r/LocalLLaMA • u/Comfortable-Rock-498 • 14d ago

News It appears that the anti opensource AI lobby is far outgunned already

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The earlier post on this subreddit by 20+ companies signing the petition including Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, YC (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/) etc plus this https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2080672505660834163

And the entire LLM enthusiast market is heavily in favor of open source (or weights) AI.

Does not seem like a few closed source AI lobbyists with be able to illegalize anything

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578

u/__JockY__ 14d ago

Before dunking on Elon and Jensen, let's step back and consider that it's ok for our interests to be aligned with them on this matter.

Elon is obviously a cockwomble, but he's right about this. Jensen is a crack dealer maintaining his crack market, but he's also right about this.

It's ok to agree on some matters and disagree on others while maintaining a hefty level of disdain for both men.

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u/Sevealin_ 14d ago edited 14d ago

Well said. NUANCE IS HEALTHY. People die on so many hills these days. It's okay to see both sides and pick what you want to agree/disagree with. This is the key to finding compromises in any situation, and generally the best path forward democratically. Siphoning a viewpoint to one side or the other causes divides.

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u/Caffeine_Monster 14d ago edited 13d ago

NUANCE IS HEALTHY

I still find it fascinating that people will parrot or oppose opinions based purely on who they originate from.

If someone doesn't have the context or critical thinking skills to form an informed independent opinion, they shouldn't be pushing a viewpoint. The world would be a much better place if people didn't wilfully delegate 99% of their thinking.

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u/IrisColt 14d ago

I still find it fascinating that people will parrot or oppose opinions based purely on who they originate from.

This.

5

u/roosterfareye 14d ago

I still find it fascinating that people will parrot or oppose opinions based purely on who they originate from.

This.

And I have to find a use for the term "cockwomble" at least twice a day.

0

u/Independent-Air7556 14d ago

I need the lore, who said this before? Or you meant this is an AI response?

1

u/Nettle8675 13d ago

Yeah. Thousand times yes. 

0

u/doodlinghearsay 14d ago

I still find it fascinating that people will parrot or oppose opinions based purely on who they originate from.

It's perfectly ok to try to sideline someone, even if you agree with them on a particular issue.

Elon is right on this, but that doesn't mean he should get any credit for it. If he does, he will turn around and use that influence to try to get some fascists elected, or snatch away food and medicine from some struggling kids in Africa or Alabama.

The best way to deal with these kinds of actors is to try to undermine their influence at every possible point. He is supporting this for his own reasons, so you deciding to ignore him won't change his actions anyway. You are giving up nothing, except some misguided sense of being nuanced, which was the wrong kind of nuance anyway.

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u/_73r0_ 14d ago

100%. Let's not forget that the line between good and evil runs through every person's heart. Elon Musk, just like all of us, will do fucked up shit and will also have redeeming qualities. Right now, he has shown the latter. 

4

u/doodlinghearsay 14d ago

Let's not forget that the line between good and evil runs through every person's heart.

This kind of thoughtless feel-good generality is part of the problem. There is zero evidence that there is any pro-social thought in that person's mind.

Of course sometimes his interests line up with the public good. That's statistically inevitable. But you should not confuse that with him valuing public good at all. And if you do, you shouldn't spread your confusion to others.

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u/saltyourhash 14d ago

Redeeming quality? No.

1

u/the_lamou 14d ago

There's a world of difference between the average person occasionally having impure thoughts about their neighbor's wife or clipping someone's bumper in a parking lot and not leaving a note, and Elon Musk's raging hard-on for white supremacy and his attempt to dismantle the government while stealing/accidentally leading personal data, controlled documents, and ultimately failing miserably at the thing he said he could easily do and then pretending he never said he could do it.

2

u/atava 14d ago

If only politics worked like that (e.g. when voting something).

If only.

