We really need to band together to fund / sponsor targeted inducement prizes (a la Nobel laureate Michael Kremer) for open models.
Every 6-12 months, give out $200K to the first model to hit a min threshold on a set of ~5-10 hard benchmarks (+ perhaps one secret benchmark) using a total of 16GB / 32GB / 64GB / 128GB of VRAM (at a min context length of 200K), then move the threshold up. Quantization etc. is dealers choice, it just needs to nail the benchmark on a reference machine by using exactly that much VRAM (no mapping to RAM / disk etc.)
You could crowdsource the funding, and cross subsidize by adding targeted prizes focused on corporate needs (the classic one is PDF processing benchmarks), and say that 25% of each corporate prize funding also flows into the general prize pool.
For a lot of these open-source model companies, it's less about the $s (though $200K is nothing to sneeze at), it's the clear recognition that helps their model efforts stand out, gain usage etc.
This seems like a good idea but also just fun. I can’t train a frontier model but maybe I could compete in the 16 GB tier. I would suspect there are a ton of optimizations out there for the taking that aren’t being considered because frontier models are way above these weight classes
They already invest in open-source AI, but nothing is truly free. Commercial AI will usually dominate because devs are paid to make it their primary effort. Goodwill and part-time contributions cannot reliably compete with livelihood and profit incentives.
That's what people said about operating systems, and databases, and compilers, and so many other big complicated categories of software that over time became increasingly dominated by OSS
OSS only dominates for software that is commoditized and the published computer science research for that software domain is close to the frontier.
OSS struggles at being relevant when software is non-commodity e.g. office suites. In software domains like databases where the state-of-the-art computer science research is often unpublished, OSS struggles to be relevant at the higher end of the market on technical merits.
When deciding what should be OSS, it is useful to consider the preconditions that have made it successful.
I personally expect token production to commoditized like mobile data. It's already happening.
See open weights gaining adoption, OpenAi talking about how 5.6 is cheaper than Fable, people are taking multiple approaches to reduce their token spend, expectations for progress in hardware and algos, and certain Ai leaders talking about how token prices should be 10-100x lower than they are.
on the small chance that the four billionaires who currently have near-exclusive control of closed sota models, (that is altman, amodei, zuckerberg and musk), are not fleecing their investors and actually build AGI, closed source leaves a choice of powerful government or powerful oligopoly/monarchy.
further explanation of this list:
musk - structural command
zuckerberg - structural command
altman - de facto command after purging rivals and privatisation, loyalty of personnel
amodei - influential, could potentially overthrow current governance
Just because a software is closed-source doesn't mean the knowledge can't be shared. You don't need to see the underlying code to explain to someone architectural patterns or best practices.
The library analogy in the scenario would hold true if LLM providers refused to answer any questions about RL or Transformers.
I am a big proponent of open-source open-weight models, but mostly because I think it's just a better product. We've seen that they are much cheaper to train and operate. Frontier intelligence might not be needed for most tasks. Just let the market decide. My bet is that LLMs will become analogous to programming languages, and big labs will make their money by fine-tuning models for very specific use cases or by deploying them for customers.
I'd rather the US fund universal childcare, medicare for all, and free school lunches than give a cent to subsidize a technology the American public absolute hates.
Can’t wait for the day Altman goes to run payroll or whatever and there just isn’t enough liquidity there, full stop.
That will be the start of the world healing from a very severe psychosis and ailment, slop leaving the internet, and the future being certain and stable again for kids and such.
Largely because enough American voters, contrary to all of the evidence, believed that Trump was going to grow a sense of duty, eviscerate corruption in Washington, deliver an economy that works for the working class, and not engage in any new wars.
Number one expense for SMB is healthcare, providing a nationalized healthcare service would likely unlock trillions in value (imagine what Americans would do if they got $200-500 more per paycheck?).
Instead we are forced to watch some of the wealthiest companies on the planet burn money for fun because apparently the government is "wasteful."
The U.S. spends more money on education per student than any OECD country other than Norway and Luxembourg. Yet it gets quite mediocre results. Why do you think the U.S. will be able to do public health care in a more cost efficient way than it does public education?
I favor universal health insurance, but you’re going to pay more, not less. European countries didn’t flip some magic switch where they saved a bunch of money by just “cutting out the profit.” They do it through measures like the UK NHS setting the standards of care, so in a malpractice lawsuit the entity that says what the doctor ought to have done is the same entity that bears the cost of unnecessary tests and procedures. Efficiency is also achieved by aggressively rationing providers such as MRIs, keeping health worker salaries low, etc. There is no stomach to do any of that in the U.S.
