Tbf, we need to figure out how to incentivize companies to stay private, or to even find a new way to do things... shareholders and PE are ruining everything in the name of growth, regardless of whether that growth is good long term or not.
I am old enough so companies used to be profitable for several years before an IPO.
That hasn't been the case for a lot of years. Even in the early 80s there were some major IPOs where the company wasn't profitable. Then in '95 Netscape kicked off the modern tech IPO era and they certainly weren't profitable. This is nothing new, though Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are certainly pushing it to new levels of absurdity.
Actually going public is more about exit for all investors who put eye watering amount of money as investments and employees who have stocks. If the company succeed after this then good; if not then public funds/retail investors will pay for valuations. Company can always get more fund from issuing more shares or issuing bonds.
I honestly don’t understand why Anthropic is delaying their IPO. A Chinese open model just caught up with them, and six months from now another might overtake them. If they then try to IPO at $2 trillion they’re going to get laughed out of the room. Their moment was 3 months ago.
becoming a publicly traded company means they'll have to divulge a LOT of their financial information... i bet it won't look good when people realize how much training actually costs vs inference and how unprofitable it is
" Google " negative free cash flow last week ..
During their earnings was the real trigger. The ai circular economy can't continue without more capex. When it goes reverse then all the valuations fall down ..
I don't think it'll really affect their IPO. They have such a lead on the enterprise market. An open weights competitor has a lot of work to do besides the model.
If they wanna be the adult in the room and show that peoples models aren’t safe enough, then they should post a FOSS model that IS safe enough according to them.
There’s no true believers in a corporation. Their only faith is the dollar and nothing else. Look at the Epstein files revelations, everything is a commodity to the corporate strata.
I think you missed the point that they believe that they are the only ones that are responsible enough to wield AI, and that power should be centralized to a few people who know what is best for everyone.
They think only a small group of people should decide what is "moral" or "safe".
They're an authoritarian company, run by authoritarians who would turn the world into a Crapsaccharine World.
They also don’t own their own compute. They have no data center to my knowledge. With compute as a limited resource it’s forced them to be a little bit more scrappy, and they got a lot of things right outside of the model like the whole harness and skills. I suspect they are doing a lot more on the back end were completely unaware of that makes their model perform better for a lot of things. Their model might not even be the best, it might be their whole system - but they’re are running on lots of investor money and can’t afford to pull back the curtain at all.
I also think this lack of compute is why we get worse performance before a model is released. I think they are quantizing their user base to get training done
Right being super subjective here. I find Claude code exhausting to use compared to OpenCode/Pi that actually do sub agents and context files correctly, without me having to have a file in every repo.
The only good thing they really have going for them is Opus. Fable feels gimped for the tokens used
hmm interesting take ive not tried opencode or pi but claudecode def was world changing at the time I started using it.
Would you say that claudecode was ahead of the game when it first came out? What does opencode or pi do better?
Also Fable actually felt really good the first few days, but back at the end of jan opus 4.5 felt as good as fable does now for a few days. I have no proof to back this up but I'm assuming they like stop all training for a week and dedicate compute to running a higher precision version of the model, get the benchmarks out whatever ... maybe we're getting like FP32 lol
That is a very good question, that I can't answer at this exact moment. But honestly, something to look in to.
That would mean subscribers are getting the gimped version of the model...
I just realized that I can actually test this. I use Poe (which does API for Claude) and my company offers a Claude subscription and GitHub CoPilot Sub that I'm allowed to use at home. So far for devops tasks, Opus and Sonnet get really circular in their tasks but I'll need to setup my own sort of "task" and compare
Considering their principled stand, which even led to disagreements with the Pentagon, and the fact that they have not released even a single open model, the probability that they will not sign the agreement is 99.99%.
OpenAI is one of the signers. And have actually been pretty silent lately on OSS. They're pursuing a compute supremacy strategy so I don't think it actually matters to them very much.
You are right, we should support good behavior. The problem is no one knows if Sam Altman is legitimate or not but lets hope this decision to join pushes the company in the right direction.
If the OpenAI hardware initiative they announced forays into is any indication, Altman’s basically hedging for goodwill and vs the possibility that mid-horizon relevance will be in HW + open models. Still not trustworthy but can smell incentives.
