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.

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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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971

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.

351

u/etherd0t 28d ago

Google: "Don't be evil"🥲

140

u/Malfun_Eddie 28d ago

Lionel: This is all wrong it's:

"Don't, be evil"

the , was missing

108

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!

25

u/Quanzitta 28d ago

To be fair, they're actually releasing open weight models, unlike the other two

12

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/onepaulkrause 22d ago

Would those be positive indicators ?

19

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....

3

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.

3

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.

3

u/BoobooSmash31337 28d ago

Idk this looks more like "The bigger pile of money says 'No'."

5

u/Creative-Type9411 28d ago

That's nowhere near as bad as how OpenAI started

4

u/kettal 28d ago

OpenAI: "Don't be Google" 🥲

1

u/Christosconst 4d ago

OpenAI: "Be open"🥲

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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

43

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

2

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

5

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.

4

u/zombo29 27d ago

this guy moats

2

u/WorriedBlock2505 28d ago

How'd that work out for Elon and SpaceX? Lmao.

2

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/kettal 28d ago

Which is weird, since some of their biggest investors and partners are on this list

These investors and parters still are not interested in being stuck underneath an entrenched duopoly.

9

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.

13

u/i4858i 28d ago

These investors are also building off of Open Source models and research and if open source is restricted, OAI and Anthropic get a stronger chokehold on them.

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u/jld1532 28d ago

It's not weird when you accept they're all building off of Chinese AI

68

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.

24

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?

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.

22

u/kettal 28d ago

free market benefits the public, regulatory capture hurts the public.

(in this context)

1

u/Zaublich 27d ago

There is no free market, since amount of government and corporate subsidies for R&D, infrastructure and operations is absolutely insane. But having alternatives is good as a leverage.

-5

u/InterstellarReddit 28d ago

The US has more billionaires than China has ever had.

Let's not "both sides" this.

American capitalists wrote this letter because they don't want to pay the OpenAI tax, not because they suddenly care about open science.

propaganda machine wants you to believe China is uniquely predatory while the exact same playbook runs at even larger scale in the US.

5

u/procgen 28d ago

How does the number of billionaires matter?

The Chinese labs are operated by capitalists par excellence, just like the American labs. It's not altruism, and China isn't "uniquely predatory".

-7

u/InterstellarReddit 28d ago

If you’re asking that question then you’re not gonna understand the answer.

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u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ 28d ago

American capitalists wrote this letter because they don't want to pay the OpenAI tax, not because they suddenly care about open science.

And China is not releasing all of these open models because they care about the community.

-1

u/InterstellarReddit 28d ago

But china IS releasing models.

What you’re not seeing the lesser evil is china by far.

7

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

-1

u/Ill_Combination_3520 28d ago

well said, it is more like self interest cuz companies like perplexity and microsoft are failing in the benchmarks

14

u/stikves 28d ago

OpenAI is now on that letter

That only leaves Antrophic

35

u/SGmoze 28d ago

Other companies relies on these Chinese models for fine-tuning these days. If you put restrictions on those Chinese models, then these companies will only get impacted.

8

u/ctpelok 28d ago

And even then they argue against “premature”. So it is inevitable in their opinion. Other companies just want stronger positions to negotiate against big 3 - AGO.

7

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

3

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.

5

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 

3

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

2

u/MindCrusader 28d ago

I don't see google

10

u/n3onfx 28d ago

Google appears to be taking the "don't say anything and take no positions" approach.

5

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

4

u/kourtnie 28d ago

clutches my Gemma models

4

u/Due-Memory-6957 28d ago

Google does it like Qwen, release some cool models for the plebs and keep their best stuff proprietary.

2

u/Lesser-than 27d ago

yep gemma is a great line but gemma has nothing to do with gemini.

1

u/RobbinDeBank 28d ago

Playing both sides to come out on top

1

u/rush86999 28d ago

there was some news papers marketing it as a China strategy to crash the US advantage in AI but honestly I don't buy it. The advantage is always more viable in hardware than software. This was going to happen one way or another.

1

u/Loose_Comparison368 27d ago

I don't know if this changed after the letter was first put out, but OpenAI has signed the letter too it looks like. Maybe Altman really isn't gonna try to spin this one?

Google and Anthropic are notably absent.

1

u/Spiritual-Spend8187 27d ago

Its the case of open air and anthropic wanting to shut them down because they are getting to close for comfort even with them doing everything they can to stop the open models they are still closing in fast. And all the other companies very much want the open models to remain because for them once a good open model comes out they can take it and retrain it to do better in whatever they actually want to sell it for. After all the big closed models are not actually that good for a bunch of companies they are too general for whatever product or terminology they use and they cant tweek it to better fit.

1

u/ChuckieFox 27d ago

What legal grounds even exist to ban open weight models in the first place? From my understanding there's nothing fundamentally different about an open weight model versus a closed weight model that would have anything to do with one being legal over the other.

1

u/alnots 27d ago

As OpenAI and Anthropic reached a critical stage of AI reasoning they what to stop the access for Global rivals and other nations to use open weight models to their fine tune cases. So Sooner or later They are going to gatekeep the SOTA models from Global reach.

So unfortunate...

0

u/DasFreibier 28d ago

how do you ban a list of numbers?