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AI weights are not open “source”

opencoreventures.com

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#31

Post by habitue »

One thing I don't see discussed enough is that, ok let's say the weights are unencumbered, and the source is under an OSI license: the point of open source licenses and free software was to expose the *human understandable* meaning of the final program.

That's why distributing binaries isn't allowed even though technically all of the functionality is present in the machine code. AI weights are basically binary blobs. We don't know what they mean, there is really no source code for them. The best we can do is various black box manipulations on them like LoRA, etc, similar to what we can do to a binary blob.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#33

Post by ndriscoll »

The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like a rather important point to bring up when discussing the licensing landscape for weights...

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#34

Post by WanderPanda »

ndriscoll wrote: post #33

The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…

Of course weights are copyrightable. Otherwise nothing is copyrightable

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#35

Post by morpheuskafka »

> AI also poses socio-ethical consequences that don’t exist on the same scale as computer software, necessitating more restrictions like behavioral use restrictions

There's plenty of software that has, or could have, similar restrictions. Consider software that allows you to plan vantage points for a shooting or estimate the impact of using explosives at various locations. And the government regulates all sorts of software for export/download because it has military use--everything from development tools to high performance chips that could be used to crunch numbers for a nuclear program, CAD software that can help you build (or destroy) a bridge, etc. The CPUs and GPUs themselves are regulated at certain performance levels, I think.

None of this is really new to AI.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#36

Post by throwaway98721 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #33

The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…

Why is it unestablished? Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Weights are just a different kind of a document.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#37

Post by mrguyorama »

programmarchy wrote: post #22
slowmovintarget wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weights are data, not a type of program. A computer program is a set of instructions that may be executed. Weights are values that may be loaded by a program, but are not a program in and of themselves.

This is a distinction without a difference. Code is data and data is code.

Maybe they've only worked with machines using a Harvard Architecture

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#38

Post by [deleted] »

habitue wrote: post #31

One thing I don't see discussed enough is that, ok let's say the weights are unencumbered, and the source is under an OSI license: the point of open source licenses and free software was to expose the *human understandable* meaning of the final program. That's why distributing binaries isn't allowed even though technically all of the functionality is present in the machine code. AI weights are basically binary blobs.…

[deleted]

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#39

Post by xg15 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #33

The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…

Furthermore, if weights are copyrightable, wouldn't this make the issue of training data licenses even more urgent?

IANAL, but if weights are IP, wouldn't they constitute a "derived work" of the training data?

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