January 2025 has seen two significant events for Big Tech. Their moves to further enable authoritarianism, and the neo-nazi far right & their loss of the AI arms race to a tiny Chinese upstart.
Meta embraced the trend of using open-source to weaken its competitors 18 months ago, and since then open-source AI from places as diverse as France and China have been using the same tactic. That culminated in recent weeks in DeepSeek - the open-source AI that has become the world’s most powerful.
So it seems the power of AI, or even AGI when it comes, may not be in the hands of a few Silicon Valley billionaires, but instead decentralized and democratized around the world. As those billionaires embrace ever darker and more fascistic visions of the future, maybe we should be relieved they are all hobbling and weakening each other via open-source AI.
Yeah, let me just go buy a couple 5090’s to slap together to run it…
It’s “free” now because users are training it. Once it’s trained it doesn’t matter if the underlying code is open source or not. The companies who own the hardware will start charging for it.
If you want your own you’ll need a massive upfront cost, expensive training that would still take months, and pay for the energy use.
Just because its free on a website now doesn’t mean it’ll always be free