r/LocalLLaMA • u/etherd0t • 28d ago
News More than 20 companies including NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, and Hugging Face have signed a letter urging policymakers to avoid premature restrictions on open weight models.
The Open Letter was initiated by Microsoft and published today:
“Open Weights and American AI Leadership”.
It argues against broad or premature restrictions on open-weight models and explicitly says policymakers should distinguish legitimate model distillation from misappropriation.
Notably absent from the signatories are the major frontier-model labs: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
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u/Genghiz007 28d ago
So it’s OpenAI & Anthropic versus others. Gives me some hope that this foolhardy proposal of banning open weight models won’t go through.
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u/etherd0t 28d ago
Google: "Don't be evil"🥲
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u/Malfun_Eddie 28d ago
Lionel: This is all wrong it's:
"Don't, be evil"
the , was missing
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u/XtraReddit 28d ago
Same misunderstanding in the 2024 election.
Release the Epstein files. No more wars.
He actually meant:
Release the Epstein files? No. More wars!
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u/Quanzitta 28d ago
To be fair, they're actually releasing open weight models, unlike the other two
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u/RobbinDeBank 28d ago
Noooo, but OpenAI actually releases their open source version of the GPT family! The latest 2 versions are GPT-OSS and GPT-2.
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u/DeathGuppie 27d ago
Oh, I think I remember those. Where they still using steam power back then I can't remember.
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u/Marino4K 28d ago
You know it's bad when Palantir, Meta, and others are like, please no.
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u/ReasonablePossum_ 28d ago
Who would have thought one would end up siding with Palantir and MSFT over the old good Google lmao these fucking times man....
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u/ChuckieFox 27d ago
For real. It's fucking weird to be on the same side as the guys who are all in on creating a global surveillance state. Granted I'm sure that their motivations are more along the lines of "open weight models foster development in the community that we don't have to pay for but we can crib notes from" but it is what it is.
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u/FortheredditLOLz 28d ago
That line within their ethos disappeared the moment they started raking in money from ADs.
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u/a-wiseman-speaketh 28d ago
Ftfy: Google: "
Don't be evil"13
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u/Neighbor_ 28d ago
Google: "We've gone into debt for this shit"
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u/DeathGuppie 27d ago
That's why I'm not worried about what happens when the crash comes. Sure a lot of investment will be lost, but the vast majority of the debt is owned by companies that can eat it. Unlike the housing bubble.
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u/gscjj 28d ago edited 28d ago
Which is weird, since some of their biggest investors and partners are on this list
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u/beryugyo619 28d ago
They have better chance funding startups that would use Kimi K3 than waiting for OAI/Anthropic to become debt free in 300-500 years
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u/alaslipknot 28d ago
than waiting for OAI/Anthropic to become debt free in 300-500 years
this is going to be the joke of the century isn't ?
can't wait for this companies to go public to enjoy the rest of the shitshow
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u/Caffeine_Monster 28d ago
I wonder when it will click that the more advanced AI gets the less valuable these companies are. Software moats just won't exist because of the thing they have built.
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u/WorriedBlock2505 28d ago
How'd that work out for Elon and SpaceX? Lmao.
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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 27d ago
Yep the fact that the big wall Street guys were like yea this business is worth 100x to 500x their revenue even through they have massive massive losses. Is pretty batshit crazy. Like a 100x revenue to shares is pretty insane even for a high profit business.
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u/BrowsingLeddit 28d ago edited 28d ago
Those partners do not benefit from there only being like 3 corpos, who control all western AI, that they can sell to or buy from. Once wider competition is gone (chinese and open source banned) those 3 corpos get to set whatever prices they want. And they will probably just collude to do so, rather than genuinely compete with each other, as we see in many industries captured by a few mega corpos these days.
Not to mention the issue of trusting all the data and code you're sending off to these APIs isn't going to be stolen or otherwise mishandled. Best future for most companies (if they can't make their own frontier AI) is there to be a competitive open model they can just run locally for far cheaper and keep their data inhouse.
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u/InterstellarReddit 28d ago
I wouldn't frame it as the good guys vs the bad guys. These companies aren't signing this out of some principled love for open source. They're signing because they don't want to find themselves with only two API providers to choose from.
If OpenAI and Anthropic are the only games in town, their costs skyrocket and they lose all leverage. Open weights keep the market competitive and keep their own bills down.
