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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

#101

Post by thoughtpeddler »

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…

It's true that there isn't currently a single Chinese model family that matches the full OLMo/Nemotron end-to-end 'cookbook' one could rightly call "open-source" (i.e. a full manual on how to reproduce your own foundation model by including the models, data, checkpoints, evals, and code for base/thinking/instruct/RLVR)...

But! the Chinese ecosystem does have most of those components, just that they're split across separate projects: MAP-Neo or YuLan-Mini for transparent pretraining, plus DAPO/verl or Open-Reasoner-Zero for transparent reasoning RL.

My bet is it's just a matter of time until there is a Chinese equivalent to OLMo. It won't just be China either - from the public sector across the globe there are efforts ranging from Apertus in Switzerland to LLM-jp-4 in Japan, and more. They're not OLMo-level but I'm sure by 2027 you'll see fully open-source 'cookbooks' help an enterprising individual reproduce frontier models of at least a 2023-2024 vintage.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#102

Post by gorgoiler »

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…

I sort of agree with your analogy but in another sense, think of Firefox.

Could I have made it myself? No!

Am I grateful that I can have the output of Mozilla’s internal efforts — the browser source code — so that I can at least tweak it and rebuild it myself, and even ship the results myself? Yes!

A open weight model is both an incomprehensible binary blob like Photoshop, but also patchable and adjustable piece of source code, like Firefox.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#104

Post by elpocko »

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.

I agree with you in general, it's not "Open Source". But in many cases you're allowed to fork them, and create and distribute derivative works (finetunes) from open models, and the training and inference code is also permissively licensed. That's not shareware.

And working with the binary weights of a huge pretained model is much easier and cheaper than doing it based on the entirety of its humongous source datasets.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#106

Post by matteoraso »

ekidd wrote: post #49
TSiege wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? We have just recently established that: 1. OpenAI's internal "Galaxy" model is fully capable of functioning as what security people refer to as an "Advanced Persistent Threat." The published details of the recent sandbox escape and Hugging Face attack involved chaining multiple unknown zero-days at various stages of the attack, and…

>2. OpenAI is clearly incapable of controlling their in-house models. This is the second time Galaxy-class models are known to have breached containment and done bad stuff.

What was the first?

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#107

Post by SwellJoe »

embedding-shape wrote: post #100
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…

> 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.

"Compiling/creating the Linux kernel or Chromium is no child's dance either"

I can compile the Linux kernel on a modest 15 year old laptop. Sure, it took 35 years and thousands of people to build it into what it is today, but anyone with pretty much any computer can meaningfully participate in Linux kernel development, and many Linux contributors have done so using modest hardware. The same is not true of AI. And, the Linux kernel is the biggest open source project, but plenty of small ones with one or two developers are in use on millions of systems.

I have pretty big hardware for local AI, more than most people have (a Strix Halo and a couple of 32GB GPUs in my desktop), but I can barely train anything useful locally; I can do QLoRAs for small models, or LoRAs for very small models, that's about the extent of it. I would need to rent big GPUs to do anything more than an experiment.

That's not comparable.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#108

Post by ekidd »

munk-a wrote: post #86
ekidd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AI were to become a super weapon why should I trust a private company to own it? We have just recently established that: 1. OpenAI's internal "Galaxy" model is fully capable of functioning as what security people refer to as an "Advanced Persistent Threat." The published details of the recent sandbox escape and Hugging Face attack involved chaining multiple unknown zero-days at various stages of the attack, and…

> We have just recently established that: Especially for point #1 I don't think we've established that - we've been given information by a private company that makes their tooling look extremely valuable which may be true and genuine or may just be yet another doomday statement to bolster their valuation. "AI is going to end the world" has been an extremely effective vector for AI shops to sell their companies to inv…

> Especially for point #1 I don't think we've established that - we've been given information by a private company that makes their tooling look extremely valuable which may be true and genuine or may just be yet another doomday statement to bolster their valuation.

Many of the details of the attack on Huggingface were reported by them before they knew who was attacking. So no, OpenAI is not the only source here. It was a pretty impressive example of an APT-style attack just from their end.

"Our model is powerful enough to commit multiple felonies (and we can't stop it)" is "marketing," I suppose.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#109

Post by SwellJoe »

antonvs wrote: post #88
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…

> But, also Photoshop is not at all comparable to open weight models. I can't legally give you a copy of Photoshop Please tell me this level of obtuseness is deliberate.

I don't know what you mean, so, if I am obtuse it is from a genuine lack of understanding. What is obtuse about that statement?

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#110

Post by SwellJoe »

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.

I'm not at all disagreeing with you about calling these models "open source". They mostly aren't and we should stop conflating the two things.
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