>European countries didn’t flip some magic switch where they saved a bunch of money by just “cutting out the profit.”
They sort of have with pharmaceuticals (which to be clear is only maybe 10-15% of overall healthcare spending) by having the government negotiate drug prices nationally, instead of having individual insurers negotiate. This has monopsonistic effects, which really does cut the profit margins of drug manufacturers substantially. Of course, in many ways, they’re free riding on drug discovery funded by profits made overseas (particularly in America) but it does result in appreciable savings.
It probably means the quality of a lot of our food is inferior and we overly rely upon heavily industrialized production, overly processed foods and exploitative labor.
I think that the obesity rate is a lot higher in the US than a lot of other OECD countries, so people aren't starving but its hard to say their nutritionally thriving.
That could be more attributed to the income gap and concentration of wealth in the US as well.
How would obesity rate be related to “exploitive labor” or “income gap?” It seems like you’ve got a hammer and are looking for a nail.
Obesity rates don’t follow any predictable pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r.... The countries around the U.S. on the obesity scale are places like Egypt, Chile, Mexico, Saudi, etc. What do these countries have in common? Probably nothing other than idiosyncratic cuisine and lifestyle habits and maybe genetics (non-asian versus asian).
The U.S. system is neither fish nor fowl, there is more spending per capita than other countries' public systems and endless amounts of red tape because instead of one government bureaucracy you're also dealing with the insurance networks, the providers, etc. I certainly don't think it'll be automatically cheaper, but one can't help but think that the current system encourages hop-ons that exploit the inconsistencies and convolutions. It's like one big nightmarish parody of public–private partnerships.
But our publicly run systems are full of inefficient bureaucracy and red tape, too. Why shouldn’t we assume our public healthcare system would be operated the same way as the public school systems in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles?
Moreover, there is a massive amount of overcare that americans aren’t willing to confront. My wife’s grandmother had a stroke at 87 and was airlifted from rural oregon to a hospital in portland. She had only 3/4 of her lungs after having cancer in her 60s. The doctors wanted to do an intensive intervention, which didn’t happen only because she refused and died peacefully the next day. My parents are on medicare and they just wander into the ER every time their blood pressure goes too high. I took my 7 y/o son in for a black eye after he ran into a table. The doctor looked at him, concluded there was almost no chance of internal bleeding, but ordered an MRI (or CAT scan, I forget which) “just in case.” We got one and the results within 90 minutes because we just have million dollar machines lying around “just in case.” My daughter went to get her retainer at a small dental office in exurban Maryland, and the office had four people working at the checkin desk. I think this practice has only three dentists total.
America’s “customer is always right” culture means it will be politically impossible to roll back any of this.
Not how I view it as a 74 yo. Patients get what their doctors want as part of a culture of minimal preventive care (it does not pay) and massive medical care (procedures pay handsomely).
Try to get a unilateral diagnostic mammogram. Sorry in the system I am in there is no code for a unilateral diagnostic, only bilateral, even if only one side actually requires diagnosis.
Why? Because 2X the charge and income fir little extra care cost. And who would ever complain about such “excellent” care? Recent experience.
Frankly, dealing with healthcare claims as an American consumer is an excruciating experience and it is at the situation where “try anything else” is worth considering.
Also, as your description of overcare is happening under the current system, a profit-oriented one at that (which incentivizes the ordering of unnecessary tests and procedures) it sounds like you would actually benefit from a non-market-controlled, more modest (even austere), system!
Postwar America was built on the customer being right. The healthcare system is one of the glaring major examples of the customer not getting what it wants. Give the customer a better system.
> Also, as your description of overcare is happening under the current system, a profit-oriented one at that (which incentivizes the ordering of unnecessary tests and procedures)
Profit is part of it, but the legal system and culture are equally big parts. Malpractice claims are handled by jury trial in the U.S., and you can always get a doctor on the stand as an expert who will tell a jury that it was negligent not to order a million tests. The UK NHS avoids that by having the NHS set the standard of care. And malpractice claims have to go through an administrative system before resorting to court. And culture is big, too. Americans aren’t going to tolerate being sent to hospice before blowing through $1 million on heroic but futile end of life care.
> it sounds like you would actually benefit from a non-market-controlled, more modest (even austere), system!
I support such a system. My point is that there would be no political will to enforce modesty and austerity.
There is zero evidence we would pay more for healthcare under medicare for all, what a bunch of neoliberal nonsense.
The idea that a for-profit system is more efficient than say medicare is hilariously out of touch. Medicare is one of the most popular programs in the country (like >80% from overall public, >90% from active users). There is no reason to deny such a program from the vast majority of Americans, unless you stand to profit from it.
