The Open Source AI Threat: How OpenAI and Google Face a New Challenge

Unveiling the Rise of Open Source AI and Its Impact on Tech Giants

Tanish Gupta
4 min readJun 21, 2023

Introduction

As I am learning more about artificial intelligence (AI), it’s becoming clear that open-source AI is changing the landscape of the sector. Exciting opportunities are presented by the growth of open-source models, which make AI more rapid, adaptable, and economical. By openly sharing their work, open-source developers enable others to utilise, enhance, and modify AI technologies.

Tech Giants vs Open Source

Unlocking AI’s Potential: The Advantages of Open Source

The advantages of open-source AI models are numerous. They respect user privacy and are quicker and more customisable. A wider audience can access and use AI thanks to open-source technology’s transparency and cost. Open-source AI developers encourage collaboration, in contrast to proprietary models, which foster creativity with constrained resources. With just, for example, $100 and 13 billion parameters, even smaller developers can outperform industry titans.

Success Stories in Open Source

We can find historical examples of open-source success in the tech world. Due to community-driven development, open-source operating system like Linux, and LibreOffice, an alternative to Microsoft Office, have grown in popularity. Open source’s ultimate potential, though, is in the field of artificial intelligence.

Consider, for instance, the LLaMA model that Meta proposed. LLama’s customisable features lead to its rapid adoption despite its initial leak. Today, there are many LLaMA versions available, each created to address a different requirement and trained on various datasets. This demonstrates how open-source approaches can encourage cooperation and creativity among members of the AI community.

The GitHub source of the now widely used LLaMA model proposed by Meta (Facebook) is mentioned below:

The Amazing Advances of Open Source AI in Surpassing Market Leaders

Google engineers also have acknowledged that developers of open-source artificial intelligence are already outperforming well-known companies. Tools built on the extensive language model of Meta, which was initially available on a limited basis, and then leaked online, accelerated the progress henceforth. The entry hurdle for developing AI models has decreased drastically since the LLaMA model from Meta became more widely available. What was formerly the domain of huge research organisations can now be accomplished by individuals with the right attitude, determination and a powerful laptop.

Source: semianalysis.com

Exploring New Horizons with Advanced Open-Source AI and QLoRA

I discovered Qlora Tech, a fascinating open-source initiative while conducting my study. Utilising 4-bit capacity, Qlora enables users to run and fine-tune models. With this method, anyone can train many models without needing an expensive GPU cluster. A 65-billion-parameter model may be fine-tuned using the Qlora technique while still achieving excellent performance on a single 48 GB GPU. Guanaco was chosen as the best model family by the Qlora researchers because it outperformed Vicuna benchmarks and achieved 99.3% of ChatGPT’s performance level with only 24 hours of fine-tuning on a single GPU. A lot of changes are made by QLoRA to conserve memory without compromising performance.

If you wish to explore and play with the Qlora project, you may see its GitHub repo below:

Conclusion:

The examples shared here offer just a glimpse into the transformative power of open-source AI for consumers and businesses. AI has the potential to revolutionize multiple sectors, and open-source AI is the key to unlocking its full potential. While models such as ChatGPT and BARD may face challenges in the future, the underlying technology, such as Open LLaMA with frameworks such as LangChain or Hugging Face Model, offers incredible opportunities to create specialised AI models for various purposes. As we have seen the rise of models like AutoGPT, the future promises even more exciting advancements that will enhance our lives in unimaginable ways.

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