"AI labs don't get what people want"
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■ In this week's Backchannel: Tim O’Reilly built a publishing empire that AI is helping to destroy. Yet he loves AI—as long as it’s open source. |
‘The big labs are reading the future wrong’ |
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Hi, everyone, Steven here. This week we talk to one of tech’s visionaries, Tim O’Reilly, who says that while the big hyperscalers pursue AGI, open source will be the people’s choice. Tim O’Reilly’s yardstick for measuring the worth of a company, person, or society has long been create more value than you capture. It’s no surprise that O’Reilly—publisher, internet pioneer, VC, conference organizer, and dispenser of tech wisdom—is applying that metric to the way people design and use AI. Specifically, he’s pushing for a future where open-source AI is an elixir for the masses. He worries that, like Microsoft in the 1990s, today’s hyperscalers are trying to lock users into their products. So he is promoting efforts to open-source AI technology—not only making critical technical details such as neural-net weights accessible, but unlocking the whole stack of an AI system, giving control to designers and users. O’Reilly sees AI as a new creative medium, which he uses extensively—and even has a blog about his chats with it. During our conversation, we discovered that we disagree about AI’s role in producing original content. Guess who took which side.… |
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