i wonder what you guys think about the open weight chinese AIs that are directly competing with the big tech AIs, isnt it a good idea to support projects that have open source and open weight only to make them more advanced than the closed ones from greedy billionaires? i say that because the AI bubble is a huge threat for the elites currently, and if we support their competition it might finally pop.
and the outcome will be a decentralized thing rather than they succeeding on replacing jobs and ruining our lives more than they already do. what yall think about this idea? remember that this is an economic war in the end, and the only way to take down the ones we despise is by decentralizing everything they want to centralize.
im asking this because i noticed people here in lemmy.zip are (justifiably) anti-ai… but only begging the govs that are directly lobbied by the elites wont work. we cannot bet on the government to bite the hand that feeds them.
I think it really depends on what you’re concerned with. Open-weight models provide you with a bit more control. For example you won’t leak all your private information to some mega-corporation. But they still centralize power, have a big impact on the environment, labour market… They also hallucinate and flood the internet with misinformation, bots and made-up stuff… It’ll also still be tuned to fit someone’s agenda. Whether that’s the bias and morals Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman likes to push down on the world. Or a Chinese “startup” attached to some Chinese government sponsored tech company. You pick your poison…
I don’t think there’s a noteworthy chance this will end up as some decentralized thing. It’ll always be researched, trained and designed by whoever is able to afford those kinds of salaries and datacenters. Which is going to be the elites, billionaires, largest companies and governments.
thats why we should focus on copyleft licensing everything we can and find a way to create copyleft idea patents (only permits the idea usage if all of the projects linked to such idea will also be copyleft-patented and will only use copyleft licenses for code,art and the likes)
i could say im even more copyleft extreme than even richard stallman… i am completely against the concept of copyright and knowledge ownership. every method and knowledge must be publicly available to be used by everyone.
we do have laws to make this happen, we need just to create a big enough copyleft scene to spread the copyleft environment and make it so its expensive and less optimal to do things in a proprietary way.
I think money is the major factor which does the gate-keeping. Let’s say I’m not okay with the other (commercial) models out there. What they do and don’t do, their tone and political bias. Like Elon Musk claims… Now I’m gonna need some 6-digit sum of $$$ to train my own model. And a couple of thousand wage-slaves in a poor country to curate datasets for me, do RLFH. And that’s the real kicker. Musk can do it easily. But I wouldn’t know where to get that kind of money. And it’s prohibitively expensive for community projects. And even large independent organizations like universities struggle to do AI research on the same level as OpenAI, Anthropic, X, Meta, the Chinese, … do it.
I think even if we changed copyright, piled up large, state-of-the-art public datasets, forced them to release the weights, we’d still be in a similar situation as of today. Where we get some breadcrumbs tossed by someone. We can choose whose breadcrumbs we pick. And we can put some topping on it. But it’s not really emancipating in the same way copyleft works for software.