Revolut says that in less than a year it’s managed to slash its [code generation] costs by roughly 90 percent by making self-hosted models its default instead of relying primarily on commercial services like Claude.
Revolut says that in less than a year it’s managed to slash its [code generation] costs by roughly 90 percent by making self-hosted models its default instead of relying primarily on commercial services like Claude.
Open weight models cannot do this, they do not have any funding. If you demand this, you are just demanding that there will never be any open models, that proprietary AI models controlled by massive trillion dollar corporations will be the only models available, and frankly the cure is worse than the disease.
It’s also impractical, like closing the gate after the horses have already gone. Open-weight, unethically trained models are already out there. They are not going away. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. They will never earn any money, so they will never be able to compensate for the training that was done to create them, unless you consider the fact that they exist, and they are open to anybody, as at least some measure of compensation.
It’s not enough compensation, but it is something. The training was certainly unethical, but so is an economic system that requires intellectual property to be transactional. Why fix one unethical thing while keeping and reinforcing another?
The only sensible and reasonable way to resolve the issue in the long term is for significant government support and patronage of the arts and content creators (and ideally all people) to be established. People who do this for a living are providing valuable service to all of humanity and that deserves to be recognized not by transactional, metered capitalism that defines each piece of art or content in terms of its raw economic value (a system easily and frequently corrupted anyway if you look at the prevalence of theft, forgery, fraud and money-laundering in the high art world), but by guaranteeing a comfortable and dignified life that allows creative people to freely create the art or other works they love and feel passionate about without worrying that they’re going to starve to death or be forced into a dead-end job if they’re not economically successful.
There’s actually a reasonable argument for global regulation of AI.
Every country faces an economic doom loop as AI becomes more capable, once it is capable of automating away a sufficient amount of labor the economy will spiral. This means every country, in a game theory sense, is facing a no-win prisoners dillema. That is precisely the recipe that allowed for nuclear nonproliferation.
It is completely within the realm of possibility for the international community to agree to control the training of models at the national level and heavily regulate distribution commercially, similar to what we do with nuclear power.