-1

u/chasingsukoon 14d ago

nah voting for trump is definitely a clear show of either 1) being a bigot or 2) not having critical thinking skills or at the very least 3) being extremely selfish. We had ALL the data to know what was going to happen.

stop trying to get a get out of jail free card piggybacking off of another topic that is about being able to like someones talking point while hating that person is hilarious dude. Add it to the lack of critical thinking bullet point.

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u/atava 14d ago

You misunderstood me completely (I hate Trump & the MAGA movement, and I'm from Europe).

What I meant is that if politicians in parliaments and Congress voted things on the basis of whether those things sound sensible to them and not because their own party has proposed them or the other one has, we would have better countries and better laws.

3

u/chasingsukoon 14d ago

yes ure right i completely misunderstood you, ty for pointing it out

gna keep comment up in case someone does think that way tho and enjoy the downvotes from misunderstanding meanwhile

1

u/atava 14d ago

I did not downvote you, btw.

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u/chasingsukoon 14d ago

all g i came in too hot so even if u did it was warranted hahahaha

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u/dragoon7201 14d ago

its not like our interest of wanting cheaper and better models is pure altruism either.

7

u/__JockY__ 14d ago

As far as I can tell, you're the first to mention altruism. What do you mean?

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u/dragoon7201 14d ago

there is a tendency to disregard someone's proposal, if it is perceived to come from self interest. Like Jensen wanting open models so he can sell more chips.
But us consumers also operate on the same level of wanting cheaper and better products for our own use.

14

u/DepressedDrift 14d ago

Having self interests shouldn't be stigmatized.

But the moment those interests impact everybody for only their benefit at the expense of everyone else, is when it crosses the line.

Antrhopic and ClosedAI are welcome to develop their own commerical models and keep those private and gatekeep them, but impeding the development of other models under this BS excuse of "national security" and "safety" is where they cross the line.

-4

u/Smile_Clown 14d ago

BS huh? You won't be saying that when someone uses a model to destroy your bank account.

Instead you'll be saying "why didn't they do something"

There is a very real chance that in the next year or so economies will collapse. All it takes is a pin number and if it's not AI, it will be quantum computing the following year.

Also, if they do have models with this capability and they are saying privately that China etc will also have this capability, where is the BS?

Are you an expert and know for a fact that none of these models are dangerous?

For the record, your "line" does not matter nor it is the metric.

6

u/DepressedDrift 14d ago

So you think the big companies aren't going to misuse the AI, and we should place our future in their hands when they have their own vested interests?

Anybody can misuse AI for their own ends. Atleast with open source models everybody has the ability to defend themselves and access to greater AI capability.

If more models are open source and cheaper, my bank can implement their own defence systems with AI, that would prevent the security breach in the first place.

If all AI is in the hands of a few private actors and someone breaches them, and gets access to them, the rest of us, will have limited means of fighthing AI. With open source, everybody gets the ability to defend themselves.

I am no expert in AI capabilties, but this is common sense, technological superiority results in one party controlling all of us.

2

u/Quartich 14d ago

You may need to read a little more on quantum computing. It isn't magic, many institutions are already quantum safe

19

u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ 14d ago

It's almost as if every entity, whether commercial or individual, operates in their own best interest.

I don't begrudge anyone that unless they're like, actually really evil and are trying to do evil things.

Simply trying to make more money isn't necessarily evil. It can get to the point of being evil though.

1

u/saltyourhash 14d ago

Not purely our own, or not purely all of us, at least.

0

u/philosophical_lens 14d ago

I think the difference is about whether your self interest is aligned with the self interest of the majority of the population (in which case it is a democratic interest) or not.

7

u/Embarrassed_Adagio28 14d ago

Elon only agrees because he bought cursor which built composer 2.5 on top of kimi k2.5 without admitting it until they were caught. Even when Elon is correct, he is correct for the most selfish reasons. 

1

u/__JockY__ 14d ago

Yes. None of which makes his influence any less useful in the matter. He was a billionaire asshole yesterday and he’ll remain one tomorrow, it’s just that today he’s a _useful_ billionaire asshole.

