Since November 2023, I have been working at 01.AI, a Chinese AI large model company, where I am responsible for the open-source efforts and developer ecosystem of the Yi series models. During this time, I experienced firsthand the rapid surge of AI innovation and confronted the controversies surrounding “copying and repackaging.” This experience led us to deeply reflect: What does “openness” truly mean in the GenAI era? Is simply releasing model weights equivalent to the open-source ethos of sharing source code? How are they fundamentally different in spirit and practice?
This talk will use my journey as a starting point to revisit the history of open-source software. We will discover that today’s GenAI evolution strikingly mirrors the past: from the dominance of academia and the high cost of computing, to the rise of commercial companies, and the fierce debate between closed and open approaches, much like Microsoft vs. Linux in the past, and OpenAI vs. Llama/DeepSeek today.
However, history does not simply repeat itself. The proliferation of PCs and the internet fueled the open-source boom back then, but will lowering the cost of computing alone usher in a golden age for open-source AI? We will examine a unique challenge in GenAI: the data problem.
Furthermore, why are projects like n8n and Dify.ai adopting licenses such as Fair Code, which are not OSI-approved, and how do these challenge our traditional understanding of open source? Is this a regression in history, or an inevitable evolution?
Finally, I want to address a fundamental question: In an era where AI can write code, what is the future of human-collaboration-based open-source communities? Are we witnessing the dusk of the open-source spirit, or the dawn of a new chapter of co-evolution and human-AI collaboration?
This talk is not only a retrospective and a comparison with the past but also an open invitation to all open-source advocates to engage in a shared reflection: How do we define “openness” in the age of GenAI, and how can we find a path toward co-creation and co-governance?