Our healthcare system has its flaws (to put it mildly), but nationalized systems have their own. I know people who don't have primary care because they live in a country with a nationalized healthcare service and their government, in its infinite wisdom, chose not to allocate enough doctors to their town.
When you cut out the insurance middlemen and pharmaceutical companies driving up record profits at the expense of care you can get pretty far with less in taxes
Insurance companies make like 2-4% hardly breaking the bank here. Pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money, but the US also funds most drug development which other countries freeload off of. US healthcare workers get a state enforced shortage to drive up their wages thanks to residency limits, but nobody ever wants to look at that.
If you can't tell I am extremely pessimistic about the changes of universal healthcare improving on our current system. And to be clear it's universal, not unlimited.
Insurance companies basically are banks, in that while they make low profit margins they wield such vast amounts of capital, some of which they invest in, they might as well be financial service institutions. There's also other categories of entities (pharmacy benefit managers, wholesalers and distributors) that also get a cut.
The big 7 U.S. health insurers made $55 billion in profits in 2025. Pharma industry profits on U.S. revenue was about $100 billion. Total U.S. healthcare spending in 2025 was $5.7 trillion. Cutting insurer and pharma profits out of the equation entirely would reduce spending by 2.7%.
I support universal health care. But most of its proponents are suffer from innumeracy and magical thinking. It’s very scary to me that we’d put these people in charge of health care reform.
We know how efficient government operates tho, the admin expenses of say social security and medicare is less than 3%. Pray tell, what corporation operates with 3% admin expenses?
Mothers are great at childcare and can easily provide much healthier lunches at far lower cost than schools. As for medicine, children are a small percentage of healthcare costs.
Every 6-12 months, give out $200K to the first model to hit a min threshold on a set of ~5-10 hard benchmarks (+ perhaps one secret benchmark) using a total of 16GB / 32GB / 64GB / 128GB of VRAM (at a min context length of 200K), then move the threshold up. Quantization etc. is dealers choice, it just needs to nail the benchmark on a reference machine by using exactly that much VRAM (no mapping to RAM / disk etc.)
You could crowdsource the funding, and cross subsidize by adding targeted prizes focused on corporate needs (the classic one is PDF processing benchmarks), and say that 25% of each corporate prize funding also flows into the general prize pool.
For a lot of these open-source model companies, it's less about the $s (though $200K is nothing to sneeze at), it's the clear recognition that helps their model efforts stand out, gain usage etc.
OSS struggles at being relevant when software is non-commodity e.g. office suites. In software domains like databases where the state-of-the-art computer science research is often unpublished, OSS struggles to be relevant at the higher end of the market on technical merits.
When deciding what should be OSS, it is useful to consider the preconditions that have made it successful.
See open weights gaining adoption, OpenAi talking about how 5.6 is cheaper than Fable, people are taking multiple approaches to reduce their token spend, expectations for progress in hardware and algos, and certain Ai leaders talking about how token prices should be 10-100x lower than they are.
on the small chance that the four billionaires who currently have near-exclusive control of closed sota models, (that is altman, amodei, zuckerberg and musk), are not fleecing their investors and actually build AGI, closed source leaves a choice of powerful government or powerful oligopoly/monarchy.
further explanation of this list:
musk - structural command
zuckerberg - structural command
altman - de facto command after purging rivals and privatisation, loyalty of personnel
amodei - influential, could potentially overthrow current governance
The library analogy in the scenario would hold true if LLM providers refused to answer any questions about RL or Transformers.
I am a big proponent of open-source open-weight models, but mostly because I think it's just a better product. We've seen that they are much cheaper to train and operate. Frontier intelligence might not be needed for most tasks. Just let the market decide. My bet is that LLMs will become analogous to programming languages, and big labs will make their money by fine-tuning models for very specific use cases or by deploying them for customers.
Op-ed alt link: https://fortune.com/2026/07/03/open-source-ai-same-fight-as-...
That will be the start of the world healing from a very severe psychosis and ailment, slop leaving the internet, and the future being certain and stable again for kids and such.
It’s optimistic I know.
Charlie Brown, Lucy, football.
That "so far" being a middle class the envy of the rest of the world which the US threw away to create a new class of oligarch.
"Back at the tail-end of that era, in the early 1960s, America’s richest faced a 91 percent tax rate on income in the top tax bracket."
https://inequality.org/article/tax-the-rich-we-did-that-once...
Instead we are forced to watch some of the wealthiest companies on the planet burn money for fun because apparently the government is "wasteful."
What a crock of shit.