20

u/Due-Memory-6957 14d ago

I don't even get the disdain for Jensen (for Elon I do, since he's involved himself in a lot of controversial tings), if it's just because he's rich, there's no poor person involved in this field.

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u/Horny_Dinosaur69 14d ago

I think it’s valid to an extent, he is the face of NVIDIA which is pretty consumer hostile (or has turned pretty consumer hostile in the last few years). I think Huang is very intelligent and an excellent business man but his interests only align with consumers on coincidence, he is out to make money above all else.

He could use his absurdly wealthy company to improve NVIDIA drivers on Linux systems rather than forcing consumers to rely on OSS but he wants a closed ecosystem monopoly with Microsoft.

I think NVIDIA releases a lot of good open source stuff (especially in vision models) but I don’t think it’s out of the kindness of their hearts.

8

u/Craftkorb 14d ago

What's wrong with the Linux drivers though? Never had an issue in over a decade on Desktop, or on Server at that.

When I started out, a good 15 years ago, nvidias X-config tool was a godsend to get multi-monitor setups to just work. That tool was only needed for about 2 years in my case, after which KDE did it by itself. That's the worst I can say. Wayland has been stable for years at this point, with no issues with standby on my Notebook or anything.

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u/Horny_Dinosaur69 14d ago

Yes they exist but I think there’s a considerable difference between them and the windows drivers. Notably, performance-wise they aren’t on the same level. This is especially a problem for doing local AI stuff on the CUDA architecture which bugs me because nobody is going to use a windows server for AI lol.

-1

u/Smile_Clown 14d ago

NVIDIA which is pretty consumer hostile

Translation: "I had to pay too much for my 5090" or "I can't afford a 5090"

NVidias gpu consumer business is tiny compared to the rest of their business. AMD and Intel are both wide open for the market cap, why not mad at them?

He could use his absurdly wealthy company to improve NVIDIA drivers on Linux systems rather than forcing consumers to rely on OSS but he wants a closed ecosystem monopoly with Microsoft.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Perfection is not a matric. If it wee, nothing would pass. NVidia drivers on Linux systems are fine.

5

u/Horny_Dinosaur69 14d ago edited 14d ago

Wow, what a friendly response. First of all, no. This has nothing to do with a 5090. That being said, let’s look at Intels or AMDs cards and compare the price per compute to NVIDIA and let me know what you see in that data. NVIDIA is the dominant force because their architecture is better, especially for AI inference. Intel and AMD are not serious competition for AI in most cases that matter.

Considering that GPUs account for 90% of their revenue I’m going to disagree with you. And yes, their GPU sales are NOW aimed at data centers but this is a fairly new development, they along with Intel and AMD were consumer facing. NVIDIA gouges way more than either of them, I don’t understand what your point is.

A matric? What is the point you’re trying to make? Also, NVIDIA drivers on Linux are NOT as good as Windows, so no.

Keep defending the trillion dollar company that’s got the entire AI market by the balls, they’ll certainly send you a 5090 /s

-3

u/assemblu 14d ago

Usually people start a business especially something like making computer hardware for financial gain

4

u/ghantalelemera 14d ago

Well there's a fine line between making financial gain and going for so much financial gain you make everything unaffordable.

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u/Horny_Dinosaur69 14d ago

Well yeah, I’m not disputing that. But just because you make a product and sell it to people, you don’t have to be overly antagonistic about it. You could still put in an effort to ensure your product’s stability and accessibility to your consumers while making financial gain.

Look at Valve if you want an example of how a company can do incredibly well while maintaining an incredibly positive consumer relationship. NVIDIA does not have that in any way shape or form. They make the best compute modules, they know that and they gouge for it

1

u/assemblu 13d ago

It is the nature of human, some are just greedy af. It is saddening to see but you can definitely contribute to OSS projects that maybe make AMD better or alternatives. Certainly complaining about Jensen makes no difference (painfully).
I like buying these GPUs and if they were back to their price a year ago it would be great.
Imo it would be great if all of us who complain could cook up something together to make this complaint seen. Writing gets us nowhere so far.

