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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can fine tune the models, and you can modify binaries. However, there is no human readable "source" to open in either case. The act of "fine tuning" is essentially brute forcing the system to gradually alter the weights such that loss is reduced against a new training set. This limits what you can actually do with the model vs an actual open source system where you can understand how the system is working and mod…

I don't find this argument super convincing. There's a pretty clear difference between the 'finetuning' offered via API by GPT4 and the ability to do whatever sort of finetuning you want and get the weights at the end that you can do with open weights models. "Brute forcing" is not the correct language to use for describing fine-tuning. It is not as if you are trying weights randomly and seeing which ones work on you…

"There's a pretty clear difference between the 'finetuning' offered via API by GPT4 and the ability to do whatever sort of finetuning you want and get the weights at the end that you can do with open weights models."

Yes, the difference is that one is provided over a remote API, and the provider of the API can restrict how you interact with it, while the other is performed directly by the user. One is a SaaS solution, the other is a compiled solution, and neither are open source.

""Brute forcing" is not the correct language to use for describing fine-tuning. It is not as if you are trying weights randomly and seeing which ones work on your dataset - you are following a gradient."

Whatever you want to call it, this doesn't sound like modifying functionality in source code. When I modify source code, I might make a change, check what that does, change the same functionality again, check the new change, etc... up to maybe a couple dozen times. What I don't do is have a very simple routine make very small modifications to all of the system's functionality, then check the result of that small change across the broad spectrum of functionality, and repeat millions of times.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#162
post #104

> Today we’re taking the next steps towards open source AI becoming the industry standard. We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, Why do people keep mislabeling this as Open Source? The whole point of calling something Open Source is that the "magic sauce" of how to build something is publicly available, so I could built it myself if I have the means. But without the training d…

Is that even something they keep on hand? Or would WANT to keep on hand? I figured they're basically sending a crawler to go nuts reading things and discard the data once they've trained on it.

If that included, e.g. reading all of Github for code, I wouldn't expect them to host an entire separate read-only copy of Github because they trained on it and say "this is part of our open source model"

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#163

Meta makes their money off advertising, which means they profit from attention. This means they need content that will grab attention, and creating open source models that allow anyone to create any content on their own becomes good for Meta. The users of the models can post it to their Instagram/FB/Threads account. Releasing an open model also releases Meta from the burden of having to police the content the model g…

This is a great point. Eventually, META will only allow LLAMA generated visual AI content on its platforms. They'll put a little key in the image that clears it with the platform.

Then all other visual AI content will be banned. If that is where legislation is heading.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#164

"Eventually though, open source Linux gained popularity – initially because it allowed developers to modify its code however they wanted ..." I find the language around "open source AI" to be confusing. With "open source" there's usually "source" to open, right? As in, there is human legible code that can be read and modified by the user? If so, then how can current ML models be open source? They're very large matric…

Llama’s code is open source: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/llama/model.p...

No, it's not. The Llama 3 Community License Agreement is not an open source license. Open source licenses need to meet the criteria of the only widely accepted definition of "open source", and that's the one formulated by the OSI [0]. This license has multiple restrictions on use and distribution which make it not open source. I know Facebook keeps calling this stuff open source, maybe in order to get all the good will that open source branding gets you, but that doesn't make it true. It's like a company calling their candy vegan while listing one its ingredients as pork-based gelatin. No matter how many times the company advertises that their product is vegan, it's not, because it doesn't meet the definition of vegan.

[0] - https://opensource.org/osd

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#165
post #151
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The codebase to do the training is way less valuable than the weights for the vast majority of people. Releasing the training code would be nice, but it doesn't really help anyone but Meta's direct competitors. If you want to train on top of Llama there's absolutely nothing stopping you. Plenty of open source tools to do parameter optimization.

Not just the training code but the training data as well, should be under a permissive license, otherwise you cannot call the project itself Open Source, which Facebook does here. > is way less valuable than the weights for the vast majority of people The same is true for most Open Source projects, most people use the distributed binaries or other artifacts from the projects, and couldn't care less about the code its…

> Not just the training code but the training data as well, should be under a permissive license, otherwise you cannot call the project itself Open Source, which Facebook does here.

Does FB even have the capability to do that? I'd assume there's a bunch of data that's not theirs and they can't even release it. Let alone some data that they might not want to admit is in the source.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#166
post #139

Thanks to Meta for their work on safety, particularly Llama Guard. Llama Guard 3 adds defamation, elections, and code interpreter abuse as detection categories. Having run many red teams recently as I build out promptfoo's red teaming featureset [0], I've noticed the Llama models punch above their weight in terms of accuracy when it comes to safety. People hate excessive guardrails and Llama seems to thread the needl…

is there a #2 to llamaguard? Meta seems curiously alone in doing this kind of, lets call it, "practical safety" work

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#167

“The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1].…

Imagine if they made a data center with 1957 electronics that cost $279 million.

They probably won't be using it now because the phone in your pocket is likely more powerful. Moore law did end but data center stuff are still evolving order of magnitudes faster than forging presses.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#169
post #104

> Today we’re taking the next steps towards open source AI becoming the industry standard. We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, Why do people keep mislabeling this as Open Source? The whole point of calling something Open Source is that the "magic sauce" of how to build something is publicly available, so I could built it myself if I have the means. But without the training d…

> Why do people keep mislabeling this as Open Source? The whole point of calling something Open Source is that the "magic sauce" of how to build something is publicly available, so I could built it myself if I have the means. But without the training data publicly available, could I train Llama 3.1 if I had the means?

I don't think not releasing the commit history of a project makes it not Open Source, this seems like that to me. What's important is you can download it, run it, modify it, and re-release it. Being able to see how the sausage was made would be interesting, but I don't think Meta have to show their training data any more than they are obligated to release their planning meeting notes for React development.

Edit: I think the restrictions in the license itself are good cause for saying it shouldn't be called Open Source, fwiw.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#170

"Eventually though, open source Linux gained popularity – initially because it allowed developers to modify its code however they wanted ..." I find the language around "open source AI" to be confusing. With "open source" there's usually "source" to open, right? As in, there is human legible code that can be read and modified by the user? If so, then how can current ML models be open source? They're very large matric…

Open Source Initiative (kind of a de-facto authority on what's open source and what not) is spending a whole lot of time figuring out what it means for an AI system to be open source. In other words, they're basically trying to come up with a new license because the existing ones can't easily apply.

I believe this is the current draft: https://opensource.org/deepdive/drafts/the-open-source-ai-de...

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