I feel like you're describing pretty much every industry ever.
You could be talking about food, or insurance or cars or planes or health or (dare I say it?) politics.
Of course there are well understood commercial reasons for industries consolidating. Primarily because consumers prefer it.
But while your post is good on rhetoric, it still lacks the concrete definition I seek. Specifically what hardware, OS, VM software, site-creation tools, subscription options, advertising networks, payment processors, and so on must I use to reach "Open web" status?
You're describing a world, which is a fair desire. But when I go to the local bakery to pitch an online presence, what exactly am I pitching, and how does this pitch serve the goals of that bakery?
I get the concept of this at a principle level. But how does it play out for you? I mean, to what extent do you succumb to the monoculture because while principles are good, you live in the real world?
So, like, what phone OS do you use? There's not much choice but did you choose Android over iOS because it's more open? Or did you go the whole way and use PalmOS or Symbian? Do you pick airlines based on what planes they fly? Do you choose Bing over Google?
I say this not to judge but rather to highlight the wide gap between principle and reality. We live in a real world, and the world consolidates behind a small number of providers because that has proven to be a beneficial strategy. (And yes, those providers can then abuse us.)
But I don't want to choose between 20 political parties, or 10 credit card processors or have to build apps for 15 phone OS's.
The sadness of losing the early days of choice and wildness are not limited to the web. Before that we lost the 20 brands of PC (all with custom OS) that we had in the 80s. Every new industry goes through this process, and every generation misses the wild heady days of its youth.
I don't have a smart phone or a mobile phone .. and yes, I do stay in touch with a good many people via land lines, email, some encrypted apps, radio and IRL face to face conversation.
I pick aircraft for their stability at near ground level flight, Cresco STOL's for example, and or ability to land on water, have high wings, mostly twin props, etc. Quite fond of Robinson R22 and Cabri G2 helicopters.
Typically elections here have 10 or so parties, three or four major parties, several minor single issue parties, and 10 or so independants in many districts. It's a preferential ranked voting system that allows you to 1, 2, 3 your main interests and tail off there if that's all you care to do.
I still largely use paper maps (despite having processed a great deal of digital GIS data into digital mapping pipelines).
So, yeah - we're happy being off to the side and not part of the great urban monoculture.
Props to you, you're further along that track than I am. Running a business has been one of main obstacles to cutting more of these ties. But it's getting there.
Props to my father, really - he's still kicking along, born in 1935, and fairly adept at living in places that lack any modern urban infrastructure.
Although, TBH, he's fallen prey to the clutches of the iPhone (sans any account stuff and pretty much limited to phone calls, text messages, and logging his daily walks).
I am working with smart phones for other people, they're more and more integrated with tractors, drones, boom sprays, ag equipment .. but many people are mindful of routing data and control through { cloud } which often means the US and are still attached to ways of working that can still work when { stuff breaks }, like internet connections, US clouds.
Fuel and fertilizer is a big issue ATM .. there are a lot of people all wanting to seed seperate 4,000 Ha farm blocks ATM - and that ability to do or not do so will have a rolling impact about the world in a few months.
I've been telling everybody around me to prepare for a massive price increase in various must-haves because I don't see how we're going to avoid that.
Fertilizer and fuel are a massive problem and once reserves run out (and we're not that far from that depending on where you live, in some places we're already there) the problems will multiply very rapidly. Trump is the biggest idiot that ever sat in a seat of power and the whole world (but of course, as always, the poorer parts first) will end up paying the price, and if the harvest is bad quite possibly the ultimate one.
( Yes, I realise that'd entail the kind of hard physical long hour labour my father grew up with .. but the means are there and the kids and grandkids are all pretty fit )
> Do you pick airlines based on what planes they fly?
I stopped flying entirely.
> Do you choose Bing over Google?
Still using Google but working very hard on moving away from it.
Yes, I too live in the real world and I'm a really annoying customer for banks, insurance companies and my government by insisting they serve me without bending over and adopting some eco-system that I do not subscribe to. I have a need to interact with my bank, my government, my insurance company and my kids schools and I point blank refuse to be sucked into any of their app driven eco systems.