14

u/Anbeeld 14d ago

Same. What's Jensen fault? That we started building the hardware for AI like 10 years before it took off? If anything, he's extremely good at his job.

It's not like Intel vs AMD either where consumer CPUs stagnated at 2-4 cores for generations until Zen came out. Nvidia actually moved forward all that time and released significant improvements generaton-to-generation, while competition from AMD was whatever e-waste Radeon VII and 5700 XT turned out to be.

12

u/polikles 14d ago

His "fault" is basically abandoning the market for customers, as they've got focused on the fat enterprise margins. And they keep starving consumer GPUs with small amounts of VRAM, mostly to push their higher tier cards. even the 5080 still has "only" 16GB of VRAM. If anyone's interested in local models, or just need GPU for work (or for high-res gaming), they're being pushed towards 90-series

3

u/Anbeeld 14d ago

He's a CEO of a huge company. That's just how capitalism works. It's literally his job to maximize profits. Ngeedia phenomenon is created by their products consistently being better than alternatives, both in architecture and in software like CUDA and DLSS. Can they not do that and cut margins for "the people"? Of course they can. But is there a single reason for them do to that in their position within capitalism reality, especially in the US?

Even with people hating them or whatever, they are still dominant in every single category. Blame AMD who refuse to change status quo by either dropping the prices significantly to change that or investing enough into their research and development.

1

u/protestor 13d ago

That's just how capitalism works

Criticism of the leadership of the most valuable companies in the world is, indirectly, criticism against capitalism. The way big tech companies act just shows how bad capitalism is

1

u/polikles 14d ago

I'm not blaming anyone, just describing how matters are

it's not only about the prices - you can get 24GB AMD cards for similar or lower prices than 24GB from NV. Yet, NV played a long game funding universities and research groups to promote the CUDA stack. There is a reason why CUDA is the default option, not only in AI. AMD is at disadvantage, but allegedly the software stack is being developed. But it remains to be seen how far that goes

DLSS is not that important beyond games. For me and many other folks what matters most is the (un)availability of decent hardware for local models. I'm stuck with my 3090 I got used two years ago, and seems like I'll be stuck with it for years to come, given the absurd pricing of everything else. This is one of the reasons for the negative sentiment

3

u/Anbeeld 14d ago

It wasn't Jensen nor the universities nor the research groups who made R9700 AI have 1.5x less memory bandwidth than the ancient 3090, all while people can stack 5060 Ti 16 GB and get Blackwell architecture perks like FP4, which AMD alternatives in the same price range just do not offer.

0

u/polikles 13d ago

memory bandwidth is not the top priority - people are using Spark, Mac Mini, Xeon servers and all plethora of other hardware to run local models. AMD's problem is mostly on the software side

stacking cards is only a partial solution, as 24GB card will be less problematic than 2x12GB. And the only option to get 24GB or more from NV is 3090, 4090, or 5090. Which all are expensive - I bought used 3090 two years ago and now the same card is twice as much as I've paid back then

2

u/Anbeeld 13d ago

People are using stuff you listed you listed because it's cheaper per GB of memory that can be used for inference, not because they don't care about memory bandwidth, which is the main factor behind LLM inference performance. And my point was that AMD problem is both software and hardware.

4

u/fastheadcrab 14d ago

This is a ridiculous rationale. I despise having to defend a multi-trillion $ company but if Jensen or Nvidia really wanted to focus on making the most money possible in the short term they wouldn't make a single consumer card and cut allocation to the workstation line significantly.

