aligned?
| summerlight wrote:
| Model developments have become seriously capital intensive
| endeavors. Probably Mistral found themselves cornered by this
| commitment and they won't be able to secure any serious
| investments without changing this stance, MSFT in this case.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39511530
| fuddle wrote:
| Damn, I was hoping Mistral would carry to open source torch for
| AI. I might be forced to create an actual open source AI company.
| andy99 wrote:
| From reddit: Chinese models seem to be the last
| hope now, LOL.
|
| It's going to be really interesting as two poles or power develop
| geopolitically, if the west or whatever you call it has to look
| to China or what we (the west) would consider the pole we look
| down on, for actually "free" ML models.
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