Dean Ball: belief

Transcript context

…But then we could always see open source come from OpenAI itself, right? We have seen a little bit of that. Yeah. De- DeepMind also does some open source. Gemma, I think Gemma's actually quite well... The most recent Gemma is, from what I can tell, is quite well-received. And also seems, GP-Toss, as I call it, um, GPT OSS has done, has done re- did reasonably well at least when it was a state-of-the-art model. Yeah. I really hope the labs, the big US labs keep, um, keep a toe in that water, maybe more than a toe. I think open source is, it's really important for certain kinds of use cases that m- are actually some of the most interesting to me. If we need to build common infrastructure that involves, let's just say we wanted to build an AI-enabled adjudication system throughout the economy, and we needed that. We needed to ensure that system was like something everyone was bought in on and trusted. It feels to me like that's the kind of thing that almost, maybe I bring my own private adjudicator to the, to that. I bring my own private advisor, which is Claude or GPT or Gemini or something. But if I'm, if we're gonna have a central public good style thing, there's all these public infrastructure ca- use cases you can imagine. I, I actually wrote a piece about this more than a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, where I just tried to imagine, yeah, what if we had a private adjudicatory body or these other kinds of public infrastructure, and we would... That would almost have to be open source in order to be trusted, in order to be auditable and trusted not just by different parties here in America, but internationally too. And so I really hope we continue to play that game. Uh, I do think I'm in agreement with one of the best champions and writers about open source AI is Nathan Lambert, who thinks of the interconnects Substack. I think if I were to characterize Nathan's, Nathan Lambert's view, it would be like- Open source is gonna, it's gonna do great in the long term, but in the near to medium term, we're gonna go through a period where there's a distinct lag and the economics are gonna get worse, not better for it. And yeah, I think that's one thing. I'm referring here to the digital intelligences, it's worth noting. It is-- I think there's a totally separate case to be made about robotics, where you can maybe imagine that on the robotics side, there's this kind of Cosian benefit to open source where there's all these hardware makers out there that wanna make a Cambrian explosion of physically intelligent devices. Physically intelligent cameras, physically intelligent lamps, monitors, and lawnmowers, and cars, and everything, right? Um, vacuum cleaners, whatever. Humanoids. Making all these different things, and you wanna imbue all of them with physical intelligence. But probably the lawnmower company is not gonna train a frontier robotic model, right? A physical intelligence model. And so you can imagine there being, like, a better case of really... And even s- I would say a s- a, a, like, a much stronger and more direct case for open source there. A physical intelligence model. And so you can imagine there being, like, a better case of really... And even s- I would say a s- a, a, like, a much stronger and more direct case for open source there. And also you don't... It's hard for me to imagine a physical intelligence model creating a kind of object-level national security concerns that the digital intelligences are creating. So I'm, like, maybe a little bit more bullish in the near term on open source and physical world stuff, and maybe somewhat more... I still, I'm a spiritual supporter of open source, but I think the economics and the national security realities are, like, pretty rough-…

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