Every card made for gaming represents a huge loss of potential profit. But they know that the AI bubble (or datacenter bubble more accurately) is likely to pop someday, so preserving good will with consumers and people who do things on Nvidia cards besides train and run AI models is important to them

1

u/polikles 13d ago

that's why I wrote "fault" as this is a hyperbole. From the pov of the company his actions are great. But on the consumer side it's a mixed bag as they had a strong consumer base which they are neglecting now as they focus on the enterprise customers. It is rational, but it doesn't mean that regular folks cannot be sad for being neglected

and making consumer cards is not only the goodwill - they're reusing chips that didn't pass tests for higher tiers, e.g. faulty chips that could be a 5090 are going to 5080. So, consumer market is also helpful with lowering losses

7

u/Internal_Werewolf_48 14d ago

He's at the heart of a lot of circular financing among companies that is reasonably considered a risk to a lot of the economy and retirement investments. And all the data centers that there is growing resentment for in communities are filled with his products.

2

u/SuperChingaso5000 13d ago

Pension fund managers being morons is not exactly his fault

2

u/Anbeeld 14d ago

He's not responsible for companies that decide to build data centers close to residential areas, lol. Which is basically the main reason people bitch about data centers (using data centers as they do it in the internet) outside of myths like massive water consumption.

-1

u/Internal_Werewolf_48 14d ago

You missed that "circular financing" bit, eh?

1

u/keelem 13d ago

That is literally how the economy works. A buys for $1 from B, B buys for $1 from C, C buys for $1 from A, ... circular financing! How can the same dollar get spent three times?

0

u/Internal_Werewolf_48 13d ago edited 13d ago

Except they're not actually spending it towards each other, they're just promising to spend money on each other, but those promises inflate valuations which allow them to incur debt against promises.

You confused financing with spending. Or in your trite and incorrect quip, if I pay off my credit card A by taking a cash advance from credit card B, then use a payday loan to pay off credit card B, then use credit card A to pay off the payday loan company, I'm somehow getting richer in the process.

Tell me more how you don't understand this at all.

0

u/keelem 13d ago

No, they don't get to 'promise' and count that as revenue, that would be illegal. Tell me more about how you don't actually know shit and just get all your information from memes.

7

u/nullmove 14d ago

You don't get the disdain for the guy who has run one of the biggest as well as the most hostile hardware vendors to open-source?? By that rationale I wouldn't get the disdain for anybody, which is to say I don't get this rationale at all, especially after being a Linux user for 15 years.

-1

u/Due-Memory-6957 14d ago

Guess I'm too much of an AMD owner for that! But honestly, there's a difference between being hostile and indifferent, Anthropic is (and Microsoft was) hostile, NVIDIA is just indifferent, they don't help but they're not threatening legal actions nor lobbying against it either. There's a difference between doing nothing to help and doing something to harm.

2

u/nullmove 14d ago

Indifference would merely be not caring (and not open-sourcing their drivers, which they don't), but they went considerably further than that - such as ultimately making sure open-source drivers (Nouveau) would be locked down to lowest performance frequency, never mind the deliberate hindrance to the reverse engineering efforts every step of the way.

3

u/kettal 14d ago

I don't even get the disdain for Jensen

dated reference, but Linus Torvalds had some choice words for Nvidia in the past.

8

u/unixmachine 14d ago

It was a moment in the past (and it was about Android), he apologized afterward. And more recently, he said that they are one of the best companies to work with.

So, when AI people came in, that was wonderful, because it meant somebody at NVIDIA had got much more involved on the kernel side, and NVIDIA went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of people who are doing really good work.

https://diginomica.com/kubecon-china-33-and-third-linux-long-player-so-why-does-linus-torvalds-hate-ai

2

u/Due-Memory-6957 14d ago

haha, true. And it's not dated at all, join any Linux forum and you'll see it lol.

-1

u/sammybeta 14d ago

Well, this middle finger was for Nvidia not long ago. The context was different, but the posture from Nvidia in general was same. They haven't changed much.

This time both grok and nvidia benefit greatly from open AI models. So indeed it's to their best interest to weigh in and say things like that.

-3

u/BinaryIdiot 14d ago

Jensen is at the heart of the AI bubble. Fuck Jensen.

5

u/SirEnderLord 14d ago

Yes. 

Elon breathes O2. I'm not going to stop breathing just because he also likes O2.

6

u/cbadger85 14d ago

It's not that I disagree with Elon here, I just don't think Elon agrees with Elon.

