I wonder how different things would be if the CPU and GPU supply chain was more distributed globally: if we were at a point where we'd have models (edit: of hardware, my bad on the wording) developed and produced in the EU, as well as other parts of the world.
Maybe then we wouldn't be beholden to Nvidia's whims (sour spot in regards to buying their cards and the costs of those, vs what Intel is trying to do with their Pro cards but inevitably worse software support, as well as import costs), or those of a particular government. I wonder if we'll ever live in such a world.
> if we were at a point where we'd have models developed and produced in the EU, as well as other parts of the world.
But we have models developing and being produced outside of the US already, both in Asia but also Europe. Sure, it would be cool to see more from South America and Africa, but the playing field is not just in the US anymore, particularly when it comes to open weights (which seems more of a "world benefit" than closed APIs), then the US is lagging far behind.
> Llama (v4 notwithstanding) and Gemma (particularly v3) aren't my idea of lagging far behind...
While neat and of course Llama kicked off a large part of the ecosystem, so credit where credit is due, both of those suffer from "open-but-not-quite" as they have large documents of "Acceptable Use" which outlines what you can and cannot do with the weights, while the Chinese counter-parts slap a FOSS-compatible license on the weights and calls it a day.
We could argue if that's the best approach, or even legal considering the (probable) origin of their training data, but the end result remains the same, Chinese companies are doing FOSS releases and American companies are doing something more similar to BSL/hybrid-open releases.
It should tell you something when the legal department of one of these companies calls the model+weights "proprietary" while their marketing department continues to calling the same model+weights "open source". I know who I trust of those two to be more accurate.
I guess that's why I see American companies as being further behind, even though they do release something.
> both of those suffer from "open-but-not-quite" as they have large documents of "Acceptable Use" which outlines what you can and cannot do with the weights
Even worse, the "Acceptable Use" document is a separate web page, which can be updated at any time. Nothing prevents it from, for instance, being updated to say "company X is no longer allowed to use these weights".
The "FOSS-compatible" licenses for these Chinese and European models are self-contained and won't suddenly change under your feet. They also have no "field of use" restrictions and, by virtue of actually being traditional FOSS licenses being applied to slightly unusual artifacts (they were originally meant for source code, not huge blobs of numeric data), are already well-known and therefore have a lower risk of unusual gotchas.
Maybe then we wouldn't be beholden to Nvidia's whims (sour spot in regards to buying their cards and the costs of those, vs what Intel is trying to do with their Pro cards but inevitably worse software support, as well as import costs), or those of a particular government. I wonder if we'll ever live in such a world.