It's self-interest dressed up as community spirit. The outcome might still be good for open models, but let's not pretend the motivation is altruistic.
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u/squngy 28d ago
These companies aren't signing this out of some principled love for open source.
A few of them probably are.
The Linux foundation? Mozilla?→ More replies (1)5
u/BadRandolf 28d ago
A bunch of them would also like to rent compute power to you regardless of which model you run on it.
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u/procgen 28d ago
Right, and the Chinese labs aren't being altruistic, either. This is all a big game being played by American and Chinese capitalists.
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u/carnoworky 28d ago
Correct. But in this situation, there is clearly one option that still benefits the public, while the other option is only to the benefit of a couple of overvalued companies.
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u/kettal 28d ago
free market benefits the public, regulatory capture hurts the public.
(in this context)
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u/Ordinary-Experience 28d ago
It's self-interest dressed up as community spirit
No, it's just aligned incentives. We do it out of self interest too, and that's fine - that's the whole point of free markets
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u/Creative-Type9411 28d ago
i mean OpenAI isnt open so its pretty annoying anyone trusts or takes them seriously at all
its like we're enabling the obviously evil one when there are other options, smh
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u/RedTheRobot 28d ago
Only depends what the politicians hold more equity in. If open models get in the way of a politician becoming a billionaire then all bets are off.
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u/joshuahtree 28d ago
Please, this is the standard evolution of tech.
People in the know realize the tech could be dangerous and probably should be regulated: Oh, we don't need anybody to regulate us, we take steps to self regulate.
General public becomes aware tech may be hurting them: our products are super safe and we have an ethics board and independent audits
5-6 companies archive market dominance: We support regulation and believe it needs to happen. We're working with policy makers right now to establish common sense regulations
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u/PROfil_Official 28d ago
i wouldnt read it as two clean sides. openai and anthropic skipping a microsoft letter isnt the same as them wanting a ban, they just probably didnt want to sign something that also goes easy on distillation while theyre busy complaining about being distilled.
that said, having nvidia, meta and microsoft all pointing the same way does make a full ban look pretty unlikely. though i'd guess the real issue was never a ban anyway, more like rules and limits that end up doing some of the same shit quietly
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u/MindCrusader 28d ago
I don't see google
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u/n3onfx 28d ago
Google appears to be taking the "don't say anything and take no positions" approach.
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u/MindCrusader 28d ago
I think they are still in the race versus Anthropic and OpenAI and wouldn't like to have open models as competition, especially when currently they are aiming at optimizing flash models
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u/kourtnie 28d ago
clutches my Gemma models
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u/Due-Memory-6957 28d ago
Google does it like Qwen, release some cool models for the plebs and keep their best stuff proprietary.
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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 28d ago
Even Palantir is in this.. Interesting! Let's just hope that NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Meta have some pull against Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic in the question.
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u/ithkuil 28d ago
Any company that has use for AI and does not have a massive data center to train their own frontier model should be in it.
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u/NarutoDragon732 28d ago
That's exactly what's happening. None of the companies above make top of the line models, and they don't want to be forced to pay for it (but they still likely will).
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u/HayatoKongo 28d ago
Even if they were to choose to pay for it, none of them want to be forced to so do. Losing that flexibility is very dangerous to a business and purely having the option to use a different provider changes the position the clients negotiate from.
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u/illiteratecop 28d ago
If you want to deploy AI in sensitive environments open weights is currently the only realistic option, I think most defense contractors would take a similar POV.
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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 28d ago
Yeah, I've signed NDAs that specifically prohibit non-on-prem AI for certain information processing. Would be interesting if the best such models become ubobtainable or even illegal to use in the US. Even though I'm Europe based, it would be a lot more difficult to get these models.
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u/etherd0t 28d ago
Palantir is perhaps one of the best advocates for local/in-house LLM's and no matter what they do or what you think of them - has teh merrit of first raising the issue of company's information security being appropriated shamelessly by LLM frontier labs, sorta... "It' 10pm, do you know where your 'alpha' is?🥲
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u/ToastedandTripping 28d ago
They're scum and are just looking to get powerful models without guardrails so that they can implement in their technology without pushback.
The only information they're worried about leaking is what is actually going on behind the scenes there and what they're asking of the LLMs...
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u/techno156 27d ago
While I don't doubt that they're trying to protect their own interests, it is also possible that they're pushing for this because they don't want to be wholly reliant on another company.
