Digital Social Hour
AI's Future: Open Source or Closed Control? | Dr. Travis Oliphant DSH #1333
Thu, 17 Apr 2025
AI's Future: Open Source or Closed Control? 🤖 Join Sean Kelly on the Digital Social Hour as he sits down with Dr. Travis Oliphant, a trailblazing AI expert to tackle one of the most pressing questions of our time. Is open source the key to AI's potential, or will closed control dominate its future? 🌐 This episode is packed with valuable insights on AI's rapid evolution, the role of big tech, and how open source could revolutionize industries, education, and even YOUR daily life. From the power of personalized learning to the ethics of AI governance, we’re covering it all. 💡 Discover how AI is reshaping industries like healthcare, gaming, and education, and why owning your own AI might be the game-changer you didn’t know you needed. Plus, hear fascinating stories about quantum computing, the rise of AI in chess and poker, and what open source really means for innovation. ♟️🎮 Don’t miss out on this engaging and eye-opening conversation! Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more thought-provoking episodes on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀 CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:26 - Travis’ Concerns with AI 03:17 - Closed Source vs Open Source AI 08:36 - Most Advanced AI Model 10:58 - Education and AI 12:02 - Benefits of Open Source 15:42 - Full Body MRI Technology 23:45 - Quantum Computing Insights 24:59 - Is AI Overhyped? 26:04 - Open Source AI Discussion 26:47 - Closing Remarks APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected] GUEST: Dr. Travis Oliphant https://x.com/teoliphant https://www.linkedin.com/in/teoliphant/ LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ The views and opinions expressed by guests on Digital Social Hour are solely those of the individuals appearing on the podcast and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the host, Sean Kelly, or the Digital Social Hour team. While we encourage open and honest conversations, Sean Kelly is not legally responsible for any statements, claims, or opinions made by guests during the show. Listeners are encouraged to form their own opinions and consult professionals for advice where appropriate. Content on this podcast is for entertainment and informational purposes only and should not be considered legal, medical, financial, or professional advice. #ainews #generativeai #openai #aitrends #airesearch
Chapter 1: What concerns does Dr. Travis Oliphant have about AI's rapid evolution?
Okay, guys, got Travis here today. We're going to talk AI, one of the pioneers in space. Thanks for hopping on today. Absolutely. Great to be here, Sean. Yeah, the space is evolving so fast. Does it concern you at all?
Yeah, it concerns me for a number of reasons, but probably not the same reasons other people think. I think there's a lot of things happening quickly and a lot of people trying to make sense of it quickly, even though there's not a lot of understanding of how it actually works. And so there's a lot of uncertainty that can lead to confusion.
so that that probably concerns me more than anything is just that um uncertainty leading to rapid action and not thoughtful action yeah what are the biggest concerns and red flags you're seeing right now so um kind of overreaction by governments is one that concerns me you know people trying to pass laws make regulations where they don't really understand what the implications of those are so kind of ended up with rules and patterns that don't really fit
what, what emerges.
Yeah.
So that concerns me. I think the other thing that concerns me is, uh, a lot of closed source companies just trying to own the space, you know, a whole lot of kind of, um, realist, like a land grab, you know, oh, here's this AI space. Let's grab all the attention.
Uh, whereas I'm a really big proponent of people, uh, learning from AI and making it part of their toolbox, you know, ultimately letting us become better agents for ourselves by having AI as a tool that we all can use. So there's kind of this land grab going on where a lot of information flow is happening to a few companies. So that concerns me too.
I want to see AI knowledge diffuse and disperse and have lots of people use it effectively. Um, but you know, there's a lot of money sort of advertising, promoting, uh, you know, it's, it's amazing how quickly people can be informed by, uh, narratives. Right. We're sort of driven by narratives. We, we, we seek out narratives and worldviews and way to think.
And without critical thinking, without background, you can easily be persuaded by something that just isn't true. Especially with social media these days. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so that's so AI could be used to actually amplify that capability. You know, people are good at it. But what if you had AI even be better at it?
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Chapter 2: What is the difference between closed source and open source AI?
Because if you show the code, then people can potentially take it, derive from it, build from it. So they would close the code, and then application would be able to find that closed source. Now, it's still, a lot of software gets built that's closed source, so that's fine. It's not like that's some kind of moral evil to close the source. But it does create challenges for innovation.
What open source was a movement that started around the time Linux came around. You know, Linux, you've heard of Linux. It's an operating system that is essentially why we have cloud computing today. Wow. It's this massive operating system that just now runs all the servers. Yeah. It's a pretty impressive kind of movement. And it's the reason AWS exists. It's the reason GCP exists.
Holy crap.