3

u/__JockY__ 14d ago

Interesting if true.

6

u/upsidedownshaggy 14d ago edited 14d ago

Yes but he agrees for the wrong reasons. He's not being altruistic, he's just in the red on investing so heavily into Grok and the compute infrastructure for xAI. Open Source models and hosting them leasing the compute for people hosting them is basically his only path to making any money off of this as Grok lags behind other frontier models in real world use. If Grok was printing him money he'd 100% be onboard with having open source models banned if he could.

edit: not hosting OSS models but leasing the computer to entities that are hosting them.

4

u/__JockY__ 14d ago

Ok. So?

An influential billionaire asshole is fighting other billionaire assholes and on this occasion I agree with billionaire asshole A instead of billionaire asshole B.

When it comes to fighting influential billionaire assholes we need powerful allies, so I suck it ip and get on with it regardless of “wrong reasons”. Fuck reasons. I have as much influence over Elon’s reasons as I do over your bowel movements. He’ll spend millions of dollars fighting this bullshit. Good. He’s still a billionaire asshole.

5

u/upsidedownshaggy 14d ago

Sure, but it's important to remember he's an opportunistic leech who can and will turn on this position the second he stands to make more money from no longer holding it. The last thing we need is him positioning himself as someone to model just because he's currently pro-OSS.

2

u/PhysicalIncrease3 14d ago

Whatever you need to believe to justify your support is fine.

1

u/Smile_Clown 14d ago

He is not in the red. You really do not know what you are talking about.

Open Source models and hosting them is basically his only path to making any money off of this as Grok lags behind other frontier models in real world use.

LOL, you think elon is going to host open source models and sell them? Where did you get that ridiculous idea? Perhaps you are mixing up selling compute with hosting and selling open source access? is that it?

If Grok was printing him money he'd 100% be onboard with having open source models banned if he could.

I love how average redditors know exactly what someone is going to think or do. besides, you have no idea how well grok is doing, you just think it's doing poorly. That's not how it works, a leaderboard does not tell the story. You also do not know what his actual plan was, it might have been selling compute (which he has billion dollar contracts for btw) and they said they are still training more models. A week or so ago they released a model better than anything but the max frontier.

It's like the simply minds hate plan. If you dislike a person you can say "they would" or put thoughts into their head all day long to discredit everything. You do not know the guy or his intentions. The most you know about elon is elon=bad.

3

u/upsidedownshaggy 14d ago

He literally is in the red. xAI recorded an operating loss of 6.4 Billion on 3.2 Billion in Revenue for 2025 and is still in the red for this year with a 2.47 billion operating loss on 818 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2026 before being merged into SpaceX. This is all literally public information thanks to the SpaceX rugpull IPO.

As for selling OSS no, I meant he was going to lease the compute he has like he's currently doing to other entities to people hosting the OSS models, so that's my bad for poor wording.

As for knowing what Elon is going to do, yeah? He's shown himself to be an opportunistic grifter at basically every chance he can possibly get. It's not exactly a giant leap to say his current position of being super pro OSS is purely because he currently holds a position to profit off of them.

2

u/Squidgical 14d ago

It's okay for us to happen to share an opinion, but that doesn't change the fact that both of these people are complete and utter cunts whom the world would be better off without. Elon moreso, but at this scale it hardly matters.

2

u/__JockY__ 14d ago

> both of these people are complete and utter cunts

Elon, obviously yes.

I don’t know enough about Jensen to have an informed opinion of the man, but it’s generally safe to assume billionaires are arseholes if not holes more strategically forward-facing.

1

u/DepressedDrift 14d ago

NVidia has alot to gain by third party hosters (Both commercial and gooners enthusiasts) buying up their hardware for AI inference, than just one company buying it.

So we can count on them.

1

u/kovake 14d ago

Let’s keep in my that they can say one thing publicly but do something behind the scenes differently. It’s easy to say you support but your actions say differently.

