It all comes down to financial incentives. Unlike the internet and software where the barrier to entry was essentially free. Open source frontier models are extremely capital intensive, infact virtually impossible without hordes of money and power. So where are the incentives for investors to back an open source model? There isn’t any. The exception is Meta because they have so much capital they can endure the loss, but they have fumbled Llama.
Another potential player could be Apple if they open sourced a frontier model, and make back some of the capex on hardware. Imagine AIserve hardware with continued expansion of MacMini’s and Mac Studios.
The quickest way to lose the AI battle to China and reinstate censorship and model political bias is to hand the industry over to the government. This doesn’t just benefit democrats, whatever political party is in power will use them as tools of political means. Not to mention almost certainly pricing won’t act in accordance with free market forces but instead be regulated. See healthcare.
One reason is that politicians have vilified them for their own political means. Creating false narratives like they use huge amounts of water, when in fact the cooling is a closed loop system and use less water than a single busy restaurant. They are being used as yet another pawn piece to push inequity and climate change agendas. It’s been quite a successful strategy.
> Creating false narratives like they use huge amounts of water, when in fact the cooling is a closed loop system and use less water than a single busy restaurant
My understanding was that often multiple cooling methods are employed and the ratio of use shifts seasonally; however, that evaporative cooling was still primary method, especially in hotter climates like CA and AZ.
Can you help me understand what type of data center (size, location, etc) uses less water than a busy restaurant?
Microsoft CEO Nadella just recently said their Fairwater (315-acre facility in Wisconsin) only uses around the same amount of water as a single restaurant over the course of an entire year.
25 data center projects were canceled in 2025, up sharply from only 6 in 2024. 2026 numbers gonna be dramatically higher. 69 jurisdictions have enacted some form of moratorium, ban, or restriction on new data center construction. The friendly states such as Texas are just going to have all the data centers and thus reap all the financial and job benefits.
I think you're being single minded about the reason people don't want them. Not everyone is hungry for giant construction projects regardless of the "jobs gain"
Agreed. They should IPO first if they think Anthropic’s IPO will be bigger. Get as much capital as you can first, then use it to buy more compute and defensively.
The hype will be a lot less if Anthropic IPOs first and beats OpenAI’s numbers.
Another potential player could be Apple if they open sourced a frontier model, and make back some of the capex on hardware. Imagine AIserve hardware with continued expansion of MacMini’s and Mac Studios.
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