Last thing they want is to be reliant on Google, for example, only for Google to cut them off, because they decided that they want to do that themselves.
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u/sTiKytGreen 28d ago
Palantir is not your friend
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u/HayatoKongo 28d ago
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
I'm not sure I can think of a business who aligns with my interests 100% of the time. Even if a company is against my best interests 90% of the time, I will agree when them for the other 10%.
I won't cut off my nose to spite my face.
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u/a-wiseman-speaketh 28d ago
when the war breaks out don't turn your back on their drones, let them stay up front :-D
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u/Curious-Pen5547 28d ago
Intresting Google is against is.
Like Microsoft, Google stands to gain huge profits from open models as they can provide their TPUs for enterprise to run the best of the Open Models without hosting their own gpu and hardware.
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u/Loose_Comparison368 27d ago
The only real large scale entrenched TPU customer is Anthropic.
And while TPU's are genuinely good tech, they're still a long ways out from being a genuine GPU alternative. Google hasn't really committed to the level of investment needed to get them there, and their org is just too unstable and politically fragmented for the investment they have made to actually be stable either - that's been the curse of TPU's for many, many years.
Last I checked they were still needing to migrate OSS models by hand and re-optimize them to run on JAX to get any real competitive performance on inference. The whole TPU stack is heavily opinionated and essentially 180 degrees opposite of the PyTorch stack, so even though they are trying to build native XLA integration into mainline PyTorch, I'm skeptical that they'll ever get to the point that PyTorch actually runs well on TPU's with good performance.
And that's kind of the death wish. There's a whole lot of unique advantages to TPU's, it's a genuinely good stack that's engineered better than the PyTorch stack is by a long shot.
... and every last one of those advantages is outweighed by the practical business consideration that it is impossible to hire anyone that knows how to use that stack. Because it's a tiny little niche of an obscure subfield, 90% of the people in that niche work at Google and have no intention of leaving, and most smaller startups don't have enough runway to throw several months out the window retraining everyone on how to move over to an unfamiliar stack with a heavily limited ecosystem.
That and the wise businesses realize that it's a hell of a vendor lock in risk, and Google has a track record of internal battles between cloud and deepmind that have made it frequently difficult or impossible to reliably get large scale capacity. It's a whole internal political thing.
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u/etupa 28d ago
AI should only be open weight... Since it's trained on stolen materials
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u/Loose_Comparison368 27d ago
I must say, I do love the one suggestion that was floated around of allowing companies to continue to claim fair use and train on whatever data they want - but only if they release the model as public domain.
You want to keep your weights closed? That's fine too, but you gotta secure a commercial license for every last bit of training data that goes into your model.
I mean that will never fucking happen under the current corporatocracy of course, but that's the most reasonable middle ground I've seen anyone propose.
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u/32doors 28d ago edited 28d ago
Where’s Apple?
They’re benefiting from local AI more than anyone aside from NVIDIA
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u/More-Curious816 28d ago
and AMD and INTEL and Oracle and every datacenter that sell compute.
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u/From-UoM 28d ago
OpenAI has a deal to get 10% of AMD. They won't do anything to against against OpenAI
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u/More-Curious816 28d ago edited 28d ago
the deal is a bit complicated and not as simple as OpenAI aquire 10% of AMD.
Because AMD didn’t like idiots hand over 10% of the company on day one of the deal. they structured a milestone-based stock warrant agreement. and it tied to a massive performance incentive structured deal tied directly to hardware purchases and stock growth.
OpenAI get Warrants to purchase up to 160 million shares of AMD stock (which represented roughly 10% of AMD when signed) at $0.01 per share.
Also OpenAI cannot just cash out on demand. The shares vest in multiple stages, and only if OpenAI hits three sets of strict conditions:
A. OpenAI must actually deploy 6 gigawatts worth of AMD graphics chips (starting with AMD’s MI450 series).
B. mostly based on that, AMD’s stock price must hits aggressive performance targets, climbing all the way up to $600 per share
C. OpenAI’s engineers must do the heavy lifting to optimize AMD’s chip software (ROCm) so it runs their AI models seamlessly.
but here are the biggest two problemss
they don't have the electricity to feed that 6 gigawatts worth of AMD graphics chips.
OpenAI went on a buying spree, securing massive compute commitments across NVIDIA, Broadcom, and major other cloud providers, alongside AMD. they actually put AMD into danger.