I applaud your dedication to not succumbing to the appification of everything.
Unfortunately you are an outlier and society is not built for outliers.
Equally, unfortunately, the opinion of outliers does not really help the argument for a more open web. Yes there's some small number of people on mastodon but telling my hairdresser to not use Facebook is not terribly useful to her.
I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. The open source weights argument was the one thing China had going and that I was seriously cheering them on for. They could have been our saviors and disrupted the US tech giants - and if it was open, I'd have welcomed it.
Now they show their true colors. They want to train models on our engineering to replace us, while simultaneously giving nothing back? No thanks. I'd rather fund the shitty US hyperscalers. At least that leads to jobs here.
If there's a company willing develop and foster large scale weights in the open, I'll adopt their tooling 100%. It doesn't matter if they're a year behind. Just do it open and build an entire ecosystem on top of it.
The re-AOLization of the internet into thin clients is bullshit, and all it takes is one player to buck the rules to topple the whole house of cards.
> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. The open source weights argument was the one thing China had going and that I was seriously cheering them on for. They could have been our saviors and disrupted the US tech giants - and if it was open, I'd have welcomed it.
Qwen is not the only Chinese lab, and the others have shown no change in their commitment to open source. Allegedly Qwen hasn't either if their recent statements are to be believed. They're just hoping to capture market share with *-claw customers before releasing an open weights version. We'll have to wait and see how before they decide to release that.
> the others have shown no change in their commitment to open source
I wouldn't call this totally accurate, especially as of late. What's closer to the truth however is that there's lots of second-rate players in China doing open models, that will be getting a lot more attention from local AI proponents if the big names seriously slow down their AI releases. The local AI scene as a whole is quite healthy.
looking at the other replies I'm not seeing what I consider the most important rebuttal to this argument: there is no real "adopting" in this hybrid open/close space right now, the lock-in is minimal and as much as different corporations are trying to create a lock-in effect by closing down their tools and interfaces, they are not really succeeding
I can constantly jump from one provider to another, and to my local servers which are already able to run very useful models at reasonable hardware cost, and I intend to continue doing that for the foreseeable future
the one thing I'm not going to do is tying my tooling to one provider or another or getting overtly used to the specifics of a model outside of my control
more than the weights or the training, which of course are very important, the real battle right now is for establishing some dependency mechanism so that your users won't just flee en-masse as soon as you inevitably try to abuse your market dominance and lock-in mechanisms, as is customary in everything computing these days - note that i don't explicitly talk about raking up prices, that is just one of the most difficult methods as people are very sensitive to that, when you can sneakily sell user data, get government contracts from never-disclosed conditions, or even just incorporate your intelligence to ad networks in one way or another
> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed weights model from a geopolitical rival.
That's a very reasonable stance. It doesn't change the fact that we do have plenty of local models (up to and including Qwen 3.5) that are still quite useful.
z.ai models are open weights. GLM-5.1 is very close to Opus with obvious exception of session length.
Only academic models will be true open source as companies can't legally afford to disclose learning inputs.
In regards to "They want to train models on our engineering to replace us". Some software engineers in China can run circles around some of the best teams in Silicon Valley. Days of U.S. hegemony are over. I recommend you make peace and make friends.
Whereas I as a Canadian am absolutely eager to see a serious competitor from a rival to the US because sending money south to Anthropic and OpenAI who think it's ok to spy on (or worse) their non-American customers, and are headquartered in a country that is trying to crush my country's economy, interfere in our domestic politics, and put us out of work and making threats on political allies.
I'd prefer them to be open weight, but I'd love to sub a decent competitive coding plan from a European or Chinese provider. Right now they're not quite there. If closing it and charging for it brings them closer to competitive, that's ok.
If the US tech and AI industry long term wants customers and a broad market outside of their own domestic base, they need to reconsider who they are bending the knee to, and how they are defining their policies in relation to the Trump administration.
