In the 1980’s, there were no freely available C compilers (I guess Borland was inexpensive, but not free). The GNU C Compiler was the first such. The project focused on being bootstrappable, reproducibility from source with a fixed dependency chain.
Corporates took advantage of GCC, and continue to, but have also been happy that LLVM came along with its permissive licensing. LLVM was a free lunch for GPU deployment, letting corporates customize it to compile shaders without having to release the sources.
In the LLM era of mostly closed weights, closed and pirated datasets and inaccessible compute requirements, what would, or does, an open alternative look like? Or should something else be done?
These peeps https://eleuther.ai/
I think there are a few similar groups but I don’t follow these things closely.
👍 the website makes a lot of the right noises.
A giant, properly ethical sourced dataset of training material, along with an AI architecture that comes without “hallucination” and an affordable GPU which can train such a model in a few weeks?
Corporates took advantage of GCC
How so?
Seriously? Lots of corporate software runs on Linux (or BSD). What are they, or the runtimes of their language platform, compiled using?
That’s not taking advantage, that’s using the product as intended.
The tragedy of the commons seems reasonable to you.
If a corporate saves $$$ by using GCC, they should give atleast $$ back (to GNU/FSF, and to SFC etc. for the other software they use), shouldn’t they? And they don’t. That is taking advantage in a negative sense.
I see what you mean. But anyone using free software would be seen as taking advantage by that logic. While that is just how the license intended.
Just like when Intel used MINIX to create their shadow OS, the IME. MINIX is a BSD licensed project, so they were free to do with it as they pleased without returning anything to the developer or the community. Any opinions to the contrary are just developer regret in choosing the license.
You are saying that the commons is unviable. I think I am saying that that is because of corporate leeches.
No, I’m not saying that. How do you even get to that from what I’ve written?
That is the implication if open licenses can’t deter corporate leeching while positioning for collaboration with volunteers. Unless there is an ideal license unknown to most projects that avoids the tragedy of the commons.
No, you see, private and commercial use are the same. /s
“taking advantage of” something doesn’t necessarily have a negative connotation.
it often does when applied to people, but not things.
It was definitely the meaning conveyed by the context though.
How do you know?
I can read.
You are right. For anyone who was doubting this (like I was!), see definition 1 in the Merriam-Webster.
not answering the question:
but i stumbled across this https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-switch-4.1-8b
Granite Switch 4.1 8B is a modular LLM that composes a base model, multiple adapters and an encoder together so that a single hosted endpoint can move between natural-language responses, general and specialized decisions, and speech-to-text.
