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AI weights are not open “source”

opencoreventures.com

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#41

Post by realusername »

xg15 wrote: post #39
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?

That's also my understanding, either the weights are copyrightable and then all the models need explicit agreements for any work they include in it because models become derivatives or they are not copyrightable being just machine data (the most likely scenario in my opinion), they can't have it both ways.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#42

Post by enlightens »

WanderPanda wrote: post #34
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

Recipes, for example, are not copyrightable in the US. Neither are some of the concepts behind creating a fillable form. It's not an all-or-nothing system.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#43

Post by jrm4 »

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…

Exactly. A lot of the difficulty here is how they skip is the hugely important issue:

An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following:

Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement -- accordingly, it's extremely difficult to say anything morally justifiable or authoritative about anyone elses "rights" downstream, and to try to inject the word "ethical" makes the whole thing even more ridiculous.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#44

Post by Izkata »

golemotron wrote: post #19
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.

No, declarative programs exist. They are not instructions. There is no real line between code and data. This is an observation that runs all the way from Turing Machines in computability theory to the Von Neumann architecture and homoiconicity in Lisp. What we call 'data' is just code that needs a cleverer interpreter.

Less into theory and more into "wait wtf": Some of the older projects I've worked on were written by people who loved database-driven stuff, to the point they did things like put perl code into one table column (with sentinel values you had to find/replace before `eval`ing the code) and sql into another table that retrieved values for those find/replaces, both retrieved and executed by some really generic code.

Code or data: Well... both.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#45

Post by Conscat »

throwaway98721 wrote: post #36
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.

No, a document's contents aren't inherently copyrightable. They have to be a creative work or a method of production, and part of that basically means it has to be human generated content (as opposed to computer or animal generated).

AI weights might be considered a method of production, but that isn't clear yet.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#46

Post by TheRealPomax »

So, Open Data. Got it. This is the same category as config files that are kept up to date by a program as it runs.

- Is it "a program"? Very clearly not.

- Is it source code? You can argue either way. The program won't work without it, but "this specific one" is not required for the program to do something, and that ambiguity means you probably don't want to call it "source code" because it's too vague.

- Is it data used by a program in order to perform its task? Absolutely. It even uniquely defines the program behaviour, and so is a thing onto itself within the context of the program it's used by.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#47

Post by worksonmine »

> Unlike software licensing, AI isn’t as simple as applying current proprietary/open source software licenses. AI has multiple components—the source code, weights, data, etc.—that are licensed differently.

Software also has multiple components, often the same as the ones listed by the author. But what do I know, to me AI is just another example of software.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#49

Post by visarga »

jrm4 wrote: post #43
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…

Exactly. A lot of the difficulty here is how they skip is the hugely important issue: An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following: Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement -- accordingly, it's extremely difficult to say anything morally justifiable or authoritative about anyone elses "rights…

> is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement

Why? Copyright covers expression not information, AIs can learn information from any source regardless of copyright. They should just not regurgitate copyrighted content, that's all. And much of what organic content is online is common knowledge, thus can't be copyright-controlled.

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