Open source isn’t going to save AI

“You don’t want AI only in the hands of a few companies.” Thus spake Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, suggesting that open source will come to the rescue of AI. It’s a nice thought, but one that has exactly zero historical precedent. Yes, open source has become integral to building software, but name a market where open source has prevented that market from settling into “the hands of a few companies.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Cloud? Years ago I wrote that cloud is impossible without open source, and I still believe that. But there are only a few big winners in cloud infrastructure. Likewise there are only a few big winners in any particular category of SaaS, only a few big winners in…you get the point. Open source may enable big markets, but it doesn’t enable widespread spoils from those markets, because ultimately people—and enterprises—pay for someone to remove the complexity of choice. So, by definition, there can only be a few “someones” in any given market.

Open source enablement

Back to Delangue, who says, “I think open source comes in as a way to create more competition, to give more organizations and more companies the power to also build AI, build their own system that they control, to make sure that they don’t only rely on big technology companies.” He may be right that open source creates more opportunity to build for more companies, but he’s completely wrong that people won’t end up depending on big technology companies. I don’t say that out of some desire that this is how it should be—it’s just how things actually are. Again, look at cloud.

Lots of open source hasn’t diffused control of the cloud market. If anything, it has concentrated it. With so much open source available, enterprises have needed cloud companies to help them make sense of it all. Enterprises haven’t really cared about the provenance of that open source code, either. After all, the biggest winner in cloud (Amazon Web Services) has, to date, been the smallest contributor to open source, relatively speaking. That has changed in the past few years, with AWS contributing across a swath of projects, from Postgres to OpenTelemetry to Linux. My point isn’t to criticize AWS. Not at all. After all, AWS has done what customers want: made all that open source easily consumable by enterprises, whatever its source.

We can wish that AI will be different, but it’s hard to see how.

The winners in AI

As Richard Waters notes in the Financial Times, “OpenAI’s biggest challenge [is] the lack of deep moats around its business and the intense competition it faces.” That competition isn’t coming from open source. It’s coming from other well-capitalized businesses—from Microsoft, Meta, and Google. One of the biggest issues in AI right now is how much heavy lifting is imposed on the user. Users don’t want or need a bunch of new, open source–enabled options. Rather, they need someone to make AI simpler. Who will deliver that simplicity is still up for discussion, but the answer isn’t going to be “lots of open source vendors,” because, by definition, that would simply exacerbate the complexity that customers want removed.

Yes, we should be grateful for open source and its impact on AI, just as we should for its impact on cloud and other technology advances. But open source isn’t going to democratize AI any more than it has any other market. The big thing that customers ultimately care about, and are willing to pay for, is convenience and simplicity. I still believe what I wrote back in 2009: “No one cares about Google because it’s running PHP or Java or whatever. No one cares about the underlying software at all; at least, its users don’t.”