Cloud? A few years ago I wrote that the cloud was impossible without open source, and I still think that way. But when it comes to cloud infrastructure, there are only a few winners. Likewise, there are only a few winners in any given category of SaaS. Open source can enable large markets, but ultimately it doesn’t reap the big spoils from these markets because people and companies pay someone to remove the complexity of their choices. Therefore, by definition, there can be only a few ‘someones’ in a particular market.
What open source does
“I think open source was introduced as a way to create more competition and allow more organizations and more companies to build AI, build systems that they can control, and not be dependent on the big tech companies,” Delangue said. “You may be right in saying that open source gives more companies more opportunities to build, but you’re completely wrong in saying that people won’t depend on the big tech companies. That’s not how it should be, that’s just the reality.
Numerous open sources have failed to decentralize control of the cloud market. Rather, it was centralized. With so much open source out there, businesses needed a cloud vendor to help them make sense of it all. Companies did not pay much attention to the origin of open source code. In the end, AWS, by far the biggest winner in the cloud, has contributed relatively the least to open source. But that has changed over the past few years, with AWS contributing to a variety of projects, from PostgreSQL to OpenTelemetry to Linux. This isn’t my intention to criticize AWS. In the end, AWS makes it easy for companies to use open source as the user wants, that is, regardless of the source.
We can hope that AI will be different, but it’s hard to know how.
AI market winner
Richard Waters of the Financial Times points out that “Open AI’s biggest challenge is that it lacks a deep moat for business and that it faces fierce competition.” That competition doesn’t come from open source. It is competition with other companies with powerful capital such as Microsoft, Meta, and Google. One of the big problems with current AI is how much of a burden it places on users. Users neither want nor need new open source support options. Rather, we need someone to make AI simpler. Who will provide that simplicity is still being debated, but the answer may not be “a bunch of open source companies.” Because by definition, this only adds to the complexity that customers want to eliminate.
Just as we should be grateful for the impact of open source on cloud and other technological advancements, we should also be grateful for the impact that open source has on AI. However, open source will not democratize AI like other markets. What customers ultimately value and are willing to pay for is convenience and simplicity. I still believe what I wrote in 2009. “No one cares about Google because it runs PHP or Java or something like that. At least users don’t care about the underlying software at all.”
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Source: www.itworld.co.kr
