The rift that has emerged in the tech world over the concept of open-source in AI can seem anything but straightforward. The leading player on the “closed” side of this split is called OpenAI. Companies that do claim to be open-source are often accused of “openwashing.” And Mark Zuckerberg is cool now?

If you’re confused by this whole situation, you’re in good company. While the question of how public the code and data behind the latest wave of AI should be has big implications for the future of the tech, the industry doesn’t even seem to quite agree on what open-source AI strictly is, for one.

The Open Source Initiative, the organization widely seen as responsible for setting that standard, recently embarked on a road trip of sorts to ask around about its proposed definitions. Executive Director Stefano Maffulli told us the complexities of the tech and the pace of its development pose unprecedented challenges.

“This is absolutely never seen before. Not only because of the new artifacts like model weights [and] parameters,” Maffulli told Tech Brew. “Also, the speed at which it came out of the labs. Like, all of a sudden, ‘Look, this thing thinks! Oh, let me build an app!’ I’ve never seen anything like this.”

The lack of a commonly agreed-upon definition hasn’t stopped companies and developers from taking sides. One faction, which includes Meta and IBM, has framed itself as a champion of open-source collaboration and innovation, though some critics have taken issue with Meta’s use of the term.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others have kept their systems more proprietary. Proponents of this approach claim secrecy is necessary because open-source AI can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Then there’s Google and Microsoft, who have mostly taken the closed route, but have also made slight overtures to the open-source movement, perhaps hedging their bets.

Before we get into all that, though, let’s back up.

Keep reading here.—PK

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BJ Birtwell says he used to identify as an EV skeptic.

Now he runs Electrify Expo, which bills itself as “North America’s largest electric vehicle festival.”

What happened in between? To start, the self-described “car guy” got behind the wheel of a plug-in model—and now he’s a full-blown enthusiast.

“A lot of car guys are skeptics. We have this notion that because you can’t hear it and maybe smell it, it’s going to lack a soul,” Birtwell, Electrify Expo’s CEO and founder, told Tech Brew. “If I couldn’t hear the rumble of the V8… forget about it; you’re never getting me behind the wheel of that car. I had made up my mind about electric cars before I had even driven one…Once I drove one, I had my light-bulb moment. And I was pretty much all-in on electric after that.”

Now, Electrify Expo’s mission is to inspire a similar journey for others. And just like Birtwell’s a-ha moment, the idea is to get people in an EV and let the experience speak for itself.

“We saw an opportunity in the space to build a festival-like show for all things electric to help drive EV adoption,” Birtwell said. “The best way to do that was through experiences.”

And by experiences, he doesn’t mean what’s traditionally found at auto shows—namely, cars on carpets in convention centers.

Keep reading here.—JG

From cloud vendors to data centers, modern businesses rely on a host of internet-connected applications and services to deliver what their customers expect. When any one of those links in the chain breaks, it can translate directly into lost revenue—lots of it.

According to a forthcoming report from internet performance-monitoring platform Catchpoint, 43% of surveyed businesses across the finance, e-commerce, cloud, and healthcare sectors estimated they lost “more than $1 million due to internet outages or degradations in the month prior to the survey.”

In an early look at Catchpoint’s first Internet Resilience Report, shared with Tech Brew, Catchpoint puts forth a solution: plan for and guard against outages from the top down.

Just as “there are financial consequences to security breaches, there are financial consequences—and brand and reputation consequences—for resiliency, and not having the right resiliency,” Catchpoint CEO and co-founder Mehdi Daoudi told Tech Brew in an interview. “People need to take it as seriously as security.”

Keep reading here.—KG

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