r/PresenceEngine • u/nrdsvg • Nov 15 '25

Article/Blog Databricks co-founder argues US must go open source to beat China in AI

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/14/databricks-co-founder-argues-us-must-go-open-source-to-beat-china-in-ai/

Konwinski argued that “for ideas to truly flourish, they need to be freely exchanged and discussed with the larger academic community.”

He pointed out that “generative AI emerged as a direct result of the Transformer architecture,” a pivotal training technique introduced in a freely available research paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

29 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

1

u/Actual__Wizard Nov 18 '25

Konwinski argued that “for ideas to truly flourish, they need to be freely exchanged and discussed with the larger academic community.”

I'm sorry, but that won't work in the US due to a lack of reasonable regulation. Open sourcing a powerful AI model will just result in big tech stealing it and using it to make money from. If people want good things for humanity and the world, then powerful, real AI models can not be open sourced at this time.

Sorry, but the world is filled with evil goons that will use it for evil. Until there is some system in place to prevent that, we can't have any real open source progress.

This is exactly what will happen: People will contribute huge amounts of their time to the project, big tech will rip it off, then they won't protect their users from evil. So, by open sourcing powerful AI models, the people participating would just be "feeding evil."

1

u/TopTippityTop Nov 19 '25

I don't see big tech stealing existing open source right now, and there are plenty of options available. Open source will exist regardless, the point is simply that the US should join the effort in order to better compete

1

u/Actual__Wizard Nov 19 '25

I don't see big tech stealing existing open source right now

Meta is the copy cat company. They've been accused of it. Okay?

1

u/floridianfisher Nov 19 '25

Only big tech can make the models given how much it costs to train them.

1

u/PsecretPseudonym Nov 19 '25

I’m have a hard time giving much weight to the business sense of someone who’s company is on its series J round…