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The fate of "small" open source

(nolanlawson.com)
295 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 16 Nov 25 19:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mccoyb ◴[16 Nov 25 20:17 UTC] No.45948052[source]▶
I don’t think open source is going anywhere. It’s posed to get significantly stronger — as the devs which care about it learn how to leverage AI tools to make things that corporate greasemonkeys never had the inspiration to. Low quality code spammers are just marketing themselves for jobs where they can be themselves: soulless and devoid of creative impulse.

That’s the thing: open source is the only place where the true value (or lack of value) of these tools can be established — the only place where one can test mettle against metal in a completely unconstrained way.

Did you ever want to build a compiler (or an equally complex artifact) but got stuck on various details? Try now. It’s going to stand up something half-baked, and as you refine it, you will learn those details — but you’ll also learn that you can productively use AI to reach past the limits of your knowledge, to make what’s beyond a little more palatable.

All the things people say about AI is true to some degree: my take is that some people are rolling the slots to win a CRUD app, and others are trying to use it to do things that they could only imagine before —- and open source tends to be the home of the latter group.

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1. nowittyusername ◴[16 Nov 25 20:24 UTC] No.45948099[source]▶
True innovation will come from open source for sure. As the developers don't have the same economic incentives to be "safe", "ethical" "profitable" or whatever. large corporations know this and fear this development. That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal. And I think they will be very convincing to the government. Because the government also fears the "peasants" and giving them any true semblance of real AGI like systems. I bet very soon we will start seeing various classifications that will define what is legal and what is not for a citizen to possess or use.
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2. pessimizer ◴[16 Nov 25 23:19 UTC] No.45949350[source]▶
> That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal.

I think they're going to be using porn and terrorism (as usual) to do that, but also child suicide. I also think they're going to leverage this rhetoric to lock down OSes in general, by making them uninstallable on legally-available hardware unless approved, because approved OSes will only be able to run approved LLMs.

Meaning that I think LLMs/generative AI will be the lever to eliminate general-purpose computing. As mobile went, so will desktop.

I think this is inevitable. The real question for me is whether China will partner with the west on this, or whether we will be trading Chinese CPUs with each other like contraband in order to run what we want.

> any true semblance of real AGI like systems.

This is the only part I don't agree with. This isn't going to happen, but I'm not even sure it would be more useful than what we have. We have billions of full AGI machines walking around, and most of them aren't great. I'm talking about restrictions on something technically barely better than what we have now; maybe only a significant bit more compute-efficient. Training techniques will probably be where we get the most improvements.