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Grok 3 just came out, and early reports say it’s shattering rankings.
Now there is always hype around these sorts of releases, but my understanding of the architecture of the compute cluster for Grok 3 makes me think there may be something to these claims. One of the exciting and interesting revelations is that it tends to perform extremely well across a broad range of applications, seemingly showing that if we just throw more compute at an LLM, it will tend to get better in a general way. Not sure what this means for more specifically trained models.
One of the most exciting things to me is that Grok 3 voice allegedly understands tone, pacing, and intention in conversations. I loved OpenAIs voice assistant until it cut me off every time I paused for more than a second. I’d Grok 3 is truly the first conversational AI, it could be a game changer.
I’m also curious how it compares to DeepSeek, if anyone knows more than I?
I feel a bit sad looking at that ranking's licensing column and it's all Proprietary except for the one Chinese model. It's as if we learned nothing from the last 40 years.
What we learned from the last 40 years is that proprietary wins.
Consumers migrated from closed source Windows desktops to closed source iOS phones.
Yes, a surprisingly large percentage of the world's infrastructure runs on Linux and other open source platforms, and that open source infrastructure is used to run... proprietary, closed source, walled garden web apps (I don't think it's an accident that the most successful open source projects are mainly infrastructure scaffolding and tools for other software developers, rather than products for non-technical users).
Much like how the credentialed expert will usually beat the autodidact, a group of highly organized professionals who are motivated by a big paycheck will usually beat a group of loosely organized volunteers who are motivated by passion for the project.
Want to run those numbers again and look at Android sales maybe?
I know the argument, I read Gates' letter. It's bullshit. Sure you can extract some value for a while, until you eventually get commodified enough that OSS eats your lunch, but if your goal is to actually make good software that serves the user's needs, you can't go proprietary. Because some authority always comes to breathe down your neck and force you to prevent the user from doing what they disapprove of.
The large majority of the cryptography that runs your daily life would not be possible if we ran things like IBM originally did. And by God there's a lot of money sloshing around making those advancements.
You got a point that it's easier to sell end users a labeled product. But AI ain't that. It's infrastructure.
You want AI models that are trojan horses against you, be my guest. I won't run that shit. And neither will a lot of people that are serious about information security. Maybe it'll take a few disasters before they realize, as we are apparently too dumb to learn this lesson the first time around, but they will eventually.
Android is weird.
The actual open-source parts of Android barely, if at all, work as an actual phone. Sure, it's running Linux under the covers so from that perspective it's open-source. Android builds on that with a very very bare UI and some of the plumbing. The thing is, any phone that is actually sold is running on not just the stock Android code, but an absolutely massive collection of proprietary code to deal with everything that makes the devices useful. Things like an app store, maps, messaging, running the physical phone hardware, making it pretty and usable.
I used to work at Amazon in their App Store. Amazon, with their Kindle tablets and the ill-conceived Fire Phone, run Android. But they forked off the open-source version because they didn't want to pay Google the licensing. Literally everything had to be reimplemented to get a device that works in any way. All of that is, of course, proprietary.
Of course, Amazon's effort to not have the licensing costs came with an absolute mountain of work. A building full of people doing all the custom code to get Android to something that is usable. Everything from a new app store, maps, push notifications, payment processing, the skins, everything. Ok, depending on the era, we either filled a building or a large chunk of one depending on which building we resided at. The hardware and base OS was handled by another group, Lab126, down in the Bay Area. And to top it off, since there's another app store, you have to get developers to submit their apps to that as well -- which was hard.
The tl;dr is that Android is the stone soup of OSS. It "works," but not in a way that is useful to end users.
I'll happily grant that Google has a...peculiar way of doing OSS (a peculiar way of doing any sort of project really). But the argument still stands. If they hadn't opened it up at least as much as it is, they wouldn't have been able to cut the ground under Apple's foot and capture most of the market.
How much of that success is just being willing to license your product, though? Apple won't let you make a phone that runs iOS at all.
RIM and Microsoft did it too, without success, perhaps too late. It's hard to isolate it as a sole factor.
Like previously stated in this conversation there have been more open failures than Android, Nokia's Symbian, FirefoxOS, etc; but there were also more closed licencing deals that got suffocated.
I'm convinced that whatever openness Android has allowed its success because that was the deliberate strategy that Google employed to woo manufacturers to their platform in an environment that was still competitive at the time.
My point here is that unless there is a moat and one company can figure out a secret sauce that makes their AI better and can't be extracted from the model easily, which doesn't seem likely at this time, we'll see the same sort of competitive environment where the less restrictive open sort of deal thrives.
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