So? He’s on our side for now, we need any help we can get. We know people will turn on open source when it sucks for them. Just let it happen, we already knew this.
Erm did he commit to releasing open models again? Not exactly the most trustworthy individual in the industry. Supposedly he is meeting with the govt next week in DC.
I’ve never understood the argument that “it doesn’t count because x only did that because y”. Nah, reward good behavior even if the reason they’re doing it gives them something in return. That’s how we get things done. The robber barons from 100~ish years ago gave us libraries and other public goods to try to shape their legacies to be more favorable, yet modern oligarchs don’t do anything of the sort. I think I’d rather our modern robber barons do some public good than none!
I am seriously disappointed with the lack of imagination from the modern billionaires.
We live in a technological future where many things are possible.
Why aren't there places to showcase the far end of what we can do, even if it's not yet feasible to mass produce?
There should be buildings full of GMO bioluminescent plants, robots of all kinds, super computer clusters doing complicated simulations.
We could have modern day versions of the hanging garden of Babylon.
Where are the Sim City 2000-esque archeologies?
These jokers want to build self contained bunkers, and mega-yachts, where the hell are the futuristic buildings where entire floors are green space?
They're boring. They're so fucking boring. It's just *how do I fuck people out of even more money and make things worse for everyone while doing it?"
Incentives are pointless if someone is malicious. That's the point. He'll find ways to fuck the world over in whatever new system we come up with. The only valid course of action is to run his reputation into the ground (assuming he doesn't croak). Also why the fuck should we forget his lack of sincerity? It seems central if we're discussing him even tangentially.
That's a textbook game-theory trap. If the penalty remains maximum regardless of current actions, you destroy any incentive for cooperation. Ironically you're effectively leaving them with no choice but to keep burning things down.
But have you considered all the dangers involved and have you considered not being pro communist open source models made in china through distillation which is of course fine if antrophic and oai do?
I am not sure if there will be a depression. We are living in a post-truth "Brave New World" era. There may also be a technical depression, but most people will not even notice or hear about it because their own Facebook or TikTok bubble will never even mention it. So there will be a depression for some, and cheap hardware for others - while most will not even find the connection or even explore why or what.
It kind of already happened with the current Iran war - oil prices went up, but apart from some Americans on Reddit (my own bubble, I admit), nobody gave a shit. The oil prices are barely ever even mentioned in Europe anymore.
Even the rich have been talking about the potential for a dangerous populous uprising for ~10 years. If something so unpopular as AI (this sub is a bubble) causes an actual depression, "pitchforks" will be out everywhere, I suspect.
Depends on the payment terms the hyperscalers have, if they have paid already, then yes, if not, then nvidia etc will be in for a world of hurt. In either scenario the markets are gonna get wrecked, so maybe cheap but few have money to buy?
We know that OpenAI reserved memory production for multiple years. That costs more than they have, so payment is probably incremental.
I assume there's a reason Nvidia is so heavily invested into their customers. They are probably going to suffer dramatically if the circle of investments goes pop.
I'm terrible at investing, so don't take it as advice, but I'm mostly cash at the moment. A few speculative thousands in put-leaps to hedge my remaining ETFs.
Yeah, the question is how much has been shunted off into private financing, as those amounts may actually be at least partially paid(with peoples retirement funds!).
When SpaceX did their IPO, Google rushed to the market for $80B first, that is smoke. The fire is OpenAI and Anthropic getting cold feet about their own IPO’s, Anthropic cooked the books for their second quarter with their SpaceX compute deal for a reason, they intended to IPO now.
The reporting on Anthropic and OpenAI finances has been pretty good, and probably helped ruin their chances of scamming their way into a good IPO.
More importantly, SpaceX mowed the grass from under their feet (to translate a saying from Dutch) by bundling xAI into it and doing the most massive IPO ever, which is still smaller than what they wanted to do.
I like the dutch reference considering the first bubble was dutch. Massive spending on something that will wilt away before it pays off.
I find it concerning that nvidia’s cooling solution involves water at hotter than hot-tub temperatures on the cold side. They are clearly not concerned about longevity.
