@boilingsteam This is worrying.

The “open source” models are parasiting on their behind-the-doors overseers. I doubt that it is even according to their APIs usage terms, but that isn’t relevant in the end.
Google has a moat here - they simply don’t (?) have a public API. It is the OpenAI that has to sell away its core to remain afloat.
The incentives for “foundational models” business here is to sell API access under tight contracts. With the progressively steep fines for breaches, making them only accessible for progressively bigger B2B peers. And whack-a-mole any leaks of course. “Intellectual property” gets a new ring to it.

But then there’s fundamental research, like the Google paper that brought us transformers. Even with more performance per dollar gains, the open source community is stuck with the published models until they collectively start doing their own research. This further incentivizes labs going dark.

Actually, this may be even good for AI Notkillingeveryoneism as it would be more incentives for non-proliferation of capabilities.

But then, there’s this “commoditize your complement” drive, that forces hardware vendors into fundamental research and open-sourcing capability gains - so the clients would buy their chips to run the newest and hottest models.

And this is worrying, since even if AI labs go dark or extinct the hardware vendors would be happy to plunge us into AIpocalypse.