It’s a significant problem when “Open Source” is used as an enticement to convince people to work on and improve their product for free, especially when that product inevitably relicenses that work using a sham of a “rewriting” process to claim ownership as though it voids all the volunteer’s efforts that went into design, debug, and other changes, just so that source can be switched to a proprietary license to make the product more VC/IPO friendly. And all of that cuts the knees out of the companies you claim it created in order to capture a portion of their profits despite the fact that they most likely contributed to the popularity and potentially even the development, and therefore success, of said “Open Source”.

IMO, it is just a new version of wage/code theft with a “public good” side-story to convince the gullible that it is somehow “better” and “fair”, when everyone involved were making money, just not as much money as they could be taking with a little bit of court-supported code theft and a hand-waive of “volunteerism”.

The people who use these open models are doing it because they find them useful. That's already plenty of benefit for them. The "ecosystem play" of benefiting from volunteers' mods to open models is certainly a benefit for the model trainer. This fact doesn't eliminate the benefit of people being able to use good models.

It's not a problem from a moral perspective or anything - we all know these models are very expensive to create.

However, from a marketing perspective - think of who the users of an open model are. They're people who, for one reason or another, don't want to use OpenAI's APIs.

When selling a hosted API to a group predominantly comprised of people who reject hosted APIs - you've got to expect some push back.

Is this true? I know a whole lot of people that use and fine tune Mistral / variants and they all use OpenAI too. (For other projects or for ChatGPT)

From my perspective, I want to use the best model. But maybe as models improve and for certain use cases that will start to change. If I work on a project that has certain parts that are fulfilled by Mistral and can reduce cost, that's cool.

I'm surprised how expensive this model is compared to GPT-4. Only ~20% cheaper

> I'm surprised how expensive this model is compared to GPT-4. Only ~20% cheaper

I'm guessing all currently available paid options are operating at a (perhaps significant) loss in order to capture market share. So it might be that nobody can afford to push the prices even lower without significant risk of running out of money before any "market capture" can realistically be expected to happen...

What you say is kinda an example of what I mean.

You say you know people who use and fine tune Mistral / variants

You know what you can't do with Mistral Large? Fine tune it, or use variants.

I was mostly trying to say, in my experience, people who use open models don't only use open models.

But I guess I'm hearing you say now, a key point was- the attractive part about Mistral was the open model aspect.

But it's difficult to pay expenses and wages if you can't charge money.

Re: fine tuning- hard for me to believe they won't add it eventually.

This. Also, at least be upfront with users about motives. OpenAI stopped claiming to be "open" about 2-3 years ago. That's fine—at least I know they're not pro-OSS.

But Mistral has been marketing itself as the underdog competitor whose offerings are on par with gpt-3.5-turbo and even gpt-4, while being pro-OSS.

Lies, damn lies.

I agree. Also Mixtral is a heck of a lot more useful than GPT-2, which is the last thing OpenAI gave us before they went the other way.