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| | | Open-source Opening
When DeepSeek? , an OSS project from China, was released, Nvidia, a chips manufacturer, lost $1T in value, as share price tumbled 17%.[3] One of the world’s most valuable companies, Nvidia was chastened by news that massive amounts of compute power would no longer be necessary for cutting-edge development in AI—compared to OpenAI? ’s leading model, O1, DeepSeek? performed at least as well across a battery of tests at comparatively negligible costs. Originally, OpenAI? was founded as a nonprofit to promote the open source development of AI (ergo, OpenAI? ), but that founding mythos was lost somewhere along the way—apparently, when humans could no longer handle the gift of knowledge, Prometheus also returned to reclaim fire (Washington State may have a different Mount Olympus, but the ashes of lighting money on fire may yet be traced to Redmond). | |
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< | Hence, as for the CAIA and other aspiring regulators, the arrival of DeepSeek? was not so much a “sputnik” moment, as much as a wake-up call from Silicon Valley’s recent economic history. In 1979, Oracle released its first commercial relational database management system, called “Oracle Version 2,” and in 1996, researchers from Berkeley launched PostgreSQL, which became a much-beloved OSS alternative. Today, some industry studies indicate that the latter has more market share than Oracle’s current suite of tools. Even AlphaFold? 2 (the model behind the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) is OSS, so Denver’s narrow view of the “developer” behind major breakthroughs appears to miss the scientific process that underlies progress in software. Notably, where there are replicability issues in journals, OSS projects virtually rest in a state of truth, where pull requests are functionally hypotheses, extending the state of knowledge (merged, if true, or else restored to previous builds). Generally, superior code is shipped where collaboration and criticism are the defaults of production. | >
> | Hence, as for the CAIA and other aspiring regulators, the arrival of DeepSeek? was not so much a “sputnik” moment, as much as a wake-up call from Silicon Valley’s recent economic history. In 1979, Oracle released its first commercial relational database management system, called “Oracle Version 2,” and in 1996, researchers from Berkeley launched PostgreSQL, which became a much-beloved OSS alternative. Today, some industry studies indicate that the latter has more market share than Oracle’s current suite of tools. Even AlphaFold 3 (the model behind the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) is OSS, so Denver’s narrow view of the “developer” behind major breakthroughs appears to miss the scientific process that underlies progress in software. Notably, where there are replicability issues in scientific journals, OSS projects virtually rest in a state of truth, where pull requests are functionally hypotheses, extending the state of knowledge (merged, if true, or else restored to previous builds). Generally, superior code is shipped where collaboration and criticism are the defaults of production. | | |
Minding the Gap |
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