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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

#201

Post by swiftcoder »

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 not "open source" AI.

The OP actually acknowledges this in the footnotes. Perhaps we don't need to re-litigate this on every post?

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#202

Post by selfhoster11 »

kennywinker wrote: post #193
throwaway27448 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cracking games is and was illegal. Only distribution.

Don’t think that’s correct, i think creating the cracked version of a piece of software is infringement of copyright even without distribution. But even if distribution is required to trigger the law - you are free to distribute fine-tunes of most open weight models.

Interoperability clause in the EU might make it legal? Not sure.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#203

Post by austin-cheney »

swiftcoder wrote: post #201
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 not "open source" AI. The OP actually acknowledges this in the footnotes. Perhaps we don't need to re-litigate this on every post?

Does that then make the title deceptive click bait?

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#204

Post by georgemcbay »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #184
georgemcbay wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the distinction is important though Only to nerds. Of which I am one, so I'm not trying to be personally dismissive here. But I'd argue the average person only really cares about the legal aspects of duplication (and not their ability to modify things) both when it comes to open source software and open weight LLMs. > it is not at all obvious to me that having the model weights available will make this sort of retr…

> But I'd argue the average person only really cares about the legal aspects of duplication (and not their ability to modify things) both when it comes to open source software and open weight LLMs. The average person does not know the term "open source" to begin with, and is 100% not going to run an open source weight model on their computer. If they are, they will call them "free" models. I think the distinction is…

> The average person does not know the term "open source" to begin with, and is 100% not going to run an open source weight model on their computer.

I agree that the fully average person isn't going to call them "open source models" (or really anything more specific than "AI") but policy makers and the media having this discussion will call them "open source models". And they will be technically incorrect, but it won't matter, the name will stick.

And yeah, it will be quite a long time before average people run open weight models on their computer, but I think a significant amount of them will run hosted open weight models in the nearish future. It won't matter to them that these models are open weight, it will only matter to them that they cost less than Claude or GPT while doing basically the same stuff just about as well.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#205

Post by swiftcoder »

austin-cheney wrote: post #203
swiftcoder wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not "open source" AI. The OP actually acknowledges this in the footnotes. Perhaps we don't need to re-litigate this on every post?

Does that then make the title deceptive click bait?

That really depends how anal-retentive one is being about semantics. My own feeling is that open-source is itself pretty meaningless ever since corporations figured out how to capture all the value in the ecosystem...

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#206

Post by Otterly99 »

zem wrote: post #138
georgemcbay wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not "open source" AI. I both know what you mean and I agree with you, but attempts like this to maintain some sort of linguistic purity of meaning never work once the discussion escapes small communities into the larger mainstream. So you should probably get used to the idea of people saying "open source LLM" when they mean "open weights LLM".

the distinction is important though, because the OP throws in the point about how "if you think the Chinese models have political propaganda baked in, go ahead and remove it, it's open source!". it is not at all obvious to me that having the model weights available will make this sort of retraining easy or even possible, but framing them as "open source" makes the analogy with open source software an easy one to get…

Open weights models are trainable. However, I would not count it as "easy" as you generally do not have access to the training material, so there is a substantial risk of model drift if you use weight-based retraining.

However, with RLHF you don't need to have access to the original training set to steer a model towards a preferable behavior.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#207

Post by Capricorn2481 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #204
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I'd argue the average person only really cares about the legal aspects of duplication (and not their ability to modify things) both when it comes to open source software and open weight LLMs. The average person does not know the term "open source" to begin with, and is 100% not going to run an open source weight model on their computer. If they are, they will call them "free" models. I think the distinction is…

> The average person does not know the term "open source" to begin with, and is 100% not going to run an open source weight model on their computer. I agree that the fully average person isn't going to call them "open source models" (or really anything more specific than "AI") but policy makers and the media having this discussion will call them "open source models". And they will be technically incorrect, but it won…

I just don't see how policy makers, media, or the average person would find any utility in calling something "open source" over "free." Maybe an actual legal bill will. But in everday speech, everyone will refer to it as "free AI", because it describes the only part they actually care to know about.

Now I am living in a world where "ChatGPT" was being used in every day conversation so I can't underestimate people

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#208

Post by jononor »

SwellJoe wrote: post #107
embedding-shape wrote: post #100

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 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, th…

Not comparable today. But in 10 or 20 years the situation might be considerably different. Hopefully closer to a everyone-can-build-using-hardware-they-already-have.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#209

Post by jononor »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #160
Groxx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially since some of the arguments in the article seem to hinge on "just fix the training!", yeah, I think this is a completely fair call-out. Open weights can sometimes get additional training, but you can't remove existing training , so there kinda isn't a fair claim to "just train it to be [nationality]". That would need "real" open source so you can train a realistically-equivalent model from the ground up.

The big labs don't generally have the resources to remove stuff and re-run training again either. That's reserved for new models. Existing models are modified by operating on the weights even by the model creators, which exactly satisfies the GPL's definition of source as the "preferred form for making modifications".

Even in a fine tuning scenario, the preferred form for making modifications is the weights plus the training pipelines, including evaluation protocols, tooling, etc.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#210

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

Agentlien wrote: post #179
ekidd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would rather say that many details of the supposed attack were published by Hugging face before it was publicly announced that OpenAI were involved. Both are big actors in the AI space who arguably benefit from increasing the perceived capabilities of AI models. If one suspects OpenAI of lying it isn't such a stretch to think this was a coordinated PR campaign between them and Hugging face.

I can accept that AI labs themselves, like essentially no company before them, are overselling how dangerous their product is far marketing. It's weird how confident everyone is about that theory, but it does at least make sense.

But come on- Hugging Face benefits from increasing the perceived capabilities of OpenAI's models to slightly beyond Anthropic's? Enough to be cut in on this PR scam- to be handed the never-before-revealed information that this is a PR scam- despite having much less skin in the game than their partner here? And then they turned around and used a Chinese model to successfully stop it? This is a stretch!

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