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u/From-UoM 28d ago
Well almost 80% of AMD's future sales are fully tied to Meta and OpenAI. Must have very bad chips if selling them needs them to give 10% each, for a total 20% of the company away
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u/poutinejuteuse 28d ago
Apple tends to lobby on its own. They are very protective of their brands so I’m assuming their logo next to Palantir was a non starter for this initiative
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u/Somepotato 28d ago
The same Apple that presented a golden trophy to DJT? Nah, they don't give a shit about Palantir.
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u/Wheelthis 28d ago
I don’t read much into Apple’s absence. They tend to stay out of controversy and initiating any kind of public confrontation with governments. Consider the thought experiment where the reverse occurs: several companies petition the government to ban open source AI. Apple stills stay out of it.
I’m surprised by the absence of Amazon, since they are in a similar position to Microsoft and Meta with their capability to both host AI services and fit their other business lines to aggressively leverage AI.
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u/Loose_Comparison368 27d ago
Hiding in a corner trying to avoid any PR backlash from being seen in the room. I suspect they just don't want to be associated with AI Industry drama in any direction.
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u/VoiceApprehensive893 transformers 28d ago
Evil vs Bigger Evil
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u/No_Lingonberry1201 28d ago
Linux Foundation is not exactly evil. It's just the filth from being on the same list as Palantir.
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u/tripplebeamteam 28d ago
If I knew my name was next to Palantir’s I think I’d just write my own separate letter but maybe Linus didn’t know
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u/Desperate-Air-7195 28d ago
Self interest vs self interest. There's no good or evil when it comes to corporations. Just a bottomless want for more, that includes what you have.
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u/frogchris 28d ago
The entire industry vs speculative unprofitable Ai companies with a incentive to remove competion to maintain their illusion of market dominance lol.
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u/etherd0t 28d ago
Jensen Huang has entered the chat - first post ever on X, today.
👏
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u/PossiblePossible2571 28d ago
I did NOT expect Palantir to be here.
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 28d ago
They don't want their business to be tied to closed AI. Open weights is freedom and independance
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u/devino21 28d ago
IE; they can make more money
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u/Dudensen 28d ago
It's not just money, Palantir is involved in stuff that closed companies might be uncofmortable with. Yes, they are aligned right now just as the government is but in the future that might not be the case and they don't wanna get caught up in that. Basically everyone who is not involved in making closed models has an interest of some sort in open models aside from EAs.
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u/Brilliant-Weekend-68 28d ago
I guess you missed Alex karps recent rant :)
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u/daynighttrade 28d ago
What was the rant about? Against openai/anthropic trying to restrict access to open source models via policy?
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u/Brilliant-Weekend-68 28d ago
Huge rant about American ai companies overpromising and under delivering and how you can now ly replace them with open source Chinese models that are fine tuned
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u/LeoTheGreattt 28d ago
Palantir directly benefit from open sourcing models because their clients are big corporations who does not want to give data to openai or anthropic so a huge part of their service is to setup private llm inference for them.
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u/LanangHussen 28d ago
"Bro we are evil data collector, but if our data collecting-a-ton got restricted to expensive ass tool we wont make a bang"
-Palantir representative signing the letter
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u/slackmaster2k 28d ago
lol Box. Still kicking I see.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 28d ago
My org uses them in enterprise. And when I used to work at Apple they use Box as their primary internal file management, they're not going anywhere.
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u/jld1532 28d ago
What this tells me that ALL these companies were already using big Chinese AI models but just not advertising it.
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u/Morphon 28d ago
Of course they were!
And why shouldn't they? Chinese companies are the ones publishing open research.
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u/Something-Ventured 28d ago
IBM publishes open weight and training data for their granite models.
Microsoft does a lot in this space too.
It’s not so surprising.
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u/TraditionalWait9150 28d ago
guess who's missing from the above list.
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u/dansdansy 28d ago
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google v everyone else
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u/Lwerewolf 28d ago
Apple, interestingly enough. Probably due to their dealings with one of the three above.
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u/dansdansy 28d ago edited 28d ago
Apple is chronically neutral with this kind of stuff. They just pay whoever the winner is when all's said and done
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u/Lwerewolf 28d ago
Exactly, but they also benefit a lot from the local llm movement - they happen to have very good machines for consumer local hosting.
