Open Foundation Models Set to Surpass Closed LLMs, Marking a Shift in AI Development

Recent developments in the AI sector highlight a significant shift towards open foundation models, with the latest release from @xai featuring a model with 314 billion parameters. This move is seen as a potential game-changer, allowing open foundation models to surpass closed Large Language Models (LLMs) within the year. This progress is underscored by a culture of freely shared state-of-the-art AI research, exemplified by Google's open sharing of their transformer breakthroughs and the invention of the GPT architecture by OpenAI. The trend towards open-sourcing is further evidenced by the @xai team's latest release, marking a notable shift from the previous year when open LLMs struggled with basic sentence formation. Additionally, the ability to train LLMs on a distributed and decentralized basis is opening up new opportunities for smaller organizations, signaling a broadening of the AI development landscape.