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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   31160 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I literally cite Kimi's own arguments for open source:

[…] 3. Why Open Source

#1: Reputation. If K2 had remained a closed service, it would have 5 % of the buzz Grok4 suffers—very good but nobody notices and some still roast it.

#2: Community velocity. Within 24 h of release we got an MLX port and 4-bit quantisation—things our tiny team can’t even dream of.

#3: It sets a higher technical bar. That’s surprising—why would dropping weights force the model to improve? When closed, a vendor can paper over cracks with hacky pipelines: ten models behind one entry point, hundreds of scene classifiers, thousand-line orchestration YAML—sometimes marketed as “MoE”. Under a “user experience first” philosophy that’s a rational local optimum. But it’s not AGI. Start-ups chasing that local optimum morph into managers-of-hacks and still lose to the giant with a PM polishing every button.

Kimi the start-up cannot win that game. Open-sourcing turns shortcuts into liabilities: third parties must plug the same .safetensors into run_py() and get the paper numbers. You’re forced to make the model itself solid; the gimmicks die. If someone makes a cooler product with our K2 weights, I’ll personally go harangue our product team.

DeepSeek's arguments are more ideological and cultural:

For technologists, being followed is a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one. To give is to receive glory. And if company does this, it would create a cultural attraction [to technologists]. […]

plus stuff about accelerating the development of Chinese ecosystem.

High-level researchers are not slaves or menial workers, they have massive pride, they want to publish and gain clout. You can pay them hundreds of millions to get over that, or you can let them publish. Open sourcing is the ultimate form of publishing your work.

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