Be careful with ‘open source’ AI
Bill Doerrfeld | August 20, 2024
For the last few months, I've been looking into open source AI — the confusion around defining 'open source' AI, the potential risks or issues with restrictive licenses, the performance differences across open LLMs, and so on. I think this is a fascinating and (murky world) with many ripple effects for developers.
My latest article on LeadDev looks into open source AI and tries to make some sense for engineering leaders on how to approach it. There are some great gems here on how to evaluate and safely use open-source AI.
There's definitely more to be said about the state of AI, and I'm excited to follow this space.
My latest for InfoWorld breaks down 10 MCP servers powering next-gen devops workflows, from GitHub and Atlassian to AWS and Pulumi.
Excited to share my talk from Nordic APIs' Platform Summit 2025. As the opening talk of the event, I wanted to address the elephant in the room head-on: MCP.
Watch all the great API talks, keynotes, and panel discussions from this year's Nordic APIs Platform Summit, now available on YouTube.
Block's open source initiative is helping to build brand reputation, attract talent, boost partnerships, guide internal open source best practices, and aid long-term system reliability.
Achieving ROI with AI requires a mix of strong leadership stewardship upfront, shifting the talent framework, and embedding proper monitoring and governance throughout the lifecycle.
I recently explored what goes into creating a solid AI agent knowledge base — from the types of data it should contain to the retrieval mechanisms and architecture patterns that support reliable agentic behavior.
I recently spoke with LinkedIn VP of Engineering Prashanthi Padmanabhan about the making of their Hiring Assistant, an agent recruiters are using to optimize the applicant selection process.
How do you fail at platform engineering? Make it 100% UI-first. Don't market it. Survey no one. Measure success by who's onboarded. And just copy what others are doing.
This year's Platform Summit felt reinvigorated, with many new motivations and areas to discuss. Of course, AI agents and MCP stole the show.
For my latest DirectorPlus edition, I interviewed Thomas Johnson, co-founder and CTO of Multiplayer, about lessons learned releasing their MCP server.