China (meaning the Chinese government specifically, not the people of course) is widely considered to be a low-key geopolitical rival to the developed West in general including Canada and Europe, not just the U.S. I don't exactly like this and would certainly prefer that this wasn't the case, but we can't exactly ignore the facts. This matters when we choose whom to rely on for things like certain hosted third-party services, including AI inference. GP's stance actually makes a lot of sense from this POV, even though it's just as true that many Chinese folks are doing wonderful work on open-weight local AI.
"the developed west" is not really a thing. its not a alliance like the eu just a description for some countries. a lot of them are split over china and its a major political issue in places like poland or germany. the only country where all parties treat china like the enemy is the united states, and thats just because theres only two major ones and both listen to corporations instead of their voters. the eu as a organization is a rival to china (not enemy) with all the special duties and import restrictions but thats just economic self interest and not every member is on board. when you ask the average person i think like 80 percent either dont care or think relations should be more friendly. if you ask people under 25 its basically everyone.
China has never threatened war against my country; America has. Between the two, it’s clearly safer to lean towards the Chinese options if EU ones aren’t available.
I've been using z.ai and codex latest models since last September.
Each release has been an improvement.
codex handles longer sessions but the quality seems to decline and it tends to over engineer and lose focus. It will happily add slop on top of slop...which may pass immediate tests of "code works" but doesn't pass my criteria of "code as craft"
I'm using z.ai GLM with opencode. It's obvious when GLM loses its mind when the session gets too long.
I've been using AI to support programming for around 3 years now. The models have gotten amazing. However, unless there is a significant breakthrough I have determined that it's best for me to focus on short sessions.
I a) organize my work, b) improve my AGENTS.md, ensure source has appropriate comments to guide the models to the patterns and separation of concerns c) use shorter sessions d) review and test without AI. This approach means I still own my code. The AI is just an assistant.
With this approach GLM-5.1 is an excellent model. I never run out of token allotment on z.ai or codex plans. At this point, I only keep my OpenAI subscription as the ChatGPT desktop app is excellent at long web research tasks and I get codex with it.
You're giving up the rest of your country to a geopolitical rival from a separate region, in a separate hemisphere with smiling expansionist goals, even allowing armed Chinese security to protect Chinese installations in country. So why not give the rest of your country to China.
It will help them get a good flank on the USA such that even when that temporarily embarrassed country gets a leader you, and the rest of the world do like, it will be too late to do anything.
A perfect definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face laid bare for all to see.
No, a rational decision based on a crazy man in the US. The US needs to learn, that if it threatens its traditional allies, they go to work with china, the main competitor of the US. If the US wants it allies back, the tariffs have to go, and the childlike rhetoric and threats as well. If not, china _deserves_ the business of the US former allies.
The US under Trump is politically and strategically almost identical to China, and can be trusted about the same.
And then, compared to China, the US acts overtly hostile: threatening us with war, starting a war in order to collapse energy supplies outside of the US.
Opportunistic beyond even China, much more hostile.
Will the US even be a democracy in two years? Is it now?
Nah man, balancing between China and the US is the only thing a smaller country can do in order not to be crushed
"Temporarily embarassed" doesn't even begin to describe what's happening down there.
We have an American neighbour actively funding and amplifying a formerly extremely fringe separatist movement in Alberta -- shades of the Donbas, North American edition --and a US "ambassador" who has the behaviour of a 4chan troll.
The bridge has been blown up. Americans might think they are a midterm election away from salvation, but we're on the whole not so naive.
> We are at least 1 year and at most 2 years until they surpass closed models for everyday tasks that can be done locally to save spending on tokens.
Until they pass what closed models today can do.
By that time, closed models will be 4 years ahead.
Google would not be giving this away if they believed local open models could win.
Google is doing this to slow down Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Chinese, knowing that in the fullness of time they can be the leader. They'll stop being so generous once the dust settles.
I think it will be less of a local versus cloud situation, but rather one where both complement each other. The next step will undoubtedly be for local LLMs to be fast and intelligent enough to allow for vocal conversation. A low-latency model will then run locally, enabling smoother conversations, while batch jobs in the cloud handle the more complex tasks.
