Here's the one-hundred sixtieth 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 Docker's acquisition of AtomicJar (the company behind TestContainers), major milestones for Plane, Hoppscotch, and OpenBB, news in open-source AI models, and more!
Enjoy!
💰 COSS Funding
No funding announcements this week.
📚 COSS Content
Vamsi Kurama: "Starting from a humble bedroom idea during COVID, @planepowers has now soared to 20,000 stars on @github in just one year. @planepowers also proudly currently stands as the #1 open-source project in the project management category. What a fantastic way to celebrate the end of 2023!" Link
Hoppscotch: "2023 has been an incredible year in the journey of Hoppscotch. As we near the end of the year, we wanted to revisit those milestones with you. This week, we will share the highlights of our journey with all of you. Stay tuned!" Link
Hoppscotch: "𝑯𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 #1 In Feb 2023, we reached 50K stars on @github This was a milestone for us since it all started as @liyasthomas side-project which now turned into the Hoppscotch today. Now we are at 57K+ stars Star us on: github.com/hoppscotch/hop..." Link
JJ --- oss/acc: "Zero to 20K stars in 1 year is amazing. But our active users metrics are more impressive." Link
Jim Fan: "My thoughts on Mistral's stellar rise: - Successful setup: founded at good timing in the OSS vs closed AI debate, closed a $400M Series A at $2B valuation, and driven by a lean team. - There're dozens of models coming out every month, but only a handful actually have staying power, and even fewer evoke a sense of yearning from the public. LlaMA and Vicuna are 2 other examples. - I think what Mistral did right is to optimize the hell out of 7B-tier models, instead of much larger capacity. 7B and the 7B-MoE (equivalent to 12B dense) are much easier for grassroot AI engineers to build on. - MoE is the right path forward. It flexibly trades off between knowledge/memorization and efficiency of a small model. OpenAI has been doing this for > 1 yr since GPT-4 training. I'm honestly surprised the AI community didn't route more attention to MoE. - An LLM is a snapshot of a civilization. There will be a LOT more localized LLMs that represent different cultures, political spectrum, religious beliefs, and region-specific regulations. Mistral makes multi-lingual front & center. Not surprising as they're a French startup! - The release itself was done with swag. It's literally the reverse order of what folks expect: (1) Drop a magnet link with no explanation. Magnet is the new clickbait! (2) Submit a pull request to the open-source vLLM project to help the community integrate the Megablocks CUDA kernels. Rad move! (3) Only then you release the blog post. - Releasing hosted API endpoint is the best way to quickly gather customer feedback, iterate on in-the-wild use cases, and most importantly, monetize OSS models. Mistral does it immediately. - "Mixtral" is such a clever name Launch blog: mistral.ai/news/mixtral-o... API platform: mistral.ai/news/la-platef..." Link
JJ --- oss/acc: "Wow! Together just undercut Mistral's pricing by 70%..." Link
JJ --- oss/acc: "Awesome @WordPress State of the World 2023 by @photomatt. youtu.be/c7M4mBVgP3Y" Link
Draw Things: "1.20231210.2 released in AppStore (static.drawthings.ai/DrawThings-1.2...). We heard the community feedback and made the model selectors more compact. We also added Stable Video Diffusion model support in this release." Link
JJ --- oss/acc: "Roughly agree. We will also see a non-Transformer architecture unlock capabilities we didn't think were remotely possible even with enormous further scaling of GPTs." Link
Yann LeCun: "Open source AI models are on a path to overtake proprietary models." Link
JJ --- oss/acc: "How to go from zero to 20,000+ stars in a year... This is the incredible story of @planepowers --- the leading open source platform for the future of work: plane.so/blog/how-we-go..." Link
Vamsi Kurama: "To my fellow COSS founders and Open-source enthusiasts, here's the story of how we garnered over 20,000+ GitHub stars for @planepowers in just a year. It's been a roller coaster ride, and we've tried to mention all the tiny details. Bookmark it! plane.so/blog/how-we-go..." Link
Yann LeCun: "EU AI Act: it's not over yet. Regulating foundation models is a bad idea that was added late in the text and rightfully fought against by Macron's government. ft.com/content/9339d1..." Link
Brian Roemmele: "This is perhaps one of the most important charts on AI for 2024. It was built by the amazing researcher team at @CathieDWood's @ARKInvest. We can see the rise of open source local models are on the path to overtake massive (and expensive) cloud based closed models." Link
OpenBB: "Just crossed 25,000 stars on GitHub Check out our repo and join our +210 contributors: github.com/OpenBB-finance..." Link
Jürgen Schmidhuber: "How 3 Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas whose creators they failed to credit. More than a dozen concrete AI priority disputes under people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ai-pr..." Link
Tracel AI: "New technical blog post We wrote about the challenges we faced while developing the WebGPU backend. Autotune played a crucial role in optimizing execution speed by selecting the most efficient GPU kernels. Link: burn.dev/blog/autotune-..." Link
Heather Meeker: "My TED Talk is finally out! Why we need open-source AI (Heather Meeker | TEDAI 2023) go.ted.com/6zxLM via @TEDTalks" Link
JJ --- oss/acc: "Last week @MistralAI launched pricing for the Mixtral MoE: $2.00~ / 1M tokens. Hours later @togethercompute took the weights and dropped pricing by 70% to $0.60 / 1M. Days later @abacusai cut 50% deeper to $0.30 / 1M. Yesterday @DeepInfra went to $0.27 / 1M. Who's next ???" Link
JJ --- oss/acc: "And now Mixtral is free Thanks @xanderatallah openrouter.ai/models/firewor..." Link
JJ --- oss/acc: "I propose that @OpenAI appoint Heather Meeker to the non-profit BOD. Heather has uniquely helped the vast majority (all?) of the most successful open source startups navigate very complex legal, IP, ecosystem and business issues over the last 20+ years... @HeatherMeeker4" Link
AppFlowy: "Excited for 2024, we invite you to shape our future by completing this survey: tally.so/r/nW8qAQ. Participants will get early access to new releases, including pre-alpha versions. Join our journey!" Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
- Docker: ".@TechCrunch just broke the news. We've acquired @AtomicJarInc and the team is joining Docker! We are sharpening our focus on DevX and our commitment to the open source community is stronger than ever before with the addition of @Testcontainers. techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/doc..." Link
🛠️ COSS Jobs
- 3,550 jobs and 298 companies hiring! Link
- ResearchHub: "Get Funded on ResearchHub! @ResearchHub is experimenting with a new feature to help fund scientific research! Our community is planning to fund five separate $5k grants for novel #preregistered research projects Click to submit your application forms.gle/sDW5dCes2K5HLp..." Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
$COSS markets up 5.96% last week
- Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin.
Top comments (0)