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If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

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Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#11

> Imagine if Linux published only a binary without the codebase. Or published the codebase without the compiler used to make the binary. This is where we are today. This was such a helpful way to frame the problem! Something felt off about the "open source models" out there; this highlights the problem incredibly well.

Open Source and Free Software wasn't formulated to deal with the need for this level of gargantuan amounts of data and compute.

Can the public compete? What percentage of the technical public could we expect to participate, and how much data, compute, and data quality improvement could they bring to the table? I suspect that large corporations are at least an order of magnitude advantaged economically.

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#12
95% of the value comes from the model being freely downloadable and analyzable (i.e. not obfuscated/crippled post-hoc). Sure there is some difference, but as researchers I care far more about open access than making every "gnuight" on the internet happy that we used the right terminology.

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#13
post #5

> if you can’t reproduce the model then it’s not truly open-source. Open-source means open source, it does not make reproducibility guarantees. You get the code and you can use the code. Pushed to the extreme this is like saying Chromium is not open-source because my 4GB laptop can't compile it. Getting training code for GPT-4 under MIT would be mostly useless, but it would still be open source.

Then what we need isn't open source. It's something else. Maybe called "Open Model?"

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#14

> Imagine if Linux published only a binary without the codebase. Or published the codebase without the compiler used to make the binary. This is where we are today. This was such a helpful way to frame the problem! Something felt off about the "open source models" out there; this highlights the problem incredibly well.

Open Source and Free Software wasn't formulated to deal with the need for this level of gargantuan amounts of data and compute. Can the public compete? What percentage of the technical public could we expect to participate, and how much data, compute, and data quality improvement could they bring to the table? I suspect that large corporations are at least an order of magnitude advantaged economically.

There is a big effort being worked on in China, Yuanqing Lin gave an interview on the deep learning course that works on this magnitude [1]. They suggest that they will host both the resources to store the data, train the data, and have all those algorithms available in China.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GfOnI3goAk

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#15

I would argue that while technically correct, it is not what most people really care. What they care about are the following: 1. Can I download it? 2. Can I run it on my hardware? 3. Can I modify it? 4. Can I share my modifications with others? If those questions are in the affirmative, then I think most people consider it open enough, and it is a huge step for freedom compared to the models such as OpenAI.

It's a great observation. People simply want their free stuff.

The potential challenge arises in the future. Today's models will probably look weak compared to models we'll have in 1, 3 or 10 years which means that today's models will likely be irrelevant in years hence. Every competitive "open" model today is tied closely to a controlling organization weather it's Meta, Mistral.AI, TII, 01.AI, etc.

If they simply choose not to publish the next iteration of their model and follow OpenAI's path that's the end of the line.

A truly open model could have some life beyond that of its original developer/organization. Of course it would still take great talent, updated datasets, and serious access to compute to keep a model moving forward and developing but if this is done in the "open" community then we'd have some guarantee for the future.

Imagine if Linux was actually owned by a for-profit corporation and they could simply choose not to release a future version AND it was not possible for another organization to fork and carry on "open" Linux?

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#16
I think the process of data acquisition isn't so clear-cut. Take CERN as an example: they release loads of data from various experiments under the CC0 license [1]. This isn't just a few small datasets for classroom use; we're talking big-league data, like the entire first run data from LHCb [2].

On their portal, they don't just dump the data and leave you to it. They've got guides on analysis and the necessary tools (mostly open source stuff like ROOT [3] and even VMs). This means anyone can dive in. You could potentially discover something new or build on existing experiment analyses. This setup, with open data and tools, ticks the boxes for reproducibility. But does it mean people need to recreate the data themselves?

Ideally, yeah, but realistically, while you could theoretically rebuild the LHC (since most technical details are public), it would take an army of skilled people, billions of dollars, and years to do it.

This contrasts with open source models, where you can retrain models using data to get the weights. But getting hold of the data and the cost to reproduce the weights is usually prohibitive. I get that CERN's approach might seem to counter this, but remember, they're not releasing raw data (which is mostly noise), but a more refined version. Try downloading several petabytes of raw data if not; good luck with that. But for training something like a LLM, you might need the whole dataset, which in many cases have its own problems with copyrights…etc.

[1] https://opendata.cern.ch/docs/terms-of-use

[2] https://opendata.cern.ch/docs/lhcb-releases-entire-run1-data...

[3] https://root.cern/

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#17

The Open Source Initiative, who maintain the Open Source Definition, have been running a whole series over the past year to collect input from all sorts of stakeholders about what it means for an AI to be open source. I was lucky enough to participate in an afternoon long session with about a hundred other people last year at All Things Open. https://deepdive.opensource.org/ I encourage you to go check out what's alr…

Can you summarize? I'm reading https://deepdive.opensource.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/D... but it seems to tackle too many questions when I'm really only interested on what criteria to use when deciding whether (for example) Stable Diffusion is open source or not.

Anyway, to go on a tangent, some day maybe with zero knowledge proofs we will be able to prove that a given pretrained model was indeed the result of training using a given dataset, in a way that can be verified vastly cheaper than training the model itself from scratch. (This same technique could also be applied to other things like verifying if a binary was compiled from a given source with a given compiler, hopefully verified in a cheaper way than compiling and applying all optimizations from scratch).

If this ever materialize, then we can just demand proofs.

Here's a study on that

https://montrealethics.ai/experimenting-with-zero-knowledge-...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576915.3623202

And here is another

https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1174

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#18
I think the biggest issue is with publishing the datasets. Then people and companies would discover that it's full of their copyrighted content and sue. I wouldn't be surprised if they slurped in the whole Z-Library et Al into their models. Or Google their entire Google Books Dataset

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#19
post #5

> if you can’t reproduce the model then it’s not truly open-source. Open-source means open source, it does not make reproducibility guarantees. You get the code and you can use the code. Pushed to the extreme this is like saying Chromium is not open-source because my 4GB laptop can't compile it. Getting training code for GPT-4 under MIT would be mostly useless, but it would still be open source.

Then what we need isn't open source. It's something else. Maybe called "Open Model?"

Yes that would make sense. I'm in no way arguing that models can't be more open, just that overloading a commonly used expression such as "open-source" and then complaining that projects are not complying with your new definition of open-source just does not make sense to me.

Re: If you can't reproduce the model then it's not open-source

#20

I think the biggest issue is with publishing the datasets. Then people and companies would discover that it's full of their copyrighted content and sue. I wouldn't be surprised if they slurped in the whole Z-Library et Al into their models. Or Google their entire Google Books Dataset

Somewhat unrelated, but here is a thought experiment...

If a human knows a song "by heart" (imperfectly), it is not considered copyright infringement.

If a LLM knows a song as part of its training data, then it is copyright infringement.

But what if you developed a model with no prepared training data and forced it to learn from it's own sensory inputs. Instead of shoveling it bits, you played it this particular song and it (imperfectly) recorded the song with it's sensory input device. The same way humans listen to and experience music.

Is the latter learning model infringing on the copyright of the song?

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