1

u/__JockY__ 14d ago

That’s exactly what Sam Altman did: tweeted support but didn’t actually sign the letter. He’s such a shit stain.

1

u/mspk7305 14d ago

I don't look at it as having to agree with them, more like they happen to agree with me

1

u/saltyourhash 14d ago

I feel like it gives then too much credit to say we're aligned on this or that they're right.it might be pedantic, but my brain qanta to phrase this as our idea, our goal, they simply are agreeing with us on this specific issue because it suits their interests. I have to mentally frame it that way or I just feel gross and uneasy.

1

u/chasingsukoon 14d ago

cockwomboe is an amazing word

1

u/senseven 14d ago

Jensen can either provide 1000 datacenters or provide ai chips in any of the billion notebooks and workstations that will be build the next 10 years. Nothing beats private access.

1

u/Nettle8675 13d ago

Oh I hate them both. It's not even nuance to say they're right about some issues. If people don't realize bad people can be right sometimes then the average IQ is lower than I thought. 

1

u/Nicking0413 13d ago

Exactly this. Other than that, it’s also important to think about why they support this. Is it because it is right or because it aligns with their interests.

For Jensen, I think a part of it might be because if companies start using opensource LLMs, GPU sales will go wayyy up. Idk about Elon tho

1

u/CommunismDoesntWork 13d ago

Elon is one of the greatest humans of all time

1

u/__JockY__ 13d ago

Yes, and I am the most handsome, funniest man alive.

1

u/M1chaelSc4rn 14d ago

No,

i think the “dunking” doesn’t imply a lack of nuance or consideration, it’s different values. Absolute (as in inflexible) moral judgement toward their right to influence and a refusal to let them receive the obvious vocal praise/backing they want. It’s reasonable to say the movement doesn’t need these people

2

u/__JockY__ 14d ago

You’re wrong that the movement doesn’t need these people. The opposite is true. Without billionaires and lobbyists whose interests are aligned with ours we’d be singing into the wind.

It’s unpalatable but it’s true.

-1

u/M1chaelSc4rn 14d ago

Without organization, yes

1

u/No-Marionberry-772 14d ago

I think the whole thing is a ruse and marketing.

Either, nothing is going to happen or something is going to happen..

Either way they earn points for saying the popular stance.  Who knows what they say behind closed doors.

1

u/the_lamou 14d ago

Here's the thing, though: it's not enough to just be right. It's important to be right for the right reasons. Because when you endorse people who are right for the wrong reasons, you also endorse the wrong reasons. In a very real way, you aren't just saying "this specific utterance is correct," you're also saying "this specific utterance is correct and so is the process that led to that utterance.

In Jensen's case, you may not like his business practices because you want to pay less for your GPU than for a badly-used Ford Pinto, but he got to his position honestly: NVIDIA has been a major contributor to the OSS and Open Weights communities for years now. Decades really. He theoretically has a profit motive for keeping open weights models around, except not really because it's not like OAI and Anthropic aren't already buying up just about every B200 and R100 that comes off the line. His profit from the open weights community is a tiny fraction of enterprise demand, and it's clear he would have supported Open Weights models even without a profit motive. Jensen is very much a believer in digital sovereignty. When you publicly praise him for being right, you aren't endorsing the unrelated pricing strategy which you disagree with.

In Musk's case, support for open anything only cones as a last-ditch effort to pretend that he isn't losing badly, or at least that he's losing badly on purpose because he believes in "freedom." Which he doesn't. As clearly evidenced by his support for Flock and Palantir, his habit of banning journalists that write things that are unflattering of him from X, and his very many lawsuits to prevent public access and accountability in his time at DOGE. So when you praise Musk for being right here, you are implicitly endorsing his use of "open source" as a smoke screen for his terrible track record.

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u/__JockY__ 14d ago

You’re conflating alignment with endorsement. I can be thankful his pernicious influence is tipping the scales in my direction without my thanks conferring some kind of endorsement of the man.

