Google Fears the Open Source AI Revolution
"We have no moat, neither does OpenAI".
Hello again folks!
We have been a little away from sending newsletters during the holy month of Ramadan, which ended last April. We’ll be back to publishing our weekly newsletters each Monday.
At the same time, we have been busy transferring our website, fosspost.org, to a new hosting provider. We have completed most of the transition so you should notice a much faster browsing speed for our website now.
Here is today’s newsletter.
Leaked Google Document: “We have no Moat”
In a leaked document published on a Discord server and shared by the folks at SemiAnalysis, Google researchers were evaluating their company’s current position in AI and how their competitors are advancing.
But they got a big surprise in the face: Their actual competitor wasn’t a big company like they were expecting, nor even OpenAI… Instead, it was the open source community.
The leaked document shows how the open source community managed to build and develop a lot of models based on Meta’s LLaMA AI model (which is an LLM that was introduced just two months ago back in March), and many of these models provide similar benchmark results with the AI models Google has.
The document also highlighted how various open source stakeholders like Stability AI, played a key role in the movement by fully releasing their models under open source licenses (like Stable Diffusion), and how this enabled them to control a big chunk of the ecosystem.
The researchers at Google were shocked; how can these individual open source developers compete with a large enterprise company like us and even provide better results? They say they can’t compete with the open source community, and that they should embrace open models and open source licenses, and drop the “keep it all” policy they are currently doing.
Connecting an AI model to the masses via an API like OpenAI and Google won’t stand for long; sooner or later the open source community will develop better alternatives, and they won’t have these limitations.
The full document can be accessed from SemiAnalysis below (a paywall for the full version, though):
It’s funny though, that the document highlights how “OpenAI”, which was supposed to provide and lead open source AI models, is in a similar position to Google; they have no moat either, and they will be crushed in the future if they keep locking their models as they do now.
As open source users and enthusiasts, this is very good news for us. It means the AI future will not be monopolized only by selected elites who have the computational power and models, instead, AI will be democratized so that everybody can build their AI tools of choice.
Share with us your thoughts on this matter in the comments below.
Last Week Open Source News
We follow open source news from all over the Internet so you don’t have to.
AMD says it will move to an open source firmware for its CPUs and GPUs by 2026, called openSIL, which should enhance the security and reliability of said hardware. This means that in the future, you should be able to run an open source firmware stack from the CPU all the way to the GPU without using proprietary code that you can’t view or edit.
A website called “DistroSea” appeared online as an alternative to the DistroTest website which used to allow you to test Linux distributions and boot them online before downloading them. There is a heavy load on it at the moment, and it could be a challenge for the website owners to scale it up and handle the load, but it’s a nice service.
In older news, both Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 23.04 are released. Linux kernel 6.3 was released as well.
Interesting Stuff from the Web
These other news, discussions and articles might be interesting for you, all related to either Linux or open source software:
In this discussion, users explore what open source LLMs are out there that allow commercial usage. LLaMA from Meta does not allow such usage at the moment, so users are exploring some other alternatives.
Do you know what are the biggest 10 man pages? You can learn that now from this diagram made on Reddit. Here is also an updated version that fixed a few errors.
Hope you liked our newsletter!
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Gotta love Open Source. Power to the People