COSS Weekly #124

Here's the one-hundred twenty-fourth issue of COSS Weekly, the global commercial open source (COSS) company category newsletter, brought to you every weekend by the team at OSS Capital, creators and stewards of COSS Community and Open Core Summit.

We deliver only the most fresh 😋 news from the previous week in COSS across: Funding, Content, Jobs, Liquidity and $COSS (Public Markets).

Last week saw the open-sourcing of the Twitter algorithm, $30M in funding announcements from Hygraph, the unveiling of a COSS AI music company, reactions to AI developments, and milestones across the space.

Enjoy!

💰 COSS Funding: $30M

• Hygraph, a content management system, announced their $30M Series B led by One Peak Partners. Link 
• JJ: "I'm an instant pass on any startup that just wraps OpenAI. Zero differentiation over time. Building your solution / app on your own models that you control, train and tune yourself? Good." Link
• VCs continue to pour dollars into generative AI https://t.co/YI0JH7WyPp by @kyle_l_wiggers (TechCrunch). Link

📚 COSS Content

• Naval: "The biggest near-term question in AI: Will open-source LLMs with decentralized training be competitive with closed-source and centralized LLMs?" Link

• Richard Socher: "I think the open source community needs to start incorporating the concepts of * open source training data * open source human feedback collection * open source weights With LLMs it will soon be less about the code than the training data." Link

• JJ: "170~ contributors, 5,300~ commits, 40,000~ stars, hundreds of thousands of deployments, millions of users... all from zero a couple years ago. Managed by a tiny elite team of 4~ people. By the power of open source, @rustdesk is the fastest growing VDI 🔥 https://t.co/ifepFPYpLT" Link

• JJ: "Cool to see SO MANY open source llama implementations popping up... 🦙 🔥 https://t.co/PZbGPX3nc9" Link

• AK 🤗 in SF for the Open-Source AI meetup: "Will be at the @huggingface SF Open-Source AI Meetup this Friday at 6pm PST, over 2000 people registered 🔥 join here: https://t.co/ZOlyVdzHsx" Link

• Open Source Startup Podcast🎙: "E79 of the Open Source Startup Podcast is UP🎙 @amanda_robs & @tnachen talk with @oktetohq CEO @rberrelleza about spinning up production-grade dev environments & the challenges building w/ Kubernetes Check it out🎧 https://t.co/eV7KEUXjER" Link

• DeSci Labs: "We've open-sourced the code behind #DeSci Nodes! Join us in building the future of science. https://t.co/jAtQLPbp8w" Link

• JJ: "Who's going to push @godotengine over the 60,000 star milestone ??? 💫 https://t.co/BRTUoGu0N7 https://t.co/1KpcKqjEK5" Link

• Liu Liu: "In the rising tide of privatize models / pause trainings for safety reasons, I am trying to make an argument that the broadest access to the most cutting-edge LLMs is the less risky path: https://t.co/SbE7pUS1E6" Link

• Chad Hurley: "OpenAI: We need more regulation! (aka let's make this a monopoly!) Competition: Yes!.. plus a 6 month pause. (aka let us catch up!) Everyone's concern for your safety is really a fight for control... to control it, to control you. Good night pawns!" Link

• JJ: "STRONG DISAGREE. Absolutely not signing this. https://t.co/69rnGBBrL2" Link

• JJ: "Decentralized neural networks are inevitable. Like Bitcoin is doing for money, @bittensor_ may do for AI." Link

• JJ: "1) alignment is impossible, so this goal is silly 2) this is ONLY possible through open source 3) see #2 https://t.co/VcTj1JtfwK" Link

• swyx 🔜 🌉: "very smart implementation of UBB from @arey_abhishek at @theappsmith - UBB with per user caps! this is the best of both worlds and very customer friendly. https://t.co/EDCKjDoChl Well done Appsmith. https://t.co/mQZBOK8qkq" Link

• TechCrunch: "Flipboard expands Mastodon support to its Android application https://t.co/DBBejI9gTy by @sarahintampa" Link

• OpenBB 🦋: "Today's blog post is from our CEO @didier_lopes. He walks through the mindset and thinking behind why OpenBB is #OpenSource, and what that means for the future of the product and the industry at large. Read more here: https://t.co/Tw5kzefXbJ https://t.co/ekGpfK3wdV" Link

• Aran Komatsuzaki: "BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance Presents BloombergGPT, a 50 billion parameter language model that is trained on a wide range of financial data. https://t.co/Sqq6AIjLZm https://t.co/hxsXJuS649" Link

• Brian Armstrong: "Count me among the people who think this is a bad idea. There are no "experts" to adjudicate this issue, and many disparate actors will never agree. Committees and bureaucracy won't solve anything. As with many technologies, there are dangers, but we should keep marching... https://t.co/TAD2t667Yk" Link

• JJ: "GameFi = @ParallelTCG 🕹️ DeFi = @OpenBB_Finance 💸 DeSci = @DeSciLabs 🧬 DeAI = @Bittensor_ 🧠" Link

• Cal.com: "happy 70k everyone 🥹👏 https://t.co/YNpoEd7D1N" Link

• Godot Engine: "We're back from #GDC23, where @godotengine had an official booth for the first time! It was an amazing experience, with 16+ indie games presented by their developers, tons of great discussions with visitors, talks, and an IGF award! 🏅 Our retrospective: https://t.co/nyqRtYUnw7" Link

• JJ: "Open source transcends all.. including AI. https://t.co/ZheFeiMgDb" Link

• Elon Musk: "Twitter recommendation source code now available to all on GitHub https://t.co/9ozsyZANwa" Link

• Mårten Mickos: "Twitter recommendation algorithm opensourced. "Any security concerns or issues should be routed to our official bug bounty program through HackerOne. We hope to benefit from the collective intelligence and expertise of the global community in helping us identify issues and... https://t.co/6FOjpYai1g" Link

• Elon Musk: "Twitter open source Spaces discussion happening now! https://t.co/VpS6frbOhT" Link

• JJ: "Digital store of value is worth $1 Trillion +: @bitcoin What will the digital store of knowledge be worth: @bittensor_ Let's learn and find out. 🧠" Link

• Wasmer: "It's official. We have formally requested porting the @Twitter algorithm to WebAssembly & Wasmer. How awesome would it be running algorithm locally in your browser? 😺 https://t.co/bq7YuIVrdm" Link

• OSS Capital: "We are rebranding to NOSS Capital --- No Open Source Capital. NOSS is our banner for ushering in the era of safe and aligned computing --- Open Source is FAR too dangerous a technology development approach to see continue at its current pace. 🛑 ✋ #HaltAllOpenSourceProgressNow" Link

💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)

• Peer Richelsen 🗓🍊⚡️: "i think the non-profit to capped for-profit move from @openai can come back to haunt them in the long run I think the least thing would be to publish a detailed ownership structure of the for-profit, who owns how much, who has sold at what price, etc." Link

🛠️ COSS Jobs

• 3,765 jobs and 271 companies hiring! Link
• samim: "Introducing Okio, our new company that is creating Nendo, an open-source generative AI music tool suite. Join us: https://t.co/xIBUKAjITA https://t.co/LkMExLe2ci" Link

📊 $COSS - Public Markets

• $COSS markets up 5.20% last week

• Latest $COSS markets as of last Friday at market close, courtesy of Koyfin.

• Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin.