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The arguments against open source AI are bad

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Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#91

Post by DonHopkins »

petcat wrote: post #83
SwellJoe wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software, like a random person in Nebraska can produce a critical piece of the world's infrastructure in their spare time, don't apply. Actually open source AI is more like scientific research. It needs public funding and reputable institutions as stewards of that funding. I'm hop…

OK so replace the Photoshop example with a compiled GIMP or shareware binary. It doesn't change the fact that it is not open source. The free software community complains all the time about binary blobs that are otherwise legal to freely distribute. Like firmwares. But somehow this is all overlooked with these "open weight" models.

Lord forbid open source models have as horrible a user interface as GIMP!

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#92

Post by kmeisthax »

elmer2 wrote: post #55
kittikitti wrote: post #42

They don't have to convince developers, they just have to convince the general population. I've had several discussions about open source with people who don't care about coding and it's hard to untangle the misinformation they receive from the media. They get talking points from authorities that they don't understand so they will always double down on it. For example, rhetoric relating open source to communism is hu…

"For example, rhetoric relating open source to communism is humiliating to discuss" All Open Source isn't communism. The GPL license is a form of digital communism. It forces you to open source any additions made to open source code as a way to make things 'equal'. I'm glad it and Stallman are mostly in the dust heap of history and better licenses, like the MIT, BSD, and Apache have gotten popular. The irony is that…

Reciprocal sharing is not "digital communism". If it was, then the mere existence of the public domain and the fact that copyrights expire is "delayed communism".

The GPL was absolutely necessary in getting corporate America to play ball with FOSS projects instead of merely extracting value from them. It's also the only reason why embedded vendors even release anything at all. The licenses on Linux and busybox require it. The fact that permissive licenses are more common for certain kinds of FOSS projects does not mean the GPL is dead - far from it.

Stallman is more or less irrelevant, but that's because Stallman let GNU become irrelevant. Without GNU, he's a washed-up has-been from the MIT AI Lab with a startlingly low Epstein number[0], a chain of disturbing accusations, and a foundation that acts like his personal sockpuppet. The reason why companies still play ball with Linux and it's GPL license is because Linux continues to deliver a Free and free kernel worth using at the low low price of "please send back your source code changes". Which, again, is not "digital communism", it's just a good bargain.

[0] Erdos number but for pedophiles

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#94

Post by mrguyorama »

catigula wrote: post #20
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already know how to kill thousands of people. It's not conceptually difficult: more than a day's effort, sure, but what stops people from doing this kind of thing is not the lack of knowing how. https://xkcd.com/1958/

No, you don't. What stops people is actually access to knowledge. There are killers of varying levels of efficacy; making killing easier means more people die. It's 1-1.

How many people have shot up electrical substations, a fairly trivial way to causing widespread harm that was popularized in the news just a few years ago.

But it's only happened a couple times. Because most people just can't be assed to harm a hundred thousand others.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#95

Post by joe_the_user »

nater5000 wrote: post #15

>Much of the angst around China's models centers on "losing the AI race". But what's the goal of this race? Is it to develop the best model? To sell the most tokens? To destroy humanity first? Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity. Even if you don't buy into a more sci-fi interpretation of this, there are pretty grounded arguments one could make that there is some sort of "goal" in AI developm…

I agree with your overall argument. But I think there's a challenge here - if the "ultimate AI" is now being built in the West, it is being built with private investment from many sources. I think even China depends on investors expecting payoffs. Those sources expect not a single Singularity but profits since these can be divided. Moreover, those investors expect a streams of profits even before the Singularity, so the companies need to sell their models, if they lock this iteration, they won't have the money for the next iteration.

Quite a balancing act.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#96

Post by joe_the_user »

TSiege wrote: post #31
nater5000 wrote: post #15

>Much of the angst around China's models centers on "losing the AI race". But what's the goal of this race? Is it to develop the best model? To sell the most tokens? To destroy humanity first? Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity. Even if you don't buy into a more sci-fi interpretation of this, there are pretty grounded arguments one could make that there is some sort of "goal" in AI developm…

If AI were to become a super weapon why should I trust a private company to own it? If the super weapon is publicly available to download then why should American citizens be banned from doing so?

If AI were to become a super weapon why should I trust a private company to own it?

If AI becomes a super weapon, it's possessor will no longer care whether you trust it. It would be nice if whether "we" trusted OpenAI et al mattered even now but I see little evidence of that.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#97

Post by TurdF3rguson »

40four wrote: post #77
petcat wrote: post #69

This is not "open source" AI. Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source Photoshop binary = open weight Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc. There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API. If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3 https://a…

This is a great distinction that I don’t think is getting talked about enough. “Open source” is probably the wrong term to use. Open “weights”, sure. If your only concern is how good is it at coding, then I don’t have an issue with using the Chinese models. Especially if you want to run it locally, they are kind of the only choice. For any other use than coding, it’s going to have to be a hard pass from me.

Well I don't see how it even could be open source, since the source is distilling closed weights models, lol.

Also, who cares about having the source? Are you going to tweak it + spend a billion dollars training to get slightly different weights? Who would do that?

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#98

Post by anon373839 »

petcat wrote: post #69

This is not "open source" AI. Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source Photoshop binary = open weight Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc. There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API. If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3 https://a…

Chinese models are open-source for purposes of inference: you know exactly what the model architecture is and the code to run it is released under an open source license. The “binary blob” is a useful artifact that has many techniques available to use in the creation of future binary blobs. And it is fixed and reliable.

Contrast this with crap like Claude, where you have no idea how many/what size/shape models you are interacting with. They can silently inject outputs from other systems, apply steering vectors to sabotage a particular user’s work, etc.

I agree that 100% free-range organic open source models are lovely, but they also are unlikely ever to attain parity with the frontier because the training data sources are open and expose them to legal liability that closed model providers can thwart.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#99

Post by parl_match »

SwellJoe wrote: post #80
petcat wrote: post #69

This is not "open source" AI. Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source Photoshop binary = open weight Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc. There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API. If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3 https://a…

Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software, like a random person in Nebraska can produce a critical piece of the world's infrastructure in their spare time, don't apply. Actually open source AI is more like scientific research. It needs public funding and reputable institutions as stewards of that funding. I'm hop…

> Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software, like a random person in Nebraska can produce a critical piece of the world's infrastructure in their spare time, don't apply.

No, but a small university team with dark time on the state school system's cluster can build a basic, functional LLM.

It will be a few years (or more) until true "open source" LLMs are available and high quality, for sure. But it's not as impenetrable as it seems, IMO.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#100

Post by embedding-shape »

SwellJoe wrote: post #80
petcat wrote: post #69

This is not "open source" AI. Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source Photoshop binary = open weight Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc. There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API. If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3 https://a…

Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software, like a random person in Nebraska can produce a critical piece of the world's infrastructure in their spare time, don't apply. Actually open source AI is more like scientific research. It needs public funding and reputable institutions as stewards of that funding. I'm hop…

> Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software

Compiling/creating the Linux kernel or Chromium is no child's dance either, doesn't make them more/less FOSS than other things. Open Source AI gets its name from the license, not how easy/difficult it is to run/produce yourself.

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