AI startups are seeing record valuations, but many are building on a foundation of cheap, free-to-download Chinese AI models.

AI startups are seeing record valuations, but many are building on a foundation of cheap, free-to-download Chinese AI models.

Surveying the state of America’s artificial intelligence landscape earlier this year, Misha Laskin was concerned.

Laskin, a theoretical physicist and machine learning engineer who helped create some of Google’s most powerful AI models, saw a growing embrace among American AI companies of free, customizable and increasingly powerful “open” AI models.

But most of these models were being made in China, and these systems were quickly gaining ground on their U.S. competitors.

  • elgordino@fedia.io
    111·
    13 hours ago

    I’m old enough to remember the days before the Apache web server and OpenSSH. If you wanted to run these services you were forking out for licenses. Obviously the open source alternatives won out, who would even think of paying for a web server these days?

    I expect the same will happen again. Businesses who are capable of investing in their own inference compute will run the, already probably good enough, open weights.

    This will become more and more likely as the big players finally run out of investor cash to subside their services and inevitably raise prices, making self hosting more and more appealing.

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      It’s already more appealing for the private individual, which makes you wonder how businesses aren’t in the same boat, being all for profit and whatnot. I think it’s just old business mindset of the support being worth the cost, but that can come for internal hire with more intimate knowledge/speed of the environment, resulting and less downtime/issue/progress, obviously paying itself off very quickly.