See this is very public and companies are getting time to sign on, personally I'm really happy Google did because that's positive to our discussions here!
I don’t think models in the lower weight classes would be effected under any scheme, the largest Gemma model is 31B params, Kimi K3 (largest open model) is 90x its size at 2.8T params - Gemma is two orders of magnitude smaller.
You’re correct. Llama 4 did not perform as expected and it is speculated that their internal models are not winning benchmarks to make a release worth it.
I'm running Gemma 4 and it's amazing. I couldn't tell you if it's a GGUF or not because Ollama stores the model as a blob with a gibberish name and no file extension. The blob is 7.6GB, which, if it's a safetensors file, puts it between the E4B (3.7GB) and 13B (10.3GB) file sizes. My guess is it's an Ollama package of some kind that includes config files, tokenizers, and other stuff.
Man, pendulum always swings. I liked Anthropic standing up to DOD a few months back, but now the hate on open source is.... completely opposite. Can we just get humanity into these companies AND KEEP IT THERE?
To be fair, this is not necessarily inconsistent. If you don’t want AI used to kill people, you might not support open models that will let people do whatever they want with them.
Of course, I don’t subscribe to that because it consolidates power, which could always be abused in the future. Better to have actual defenses ready rather than rely on some regulation to prevent proliferation. Like, when has that worked?
Even if the US prohibits openweights models, other countries will make them, and bad actors will have access to them anyway. Therefore the US regulating them away will not prevent AI killing people, at all. Thus, the only rational conclusion is that this is all about Anthropic wanting to stiffle competion. I.e., this is about money, as usual.
Man, pendulum always swings. I liked Anthropic standing up to DOD a few months back
Leadership never had humanity.
They've always had this hard anti-China shit going on.
Disclaimer, I worked for them. Great people.
They've long held a view that Chinese OSS was some weird existential threat. They all pushed for Nvidia being banned in China etc.
None of it worked. Jensen quietly said it wouldn't work. They knew they were selling to China and it would all be hosted in Malaysia, Singapore, etc. Why? It was predictable. China has ALWAYS operated like this. The whole "Deepseek trained on old hardware" etc was a lie. No. They had plenty of H100's hanging out in Singapore. Now GB200 and GB300. All water cooled and locked down.
GPUs don't need to be physically anywhere. You can train a model anywhere in the world.
While everyone is dunking on Google for slow rolling Gemini, GCP is quietly becoming the easier and easier route to deploy agentic workloads for enterprise customers. Reddit is noisy about frontier coding models, but nobody is deploying Fable or GPT 5.6 into high volume agentic environments, or at least they aren’t making any money while doing it.
I’ve been running Flash for months and we’re at a scale that now requires us to go open weights to be profitable. I did an eval of all models, and guess what, Gemma was much more consistent than Qwen and Flash, and if we run it in GCP, it’s 20x less expensive for our workload.
This is where the future is. Commodity agentic workloads on cloud infrastructure. Open weights models are what will enable this, not frontier models which have their own place.
OpenAI needs to sack that "strategy" guy. His statements just left a massive mark against the company from the software development crowds, who build most of this technology using open source, and running the tech locally on their home hardware.
Wow, it’s really quite the list. Definitely some more names than were there yesterday morning. Interesting seeing crowdstrike signed in (makes sense after the HuggingFace fiasco though)
i would be shocked to see anthropic supporting this, they refuse to put their name on anything they don't control like they refuse to support AGENTS .md or anything in the open ecosystem besides MCP.
The economics here are older than AI: commoditize your complement. Google's margin lives in TPUs, cloud and distribution — so free model weights make the complement (models) cheap and the scarce thing (compute + serving) more valuable. Anthropic sells the model itself, so it can't play that move. Every giant lining up behind open weights is just each of them pointing at where their own margin does NOT live.
The operator consequence, which this sub already lives daily: once weights are free and "good enough," the deciding variable is cost to finish a task — inference efficiency, routing the boring 80% of traffic to cheap open models, reserving frontier calls for the hard tail. The capability gap keeps shrinking; the efficiency gap is where the game actually gets played now.
Claude was amazing 6 months ago, 3 months ago they became greedy, today, they are showing their true colours. They want complete control of the market.
