Ex-Google Chief Warns West To Focus On Open-Source AI in Competition With China (ft.com) 28
Former Google chief Eric Schmidt has warned that western countries need to focus on building open-source AI models or risk losing out to China in the global race to develop the cutting-edge technology. From a report: The warning comes after Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the world last month with the launch of R1, its powerful-reasoning open large language model, which was built in a more efficient way than its US rivals such as OpenAI.
Schmidt, who has become a significant tech investor and philanthropist, said the majority of the top US LLMs are closed -- meaning not freely accessible to all -- which includes Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4, with the exception being Meta's Llama. "If we don't do something about that, China will ultimately become the open-source leader and the rest of the world will become closed-source," Schmidt told the Financial Times. The billionaire said a failure to invest in open-source technologies would prevent scientific discovery from happening in western universities, which might not be able to afford costly closed models.
Schmidt, who has become a significant tech investor and philanthropist, said the majority of the top US LLMs are closed -- meaning not freely accessible to all -- which includes Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4, with the exception being Meta's Llama. "If we don't do something about that, China will ultimately become the open-source leader and the rest of the world will become closed-source," Schmidt told the Financial Times. The billionaire said a failure to invest in open-source technologies would prevent scientific discovery from happening in western universities, which might not be able to afford costly closed models.
philanthopist? (Score:2)
I guess once you're an oligarch, you can wash your past clean...
Like Bill Gates... he's so relatable now with getting arrested and smoking dope once and maybe what LSD?
Really?
<chuckles>
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World Warn Google To Focus On Not Being F-ing Evil (Score:2)
Google is an irrelevant, evil, advertising company.
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Because tech CEOs seem to be making all government decisions, regardless.
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*Former CEO* fFTFY
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To be fair to myself, it was easily missed. I mean, it's not as if it was the first 3 characters of the story title.
Attack the idea, not the man (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should we care about anything the CEO of Google says?
Google is an irrelevant, evil, advertising company.
Rather than attack the man, let's discuss the position.
About 2 years ago all the AI systems were closed source, and there were three of them.
Then LLAMA was leaked online, and ten years of improvement happened in the next six months. People published paper after paper describing what they could do with the LLM, using it in innovative ways that no one had thought of.
As was pointed out, Meta (who developed LLAMA) simply didn't have the manpower to explore all the interesting aspects of the system.
So in retrospect, losing control of LLAMA was a good thing for AI development.
So it would seem that having AI be open source is a good idea.
Do you disagree?
Or is the fact that it's put forward by an evil person somehow relevant?
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We don't need advice on what is good for the world from the CEO ( current or former.
If he wants to do good for the world, he should advise Google to stop being evil.
An alignment problem is for natural intelligence (Score:2)
Open Source is always the way to go IMO. Just like it is to work for the people instead of against them, and to develop technologies for peace instead of for war.
Open AI looks like a good idea, hence the company's name. But Open AI is no longer Open, and tech companies are walking back on their pledges instead of acting upon them. It feels like the current state of capitalism creates incentives that does not align with the people's interests.
You want to fight climate change ? Internalize the costs of pollut
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Humans are inherently tribal. Even if in the West we talk ourselves out of our more base instincts, China absolutely wont, and will take advantage of that.
Open Source is decidedly NOT the way to go. This is arms race, and you don't do an open source arms race. If anything we need stronger export controls, like previous controls we used to have on cryptography. We need find effective ways to enforce them.
You can't pay the nations bills with individual taxes on 400 or so people, the math does not work. You
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Open Source is decidedly NOT the way to go.
That's funny when 99.9% of internet and 70+% of mobile phones run on open source.
Well, maybe the world will wise up one day and dump all that for closed source.
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Humans are inherently tribal. Even if in the West we talk ourselves out of our more base instincts, China absolutely wont, and will take advantage of that.
Open Source is decidedly NOT the way to go. This is arms race, and you don't do an open source arms race. If anything we need stronger export controls, like previous controls we used to have on cryptography. We need find effective ways to enforce them.
You can't pay the nations bills with individual taxes on 400 or so people, the math does not work. You can't tax corporate entities because they just pass the costs on. In fact tariffs should ALWAYS be preferred to taxing domestic entities directly at least with that you get a policy tool that can be something other than entirely regressive. IE tax steal if you want fewer cars spewing carbon, it will raise the price of those, but at the same time china will retaliate and stop buying grain, you get a softer international market for the export, which means lower domestic prices for basic food stuffs (a good policy if you want to shrink the wealth gap).
AI is only an arms race because we've decided to make it one. It could have been something we do for the betterment of all, but capitalism wants everything to be an arms race because arms races make bank. And being completely honest, that's the only concern that any big decision maker really gives even the tiniest shred of concern to. "Show me the money," has become the battle cry of our entire societal system. And we'll ride that Gong Show of stupid to our doom, so long as somebody makes a few more pennies
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China has found that being open source is a great way to get past suspicion and general animosity from Westerners.
As usual attempts to damage China with innuendo and sanctions have backfired.
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I talk about China like a rival that we need to compete with. Trying to keep them down isn't going to work and is immoral anyway, We need to stop making it worse and get on with improving our own products.
Former farmer warns West to focus on tulip bulbs (Score:2)
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No, as analysis has demonstrated, there's been a lot of "borrowing" of technology. That, in and of itself, is an issue in LLM generation. The fact is, I'm not sure economically how you can justify taking another's IP, creating a productized LLM for profit, and then complaining about an open-source version that "borrows" from what you've derived. Nations will "borrow," "plagiarize," or outright steal where it serves their national interests. To say otherwise is naive.
Logical nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't say we're in some global AI arms race that we absolutely must win, and then say the best thing to do is for all sides to show each other their schematics. It's clear he doesn't know what open source actually means, because his logic only works in the context that China wouldn't have access to it, and DeepSeek has already proven that this isn't a barrier for them anyway. The fact that they're letting us copy their homework should probably signal to Eric that this isn't the arms race he seems to think it is.
This whole argument is just abhorrent nationalist fearmongering to insist that the entire scientific research community will somehow come to a complete standstill if they don't have access to cheap, red-white-and-blue branded AI; and really, what could be more American than subverting the gears of capitalism by insisting competitors work together toward a singular, national interest?
Maybe Eric Schmidt should have tried using AI to generate a coherent viewpoint.
Re: Logical nonsense (Score:2)
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Glaring flaw in the reasoning. (Score:2)
It doesn't take much thought to see that the competitive edge would require closed-source development, not a process open to the country you're competing against.
AI Gap (Score:2)
We cannot allow an AI gap!
Dr. Strangelove [youtube.com]
It's not just AI we're in danger of losing on (Score:2)
The West, especially the USA and UK, need to put a lot more resources in to education. Our education systems are failing just like health care. The AI race is maybe more in the front of the billionaire investors minds right now, but for the people of these countries the education system is not turning out as many good engineers. We need fewer wannabe entrepreneurs and CEOs and more engineers and scientists. Billionaires in control of politics are making us all dumber and there doesn't seem to be anyone doin
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No. We put plenty of resources into education. The reason our students do poorly isn't because the "education" is wrong, or the schools are not funded, or the teachers are not paid enough or we don't have enough administrative staff.
The biggest reason is that parents are not involved in their children's education. Not even to the minimal extent of making sure they show up to class or do their homework.
My kids go to public school in one of the lowest rated (in terms of standardized testing) school district
Money (Score:2)
But if Open Source, how the billionaires can make even more money from it?