Re:Open Source AI Is the Path Forward
by jsheard on Tuesday July 23, 2024 @11:41AM
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I also think that something like Chromium is a better analogy to corporate-backed open source models than a grassroots project like Linux is. Chromium is technically open source, but Google has absolute control over the direction of it's development and realistically it's far too complex to maintain a fork without Googles resources, just like Meta has complete control over what goes into their open models, and even if they did release all the training data and code (which they don't) us mere plebs could never afford to train a fork from scratch.
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I think you’re right from the perspective of an individual developer. You and I are not about to fork Chromium any time soon. If you presume that forking is impractical then sure, the right to fork isn’t worth much.
But just because a single developer couldn’t do it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done. It means nobody has organized a large enough effort yet.
For something like a browser, which is critical for security, you need both the organization and the trust. Despite frequent criticism, Mozilla (for example) is still considered pretty trustworthy in a way that an unknown developer can’t be.
If Microsoft can't do it, then we can reasonably conclude that it can't be done for any practical purpose. Discussing infinitesimal possibilities is better left to philosophers.
Doesn’t Microsoft maintain its own fork of Chromimum?