Open Source AI is going to be a necessity

The very savvy Doc Searls has issued a call for open source AI tools. His argument is that all current AI is just another Software as a Service (SaaS) under the control of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), and Apple. As such, the owner of the service gets to decide what kind of answers it provides.

It's not hard to smoke out the bias built into all of the AI services just by asking a few questions from opposing viewpoints. You can quickly see how the AI has been programmed.

And just to be complete, there is no Artificial Intelligence in AI. These are correctly identified as Large Language Models (LLMs) that simply use sophisticated predictive algorithms (i.e. statistical analysis) to decide how to string words together to form a response to a question. I try different AI services from time to time by simply asking questions on topics that I already know something about. I would say that about 50% of the time--recognizing I'm a very small sample size--I get some incorrect information back.

One of my favorite test queries is "Who is Andrew Cohill." One AI service had a fairly complete list of stuff I've done, but also claimed that I had testified to Congress several times. That's news to me, and if someone else asked the same question, how would they know that is just flat out wrong?