I favor universal health insurance, but you’re going to pay more, not less. European countries didn’t flip some magic switch where they saved a bunch of money by just “cutting out the profit.” They do it through measures like the UK NHS setting the standards of care, so in a malpractice lawsuit the entity that says what the doctor ought to have done is the same entity that bears the cost of unnecessary tests and procedures. Efficiency is also achieved by aggressively rationing providers such as MRIs, keeping health worker salaries low, etc. There is no stomach to do any of that in the U.S.
They sort of have with pharmaceuticals (which to be clear is only maybe 10-15% of overall healthcare spending) by having the government negotiate drug prices nationally, instead of having individual insurers negotiate. This has monopsonistic effects, which really does cut the profit margins of drug manufacturers substantially. Of course, in many ways, they’re free riding on drug discovery funded by profits made overseas (particularly in America) but it does result in appreciable savings.
Secondary Education (6–12): The U.S. spends 23% of its GDP per capita per student. This sits just slightly below the OECD average of 24%.
I think that the obesity rate is a lot higher in the US than a lot of other OECD countries, so people aren't starving but its hard to say their nutritionally thriving.
That could be more attributed to the income gap and concentration of wealth in the US as well.
Obesity rates don’t follow any predictable pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r.... The countries around the U.S. on the obesity scale are places like Egypt, Chile, Mexico, Saudi, etc. What do these countries have in common? Probably nothing other than idiosyncratic cuisine and lifestyle habits and maybe genetics (non-asian versus asian).
The U.S. is at $20k, well over the OECD average of $15k. O my Austria, Norway, and Luxembourg are higher.
Moreover, there is a massive amount of overcare that americans aren’t willing to confront. My wife’s grandmother had a stroke at 87 and was airlifted from rural oregon to a hospital in portland. She had only 3/4 of her lungs after having cancer in her 60s. The doctors wanted to do an intensive intervention, which didn’t happen only because she refused and died peacefully the next day. My parents are on medicare and they just wander into the ER every time their blood pressure goes too high. I took my 7 y/o son in for a black eye after he ran into a table. The doctor looked at him, concluded there was almost no chance of internal bleeding, but ordered an MRI (or CAT scan, I forget which) “just in case.” We got one and the results within 90 minutes because we just have million dollar machines lying around “just in case.” My daughter went to get her retainer at a small dental office in exurban Maryland, and the office had four people working at the checkin desk. I think this practice has only three dentists total.
America’s “customer is always right” culture means it will be politically impossible to roll back any of this.
Try to get a unilateral diagnostic mammogram. Sorry in the system I am in there is no code for a unilateral diagnostic, only bilateral, even if only one side actually requires diagnosis.
Why? Because 2X the charge and income fir little extra care cost. And who would ever complain about such “excellent” care? Recent experience.
Also, as your description of overcare is happening under the current system, a profit-oriented one at that (which incentivizes the ordering of unnecessary tests and procedures) it sounds like you would actually benefit from a non-market-controlled, more modest (even austere), system!
Postwar America was built on the customer being right. The healthcare system is one of the glaring major examples of the customer not getting what it wants. Give the customer a better system.
Profit is part of it, but the legal system and culture are equally big parts. Malpractice claims are handled by jury trial in the U.S., and you can always get a doctor on the stand as an expert who will tell a jury that it was negligent not to order a million tests. The UK NHS avoids that by having the NHS set the standard of care. And malpractice claims have to go through an administrative system before resorting to court. And culture is big, too. Americans aren’t going to tolerate being sent to hospice before blowing through $1 million on heroic but futile end of life care.
> it sounds like you would actually benefit from a non-market-controlled, more modest (even austere), system!
I support such a system. My point is that there would be no political will to enforce modesty and austerity.
The idea that a for-profit system is more efficient than say medicare is hilariously out of touch. Medicare is one of the most popular programs in the country (like >80% from overall public, >90% from active users). There is no reason to deny such a program from the vast majority of Americans, unless you stand to profit from it.
If you can't tell I am extremely pessimistic about the changes of universal healthcare improving on our current system. And to be clear it's universal, not unlimited.
https://medium.com/@brian-curry-research/the-healthcare-maze...
I support universal health care. But most of its proponents are suffer from innumeracy and magical thinking. It’s very scary to me that we’d put these people in charge of health care reform.
There's absolutely no way the government operates more efficiency in this space.
Once again, what a crock of shit.
this is like saying "gov should invest in pyramid schem, because everyone is doing it". or btc. or web3 pictures of monkeys.
what i expect the gov to do is to add a 999% tax or tarif on top of GPUs bougth for AI, after the first 100mi that company spends on it each year.
Fixed the title for you