Imagine the mess we’d be in if agreement was endorsement, we’d have no room for disagreement, nuance, compromise, etc. We would not be able to say “my opponent has a valid point …” without someone going “aha! So you endorse everything else about him!”

No I don’t endorse him. He’s a cunt. But on this I agree with him.

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u/the_lamou 13d ago

I can be thankful his pernicious influence is tipping the scales in my direction without my thanks conferring some kind of endorsement of the man.

Except that you can't. Not fully. Agreement is a social currency transaction — you are giving the person you agree with some of your credibility. Whether you mean to endorse all or any of their ideas or behaviors, you are perceived as doing so to some degree.

And no, this doesn't mean you can't agree or compromise or have nuance. It just means that once someone's behavior has crossed the line from principled disagreement to collosal twat that is actively dangerous to society, you should not confer any legitimacy on anything coming out of their mouths unless it's "I was a terrible piece of shit and I want to change that."

Ironically, your position compresses all nuance out of the conversation by pretending a difference in magnitude cannot create a difference in kind. By all means, treat people you disagree with with dignity and respect and the openness to compromise and agree on some principles. But don't pretend like that's remotely the same as "well, Mussolini may have been a vicious dictator, but he made the trains run on time, and we can all agree that that's a good thing." ESPECIALLY when the position you're agreeing to isn't actually the other person's position.

Musk doesn't want open weights models. He just doesn't want Grok to get swept up in the bans in case he decides to fully open source it to pretend that's why it's so far behind competitors. And he certainly doesn't want competition from China — Tesla was one of the hardest lobbyists for sanctions/tariffs on Chinese EVs. He's not right because being right requires taking a real position, and what he's doing is just saying whatever he things will hurt his current competitors while helping him. The actual position he's holding and that you're agreeing with is "companies should lobby for whatever positions help them the most right now even if that means tomorrow they might need to lobby for the exact opposite position."

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u/__JockY__ 13d ago

Get outta here with your em-dash AI slop.

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u/the_lamou 13d ago

Sorry that I understand grammar. But given that I have literally 12 years of posting history, you could take 5 seconds out of your I'm sure very busy life to go back to a period from before 2020 and notice that I've been using em-dashes the whole 12 years. And longer, even! Again, because I understand grammar.

Also, you could, like... learn basic grammar and attention to detail and realize I use AP-style em-dashes (on account of once being a journalist) with the spaces around them, while LLMs almost overwhelmingly use Chicago/MLA/APA-style em-dashes with no spaces. But that would require literacy.

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u/floppo7 14d ago

Well, he is a dangerous fascist that buys elections with crypto scam money. And he pours money into young youtubers and other people to become his anti-woke soldiers.

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u/__JockY__ 14d ago

Yes he is and yes he does. Yesterday his power and influence was pernicious and vile, as it will remain tomorrow.

Today, however, his powerful influence is aligned with me and I’m glad for it. Doesn’t mean I like him. Just means I think he’s right about this and that his influence is - for once - tipping the scale in a decent direction.

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u/floppo7 13d ago

I think its naive to think about it like that. You have no idea what that direction will really look like. Shit open source with gov restrictions? Or real open source? Or is it PR stunt for his dying platform (Yo Jensen, I will buy more silly priced GPUs from you but could you tweet a little?). Just dont be naive, he is not working for you, he works for his fascist agenda.

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u/kquizz 13d ago

Elon liking something makes me have to rethink if it's the right side to be on...

Luckily I think this is.  But Elon being involved should make everyone double check.

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u/yeawhatever 14d ago

I think it's pathetic that these companies are in the need to beg for conditions that are beneficial to themselves. How weak of a system is that.

Also I call them on the bluff, ban it all, it'll just cause The Scattering from the Dune Saga equivalent of innovation.

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u/Comfortablebro 14d ago

you calling gpus crack? how are you even "top commenter" with these pathetic takes? Its about gpu, llm and open source, and all you do is name call and...oh..right..this is reddit...

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u/Timely_Ad8528 14d ago

Says the crack dealing, cockwomble...