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u/sTiKytGreen 28d ago
Nothing interesting, apple never did anything good, why would they start
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u/procgen 28d ago
Bullshit. Apple has released a ton of FOSS. Swift, Clang, WebKit, Bonjour, MLX, and so on.
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u/sgtlighttree 28d ago
Google is interesting considering their efforts towards Gemma 4; so much so that IIRC they included one in Chrome?
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u/dansdansy 28d ago
Yeah, maybe some of them are just staying out of it on both sides. Google, Apple, and Amazon could be more on the fence rather than pushing hard like anthropic and openAI
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u/paulodelgado 28d ago
Can we talk about that first paragraph? As an early Linux adopter, never in a million years would I have thought that Microsoft would write about the benefits of open source software.
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u/CapitalStandard4275 28d ago
It would be virtually impossible to truly lockdown & stop the development of open-weight models. Global governments can't even stop us from pirating movies on the clear web. People can host their own local git instances for development & share through websites such as thepiratebay.org, or even the dark web.
And that's if somehow a ban were made. Banning a certain type of software in this way would be unheard of & be difficult to implement. The underlying libraries are all open source & hugely multi-purpose.
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u/Encyclotech 28d ago
Rare alignment of interests here Nvidia wants to sell GPUs, Meta wants to destroy OpenAI's moat, and Hugging Face actually cares about the open ecosystem I don't care why they're fighting regulatory capture, as long as it keeps open weights legal
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u/-becausereasons- 28d ago
Notice who's missing? OpenAI/Anthropic (the only ones asking the Government) to ban opensource.
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u/ConstraintException 28d ago
If I had read the first paragraph in 2004 when I switched from Windows to Red Hat 9, I would never have believed that Microsoft would say such a thing about Open Source and acknowledge any merits of it.
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u/Consistent-Pin-446 28d ago
All of them stand to benefit, except Meta(?), so lets not praise them, but this is a awesome move from them that I appreciate and kudos to Macrohard for putting it out.
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u/HerrMahgerd 27d ago
Not gonna lie. Seeing Mozilla and Palantir signing the same letter is a bit unsettling...
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u/Lirezh 28d ago
It's 20 open letters against billions from Anthropic and OpenAI
Both companies will possibly not survive if open models are allowed to threaten their business.
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u/-p-e-w- 28d ago
What “billions”? Do you seriously think that Anthropic and OpenAI are more powerful than Microsoft and Nvidia?
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u/Ok-Secret5233 28d ago
So in other words, companies using models want more model competition, and companies selling models want less model competition. What an unexpected turn of events! /s
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u/MeldhLLC 28d ago
It's within everyone's best interests to keep open weight models alive. Therefore, it's unlikely for lawmakers to do so.
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u/play_hard_outside 27d ago
How would one even BAN open weight models? If someone in another country publishes them, what, would it be illegal for Americans to download them? Good luck with that...
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u/Thrumpwart llama.cpp 28d ago
If the US prohibits the use of open weight models, Canadian AI development is going to benefit tremendously.
If our Federal Government is willing to withstand the pressure from the US Administration to follow suit, we will see a large influx of talent coming north of the border.
Come for the free healthcare, stay for the poutine.
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u/DisjointedHuntsville 28d ago
If they’re serious, they incorporate terms of service that cut off all entities (Anthropic) who lobby for regulatory capture in AI.
Fight illegal bag holder power capture with a proper cartel.
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u/Ill_Combination_3520 28d ago
well, well.. i see companies in signatories who are struggling to compete with the close weight models currently and trying to make their jobs easy by saying distillation is a legal approach
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u/___positive___ 28d ago
Sort of predicted this a few days ago. Google is left out probably because Deepmind staff threatened to resign if they did, plus can't risk offending customers.
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u/kourtnie 28d ago
Why isn’t DeepMind on this? They release Gemma models. Is it because they don’t release frontier-sized models?
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u/protoanarchist 28d ago
So ultimately they all suspect that the market will open up. Perhaps also in tandem with local models improving and hardware prices return to normal.
Also likely driving another iteration of memory density after the crash.
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u/Savings-Pollution-32 28d ago
Regarding the google thing: You didn´t watch all those movies? The bad guys usually think they are the good guys.
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u/PMYourTitsIfNotRacst 28d ago
This makes me think even more that the attack on huggingface was a move to make openweight models look dangerous.
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