5 items tagged “oxide”
2025
My AI/LLM predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years, for Oxide and Friends
The Oxide and Friends podcast has an annual tradition of asking guests to share their predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years. Here’s 2022, 2023 and 2024. This year they invited me to participate. I’ve never been brave enough to share any public predictions before, so this was a great opportunity to get outside my comfort zone!
[... 2,675 words]Oxide and Friends Predictions 2025—on Monday Jan 6th at 5pm Pacific (via) I'll be participating in the annual Oxide and Friends predictions podcast / live recording next Monday (6th January) at 5pm Pacific, in their Discord.
The event description reads:
Join us in making 1-, 3- and 6-year tech predictions -- and to revisit our 1-year predictions from 2024 and our 3-year predictions from 2022!
I find the idea of predicting six months ahead in terms of LLMs hard to imagine, so six years will be absolute science fiction!
I had a lot of fun talking about open source LLMs on this podcast a year ago.
2024
Whither CockroachDB? (via) CockroachDB - previously Apache 2.0, then BSL 1.1 - announced on Wednesday that they were moving to a source-available license.
Oxide use CockroachDB for their product's control plane database. That software is shipped to end customers in an Oxide rack, and it's unacceptable to Oxide for their customers to think about the CockroachDB license.
Oxide use RFDs - Requests for Discussion - internally, and occasionally publish them (see rfd1) using their own custom software.
They chose to publish this RFD that they wrote in response to the CockroachDB license change, describing in detail the situation they are facing and the options they considered.
Since CockroachDB is a critical component in their stack which they have already patched in the past, they're opting to maintain their own fork of a recent Apache 2.0 licensed version:
The immediate plan is to self-support on CochroachDB 22.1 and potentially CockroachDB 22.2; we will not upgrade CockroachDB beyond 22.2. [...] This is not intended to be a community fork (we have no current intent to accept outside contributions); we will make decisions in this repository entirely around our own needs. If a community fork emerges based on CockroachDB 22.x, we will support it (and we will specifically seek to get our patches integrated), but we may or may not adopt it ourselves: we are very risk averse with respect to this database and we want to be careful about outsourcing any risk decisions to any entity outside of Oxide.
The full document is a fascinating read - as Kelsey Hightower said:
This is engineering at its finest and not a single line of code was written.
Talking about Open Source LLMs on Oxide and Friends
I recorded an episode of the Oxide and Friends podcast on Monday, talking with Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal about Open Source LLMs.
[... 1,995 words]Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison. I was invited to the Oxide and Friends weekly audio show (previously on Twitter Spaces, now using broadcast using Discord) to talk about open source LLMs, and to respond to a very poorly considered op-ed calling for them to be regulated as “uniquely dangerous”. It was a really fun conversation, now available to listen to as a podcast or YouTube audio-only video.