One clear message emerges from all this: AI and data infrastructure might be driving demand for open source technologies, but this demand creates significant costs for the project maintainers. Ion Stoica, professor of the computer science division at Berkeley and a Sky Computing Lab adviser, says that the funding pressure on open source project maintainers is “at least an order of magnitude higher” with the advent of LLMs.

“You have multiple kinds of GPUs, you have all of these other accelerators, and there’s also a difference in scale,” he said. “Ten years ago, most of the funding for a new startup would go to adding people; today, it’s going to infrastructure.”