GoKawiilThe release of Kimi K3 has opened a fresh round of angst and confused discourse. There's a loud cohort of journalists, business leaders, and politicians arguing that open source AI is a dangerous threat. OpenAI's Dean Ball:
One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism... rather than a market product, AI is a "public good"
Freely available AI for anyone? The horror!
Frontier labs' case against open source AI is essentially: Open source models are dangerous (and un-American!). We should open the AI Pandora's Box, but only with responsible gatekeepers (toll collectors, preferably us!). Only trusted users (our most profitable customers) should be able to use it.
I want to address some bad arguments against open source AI, but some corrections on how the argument is being framed are in order:
Ball's framing strolls past the fact that open source software is the foundation of all proprietary software. This includes frontier models, which at the end of the day are software products.
Open source software is counterintuitive to people outside of the software industry. Why work hard on a product, and give it away for free?
A software program is a stack of programs, with each layer built on top of another. To build Uber, you need programming language frameworks, software to send and receive web traffic, data analysis tools, and countless other components. Most of these are not differentiators for a commercial enterprise, so it serves commercial actors to cooperate on lower components in the stack and compete on the higher level pieces that actually differentiate their products.
Frontier labs would very much like AI models to not fall into the category of "so commonplace that it doesn't make sense to compete on". Whether that happens remains to be seen.
In reality, the argument about suppressing open source models is mostly beside the point. History tells us that suppression of open source software is extremely difficult, and attempting to do so only serves to weaken companies against international competitors. A brief history of encryption is illustrative:
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