CS373 - Open Source Software Scenario 3

Scenario 3: Machine Learning Infrastructure Framework

Potential Benefits of Open Source:

• Ecosystem adoption: If widely adopted, it could become a de facto standard, with hardware vendors optimizing their drivers for it.
• Talent attraction: Top engineers are often drawn to companies that maintain influential open-source projects.
• Collaborative innovation: External researchers may contribute features like new parallelism strategies or support for novel hardware (e.g., Cerebras, Graphcore).

Potential Risks/Challenges:

• Competitive exposure: Large cloud providers (AWS, Google, Microsoft) could integrate it into their stacks and offer it as part of their service, bypassing the company.
• Governance and roadmap control: Once public, direction could be influenced by big contributors, making it harder for the company to set priorities.
• Security vulnerabilities: Public code may be scrutinized for exploits, and the company will be pressured to patch quickly.