Absolutely. It's hugely impactful. So open source has been an extremely impactful social movement. And that's probably the way to describe it because, and I started participating in open source in the 90s, late 90s, when I was a graduate student. I'm kind of a geek at heart. I'm a science geek who loves physics and loves math and loves to kind of make things. And I need software to do it.
And I wanted to, and so I got wrapped into this open source movement because I liked how when I did the work, I could share it with others. And that's essentially a lot of us. Millions of people have been pulled into this open source ecosystem sharing their code with each other. So it's kind of this interesting world that's emerged over the past 30 years where people share code.
There's places that that code can be seen and people can build from it. there's lots of movements around that code. So open source is just this phenomenon of sharing your code, everyone can use it. Closed sources, you've got to license the code to use it, right? But open source, there's lots and lots of parallels.
We could have long conversations about what open source means, how it drives value, how do you make money from it? My story and what I'm doing now really starts there. I loved open source. I love the engagement that it created. I love the fact that I could share. People could comment. People could work with me. And I'd build a community. Love that. That's cool.
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Chapter 3: How did the open source movement influence AI development?
Just, you know, because all of us need community and tribe. In fact, I think that's a critical thing to understand about human behaviors. You want to have your tribe. You want to have your community. Open source gave a place for people to have community.
Yeah. So is ChatGPT open source?
No.
So is that the whole dilemma with BEM and Elon?
yes that's part of it that's part of it i mean some part of it is is just egos right but another but a big part of it is is the fact that elon gave them money to build open source ai got it that's why they started was elon was concerned about google having all the knowledge of ai so some of the same concerns that i'm expressing elon expressed years ago where he was saying look we need to make sure that ai as it emerges isn't just controlled by a few hands
We have to have lots of people aware of how to use this. And he was worried that Google was actually consulting all the AI experts. And with their deep mind, they were. They were advancing very, very rapidly. So open AI was basically an initial tranche of, hey, let's go give some money, create a foundation, and have open source AI. Uh, but then, you know, things changed.
There were some different opinions and I don't know Sam well enough and, and have, I don't know quite what drove those decisions. Uh, I can, I can understand there's some probably good reasons and then reasons that I wouldn't agree with.
But, uh, so we pushed for a kind of closed AI and then, but, you know, had the release of ChatGPT that had this phenomenal explosion in the world of people going, oh, these models that scientists have been working on for decades.
can do interesting things like predict words reliably predict phrases that sound realistic and then more than going beyond that from just words to music and to audio and to video images yes exactly you can actually produce a podcast and it sounds decent too it does that's scary it is no there's a company i've been consulting with called zyfra they're out in uh palo alto
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Chapter 4: Why is ChatGPT considered closed source and what are the implications?
Absolutely. So I'm more of a visual guy, but I love audiobooks and I love podcasts too. Yeah. So I understand. I like to listen at 2x speed.
Same.
Sometimes 2x5. Sometimes 2x5. I know the recent one can go up to 3x. I'm going, some people I can listen to at 3x speed. Same.
Yeah, he talks too fast. Even 2x at bend is tough. It's true.
You're sitting there going, wait, I got to process all this information quickly, can't I?
Yeah, but sometimes when it's a seven-hour Rogan episode, I'll do like 2x for sure.
Yes, right. And that's, oh, that was only three hours.
Yeah, he's had some long ones lately, man. So true. So there's AI companies coming out of China now. Who do you think has the most advanced one? We're filming this in March 2025.
Yeah, well, right now, China seems to have some really cool advanced models. DeepSeek showed that it's very advanced. But Gemini is, Google is actually showing some advanced models. Anthropic is showing advanced models. Actually, some of the open source models are also, getting to where they're comparable. So it kind of, it's no longer fortunately just a matter of who has the best models.
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Chapter 5: Which companies and countries have the most advanced AI models in 2025?
Manus is all the rage. Right. It just came out like within a few, it was in this past week and everybody's kind of going, whoa, this is amazing because it can run my business, I can do my research report, I can run a stock report, I can file my taxes, what they think. I mean, it's making games. Grok has a great model too, actually.
Grok 3 was just released and it's beating in a lot of measurements, a lot of the other models. So Grok is also really a fantastic base model. And they have a deep search and they have kind of additional modules around the model that they're starting to release as well that people are going to experience with. But honestly, Sean, it's really early.
So it's easy to kind of have these F1 race concepts, but it's not really the model that works because everyone has to kind of ask the question, what am I trying to use this for? Right. And what for me is going to be a valuable tool. And that's going to be the most productive question.
Like for me, like on the side, I'm a chess player. AI has revolutionized the chess space. It's caused players to become a lot better. For example, I played Andrew Tate in chess yesterday. And I beat him because... Think about this. He played chess his whole childhood, but there was no AI or computers back then. So to get better at chess was really hard.
