The opensource I look up to, is the source that enabled the takedown of Microsoft. Back in the day, Microsoft was on the same track as Apple, and OpenAI is now. To dominate the entire server market. I hated them, took every opportunity to replace them. It felt like paying a tax just to exist, just to run a website or a file share. Opensource was what got us into position to run our own servers, with Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php, Samba, and be paid (jobs created) to contribute to and run opensource at companies.
I think those projects did well for themselves, and for their users/contributors.. What really scares me now is not just that we let google and apple dominate mobile and wall the garden, but that AI is the new battleground and quickly heading toward dystopia where we again, aren't able to run our own computers.
Interestingly, without china releasing these opensource models, it would appear the battle was already lost.. Zuck will/would cave to closed source eventually, but not if china keeps releasing. Sadly, the gathering of all the data from the internet and running it through billion dollar data center training, isn't something a startup or small operation can do and therefor, we are at the mercy of the big corporations like never before.. We can only hope that the models themselves will remain useful and available.
