US tech giants bind developers to closed-source AI ecosystems with open tools: Ant Group
US firms focus their open-source efforts on AI development ‘toolchains’ to drive adoption of AI models and hardware, Ant says
American tech giants such as OpenAI and Nvidia are trying to “lock in” developers to their closed-source artificial intelligence ecosystems by open-sourcing tools in other layers of the tech stack, according to a report from Chinese fintech company Ant Group.
While most leading US large language models are closed-source, Chinese players from Alibaba Cloud to TikTok-owner ByteDance have instead opted to “open-source” their models, meaning that developers can download and build on top of them.
A tech stack is the collection of technologies needed to develop and deploy an application. In AI, this includes hardware such as semiconductor chips and software like algorithms and frameworks.
US companies have focused their open-source efforts on AI development “toolchains” in particular to drive adoption of their proprietary AI models and hardware, Ant Group said in its report on the global open-source AI landscape, released on Saturday at the Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai.
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Ant Group cited the example of Dynamo, open-sourced by US chip giant Nvidia in March, an inference platform optimised for deploying large-scale AI models. Nvidia has marketed Dynamo as the “operating system of AI”.
While the platform can be integrated with popular open-source AI development frameworks such as PyTorch and SGLang, it is designed to be paired with Nvidia’s powerful graphics processing units (GPUs), according to the Alibaba Group Holding affiliate. Alibaba owns the Post.