Now when I play on the chess.com phone, AI analyzes every single game and I could see where I mess up so I could get better way quicker. So I love that.
I think that's a fantastic use case of AI. I think it's an important one too. It's about helping humans get better. Like I'm a big advocate for natural intelligence. Like we have not optimized how humans learn. Right. In fact, I think our education system, at least in the United States, is really, really bad. Really bad. Terrible. And a lot of systemic.
And schools are banning AI.
And that's completely a mistake. Yeah. Because AI needs to be used to help exactly this. It can make personalized education more possible. It can help you take an interest you have and in that moment of interest, amplify your capability. And the iteration ability to learn Powerful. So good. Actually, there's a guy, Gerald Chan, he might be a little annoyed that I talk about on this podcast.
He's an investor. He's somebody that invested in Anaconda. But he gave a talk at Berkeley just a few weeks ago about the role AI can have in improving education. Wow. It was actually quite inspiring.
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Chapter 6: How is AI transforming education and personalized learning?
Uh, I've been involved in open source for a long, long time. I started as a scientist.
Wow.
Um, really, uh, it was during my, I got a master's degree using satellite images to measure, um, backscatter off the earth holy crap yeah it's intense it was intense but it's also very you know it's math i mean i know i really is math not for everybody yeah but i love math and i love learning as much math as i could and to me math is just a tool it's a tool that lets you get insight from data
And we did that from the satellite data backscatter. You basically have electromagnetic radiation, so you beam a radar down to the earth, you measure what comes back, and then you try to infer what that means about the ice field, about the wind speed and direction over the ocean, about the plant vegetation. So that was my first experience with large-scale data processing.
But I went to the medical area to try to do the same with images, with MRI, with ultrasound. Yeah. And that industry could progress faster. It's a little more regulated. And so there's a lot, progress is slower.
Yeah.
That's another topic we could go into, but probably a different data. But go ahead.
Yeah. Have you heard of Pernulo? I have not. Full body MRI. They use AI to analyze the MRI. The problem is it's expensive. So most people can't afford this. But yeah, I got it. They used AI to analyze my results. I learned a lot about my body. And that's where I hope the future, like medicine goes to. And that's the same with my dentist. So there's holistic dentists now.
We'll take photos of your teeth, throw it into AI. It was finding my cavities and it was finding my gum infections.
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Chapter 7: What are the benefits of widespread AI usage for professionals?
It is. And there's also a lot, it was expensive to make the field so that the processing was simple. That's the big thing. So because right now, that's how MRIs work is the processing is relatively simple from a, mathematical point of view. Because if you have the field slightly inhomogeneous, then the processing is a lot harder, but potentially still possible.
And with AI, hey, maybe we can get there. I also am excited about AI just design, AI helping scientists iterate faster. Just like you said with chess, you learn quickly. What if scientists learn more quickly about how to, you know, what does this mean? What if I make this change? What does that mean? There's a big saying I've come to say all the time, which is innovation is iteration.
Like the speed of iteration determines your speed of innovation. Yeah. Yes, you need creativity. Yes, you need, you know, it's people who pull that off. But iterating is really the key to progress. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm also a big poker fan. AI has revolutionized poker. I bet it has. They call them solvers, but it shows you how to play like the best strategy, the best hand and when and what to bet. Two hand, I mean, Texas, the Texas poker. Yeah. Well, it has all the different poker variances, but it's just people have gotten so much better at poker now.
i agree it's actually a corollary of something i always say which is you know for your job it's not about being replaced it's about being replaced with someone that knows how to use ai better Exactly. Right. So if you're worried about your job and AI, just turn that into motivation to learn to use AI.
Yeah. Same with my video editors. A lot of them are using AI now to find clips. And it's like, I love that. Like, I don't want to replace you. Right. I want you to be able to, like, give me a ton of clips. Right.
We're still going to need the human connection. I really am a promoter of accountability with people. Like, you're not going to have AI be accountable. In fact, that's kind of the thing that's really the root of it. Like, oh, well, even the... You know, Tesla cars can drive you now, but you still have to sit in the driver's seat. I know there are self-driving cars going around cities. The Waymos.
The Waymos are showing up. And a big part of that is actually liability. Who's liable if something goes wrong? Right. What if it crashes or something? What if it crashes? What if there's a problem? And so ultimately, that's a real question that has to be resolved. That will be resolved through accountability processes.
layers right so my my answer is what we accountability is with individuals and then you have a tool that's ai then you're still accountable right like all my developers so i have i have a few companies i've worked at yeah i have developers that work with me and i tell them look use ai all you want but the code you commit to a repository and ship to a customer you're accountable for that code that's your response for the code you can't say the ai made me do it
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