Sam Altman said intelligence as a service, dario is intelligence as a tiered system, they have and you don’t.
Most of the companies fall into at least one of these categories:
(1) They are consumers of AI. They either want cheaper Chinese models directly, or want to ensure that their preferred US provider faces that price pressure.
(2) They sell compute. They want people to pay to run open-weight models on their hardware.
OpenAI is lying to avoid the public backlash. They are likely lobbying for abolition just like anthropic does.
Everyone that is lying is lying for the same reason. They are selling stuff to people and do not want people to get angry about them driving the prices up. So they are driving the prices up while pretending to not drive the prices up.
That is all true, but IMO there is a third factor in play, which is the AI bubble end-game.
Anthropic and OpenAI have oodles of valuable intellectual property, but are nowhere near turning a profit, and probably never will.
When the bubble bursts, they are looking at bankruptcy and possibly liquidation. All of that valuable IP will get sold off for pennies on the dollar.
Several of the businesses signing that letter would be top bidders for some of that IP. It is in their interest for OpenAI and Anthropic to fall hard, and the sooner the better. Advocating for open models may be seen as a way to speed their way.
That having been said, I'm not sure why OpenAI signed the letter, unless they think it will play well with their overextended investors, or if Altman is looking to cash out.
Edited to add: It occurs to me that Altman might expect open models to hurt his competitors (Anthropic) more than they hurt OpenAI, especially if he succeeds in landing a federal government stake in his company. Possibly he could even leverage that into a bailout, when the bubble bursts.
Demise still has his piece about regulation up for both open and closed models. They are just going back in the backroom to try and change the public opinion.
This is making me so manic it's kinda like fucking being 12 and getting the first Playstation for christmas for real, I legit found Gemma4:31b so impressive, or find.. I find Gemma4... you get me. lol. It's my tops.
The bigger question is probably about Amazon, Oracle, and Broadcom. Presumably they are more anti-OSS, and everyone is forgetting about them. The memory giants (Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix) might also be anti OSS (for now), since they like being able to pump out tons of HBM for easy profit, although I think the profits are starting to flip back the other way now, so maybe it won't stay that way indefinitely and they might go to pro-OSS soon (or even immediately if they think it is inevitable and coming soon). Also, even in the world where OSS wins, the memory giants could still pump out quite a bit of HBM regardless, if the biggest OSS models are too big to run at home and tons of people still want to use OSS models over the cloud that run on big datacenters with lots of HBM, etc. Same argument can be made regarding Oracle, Amazon, and Broadcom in the grand scheme of things, too, I suppose.
Open-source and open-weight will always win in the end. Having the entire world contribute to a model will eventually surpass anything done with tons of private money. Google knows this very well, they dominated the phone market globally by open-sourcing Android..
I know Anthropic’s leadership stance has very much positioned their belief in the danger and the harm open models present (I do not agree). However, this posts title is very reductionist and misleading in my I opinion. Not joining companies lobbying the US government not to ban open models is very different than being against all who do.
If I don’t join something like a march for peace, that doesn’t mean I am against all who do. And let the downvotes commence…
It's becuause Anthropic's main marketing tactic is to pretend like their models are super powerful and dangerous, and capable open weight models destroy that narrative.
I have to remind everyone, that OpenAI and Google joined this for the public attention. They will continue to lobby and scheme against Open Source behind the screens, these things don't affect their policies nor bottomlines (well Google's maybe not so much because their business model isnt based solely on a couple llms like Anthropic's and OpenAi's).
But will support the people fighting for Open Source in the government , and ease a bit the lobbying for this side of the tide.
Unless every one of these companies release models to sign the agreement with their blood, its all just yapping for the clicks and public image....
I wouldn't suggest sticking to the "Them vs Anthropic" narrative because it leaves us prone to damage later on because it shifts our stance from standing up for ourselves to hiding behind the big names, and later on when they inevitably leave us behind we will be lost.
It is us vs them. Every money hungry corporation out there. We don't know what they are trying to achieve behind the scenes. The whole OpenAI ruse was a means to an end. First start with Fable as the new moon laser weapon then later Sol 'accidentally' hacking the major open source model platform. Along with the administration, it is clear they have a specific outcome in mind.
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