this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
429 points (97.8% liked)
Open Source
32388 readers
436 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, if openai open sources all their models, what value is there left that is unique to openai? Training data? But that is only valuable if they invent a better way to make it into an "AI".
Most companies that have open source products make their money in providing support for it to other companies, so theoretically OpenAI could do that (in fact top level AI developers are pretty rare so they could charge way more than other companies do for consulting) but that wouldn't be a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars business plan because it's much too sensible.
Hosting a model of that size requires ~800GB of VRAM. Even if they release their models, it wouldn't make them obsolete since most people and many companies couldn't host it either way.
Anyone can now provide that service. Why pay OpenAI when you can pay a different service who is cheaper or provides a service more aligned with your needs or ethics or legal requirements?
Anyone that has 300.000$ per instance, the know-how to set it up, the means to support it and can outbid OpenAI, yes.
I don't see that happening on a large scale, just like I don't see tons of DeepSeek instances being hosted cheaper than the original any time soon.
If they really are afraid of that they can always license it in a way that forbids reselling.
OpenAI started as a non-profit, so it could be 100% open and still be truthful to it's original intentions.