Google, at least, is likely interested in such a scenario, given their broad smartphone market. And if their local Gemma/Gemini-nano LLMs perform better with Gemini in the cloud, that would naturally be a significant advantage.
I mean, correct, but running open models locally will still massively drop your costs even if you still need to interface with large paid for models. Google will still make less money than if they were the only model that existed at the end of the day.
Why is pessimism, virtue signalling, doomerism, etc. so prevalent on the internet these days?
It wasn't always this way, was it? Am I misremembering "the golden years"?
Is it the failing economy? The K-shaped economy? The political and news cycle?
I'm excited for all of this stuff, and I can't imagine being downtrodden and pessimistic about our outlook. The only thing I'm down about are authoritarianism and monopolies, but those are outside of my control. Modern science and engineering rock.
Going to the moon is amazing. All this AI stuff is amazing. It feels like the future again.
Tell that to the guy who got upset with WP Engine. EmDash is clearly "inspired" by WordPress including in its UI, so there's definitely something to it.
The phrase "spiritual successor to WordPress" is not likely to be judged a trademark violation, though. It doesn't create confusion in the marketplace as to whether Emdash is WordPress.
The problem with WP Engine was that the name is confusing to users who aren't familiar with it. Presumably the WordPress Engine is the core of Wordpress? Or it's the thing powering Wordpress? It's easy to see ways in which an end user could be confused which was which.
Conversely, this product is called something else, and while their blog post references Wordpress repeatedly it's in a way as to make it very clear that this is not that.
That situation had nothing to do with reality either. It was just some guy being upset at someone and starting a war all of the sudden. War it lost anyway.
Matt got upset because they forked his open source project and built a hundred million dollar revenue business on top of it without contributing anything back to WordPress.
He'd have more of a leg to stand on if WordPress wasn't itself a fork of an open source project.
Matt should have built something open core or fair source licensed - free for customers, but stops competitors from stealing your lunch. He has no legal ground to argue his case now.
It's a much bigger deal with hyperscalers poaching and stealing, like AWS and GCP ripping off and stealing most of the revenue from Redis and Elasticsearch. That's dishonest and evil in my mind.
Totally orthogonal to this issue of marketing comparisons.
WPE never forked a thing. They were a successful company after he backed out of an investment with them, he resented the success, blackmailed them for 8% of their top-line revenue, then threw a tantrum when they told him to pound sand.
All PHP is going to be replaced with single binary Rust apps.
Talented teams will build the atoms for most apps - blogs, CMSes, ticket systems, forums - and it'll be easy for end users to configure.
Rust is easy to code gen and deploy now. No barrier to understanding lifetimes. It's the language everyone should be using Claude Code to emit.
Everyone is now a Rust engineer with 10 years of experience. (I'm not joking, just in case that needs clarification.)
If you haven't tried writing a simple web service in Axum or Actix plus SQLx, you need to give it a try. You'll be amazed at how simple it is, and you'll be even more amazed at how performant and easy it is to work with.
You do not need to know Rust or have any prior Rust experience. You'll pick it up along the way. It's easy and you'll learn it fast.
Rust is a low-defect rate language to serialize to. The syntax begs you to handle errors, nulls, exceptional conditions within the language itself. This is naturally a good fit for most business problems. It doesn't hurt that the language is fast as hell and super portable either.
If the job is now encoding business logic - this is the optimal serialization that I'm aware of. I write Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, PHP, Swift - I can't think of any better language for greenfield projects that don't have existing language/library requirements.
I'm not sure you appreciate why PHP was successful. You might be completely right about all this, but the LAMP-stack "just upload this file to shared hosting" workflow is what made apps like WordPress win out, and the barrier remains significantly higher to do the equivalent with Rust.
Aren't there licesing issues with porting a proprietary implementation into an open-source one that could open up the project to legal issues with the proprietary vendor?
Nothing lives forever. The life of a product is short and over in the blink of an eye.
They're playing this game optimally for their present station.
Slow coding an IDE? We might not even have IDEs in six years.
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