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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#371

Post by advael »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #356
ori_b wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that ever stops being the case, you should fork rather than trust their judgment. Fork what? The secret sauce is in the training data and infrastructure. I don't think either of those is currently open.

A good point. Forgive me, I am AI naive, is there some way to harness Llama to train ones own actually-open AI?

Kinda. Since you can self-host the model on a linux machine, there's no meaningful way for them to prevent you from having the trained weights. You can use this to bootstrap other models, or retrain on your own datasets, or fine-tune from the starting point of the currently-working model. What you can't do is be sure what they trained it on

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#372

Post by SquareWheel »

Palomides wrote: post #348
SquareWheel wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> specific, widely accepted definitions Realistically, nobody outside of Hacker News commenters have ever cared about the OSD. It's just not how the term is used colloquially.

who says open source colloquially? ime anyone who doesn't care about software licenses will just say free (per free beer) and (strong personal opinion) any software developer should have a firm grip on the terminology and details for legal reasons

> who says open source colloquially?

There is a large span of people between gray beard programmer and lay person, and many in that span have some concept of open-source. It's often used synonymously with visible source, free software, or in this case, open weights.

It seems unfortunate - though expected - that over half of the comments in this thread are debating the OSD for the umpeenth time instead of discussing the actual model release or accompanying news posts. Meanwhile communities like /r/LocalLlama are going hog wild with this release and already seeing what it can do.

> any software developer should have a firm grip on the terminology and details for legal reasons

They'd simply need to review the terms of the license to see if it fits their usage. It doesn't really matter if the license satisfies the OSD or not.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#373

Post by noiseinvacuum »

bun_at_work wrote: post #121

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…

Creating content with AI will surely be helpful for social media to some extent but I think it's not that important in larger scheme of things, there's already a vast sea of content being created by humans and differentiation is already in recommending the right content to right people at right time.

More important is the products that Meta will be able to make if the industry standardizes on Llama. They would have the front seat in not just with access the latest unreleased models but also settings the direction of progress and next gen LLM optimizes for. If you're Twitter or Snap or TikTok or compete with Meta on the product then good luck in trying to keep up.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#374

Post by thayne »

Zambyte wrote: post #238
the8thbit wrote: post #12

"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…

> If so, then how can current ML models be open source? The source of a language model is the text it was trained on. Llama models are not open source (contrary to their claims), they are open weight.

I think it would also include the code used to train it

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#375

Post by noiseinvacuum »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #97
mattnewton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think this is one of the rare times where the small guys interests are aligned with Meta. Meta is scared of a world where they are locked out of LLM platforms, one where OpenAI gets to dictate rules around their use of the platform much like Apple and Google dictates rules around advertiser data and monetization on their mobile platforms. Small developers should be scared of a world where the only competit…

Sure, but don't you think the "not getting locked out" is just the pre-requisite for their eventual goal of locking everyone else out?

If by "everyone else" here you mean 3 or 4 large players trying to create a regulatory moat around themselves then I am fine with them getting locked out and not being able to create a moat for next 3 decades.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#377

Post by lawlessone »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #353
advael wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, absolutely zero people in the world should trust any tech company when they say they care about or will keep commitments to the open-source ecosystem in any capacity. Nevertheless, it is occasionally strategic for them to do so, and there can be ancillary benefits for said ecosystem in those moments where this is the best play for them to harm their competitors For now, Meta seems to release Llama models in way…

Is forking really possible with an LLM or one the size of future Lama versions, have they even released the weights and everything? Maybe I am just negative about it because I feel Meta is the worst company ever invented and feel this will hurt society in the long run just like Facebook.

> have they even released the weights?

Isn't that what the model is? just a collection weights?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#378

Post by noiseinvacuum »

Salgat wrote: post #66
rybosworld wrote: post #54

Huge companies like facebook will often argue for solutions that on the surface, seem to be in the public interest. But I have strong doubts they (or any other company) actually believe what they are saying. Here is the reality: - Facebook is spending untold billions on GPU hardware. - Facebook is arguing in favor of open sourcing the models, that they spent billions of dollars to generate, for free...? It follows th…

The reason for Meta making their model open source is rather simple: They receive an unimaginable amount of free labor, and their license only excludes their major competitors to ensure mass adoption without benefiting their competition (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, etc). Public interest, philanthropy, etc are just nice little marketing bonuses as far as they're concerned (otherwise they wouldn't be including this lic…

All correct, Meta does obviously benefit.

It's helpful to also look at what do the developers and companies (everyone outside of top 5/10 big tech companies) get out of this. They get open access to weights of SOTA LLM models that take billions of dollars to train and 10s of billions a year to run the AI labs that make these. They get the freedom to fine tune them, to distill them, and to host them on their own hardware in whatever way works best for their products and services.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#379

Post by KaiserPro »

natural219 wrote: post #268
bun_at_work wrote: post #121

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…

AI moderators too would be an enormous boon if they could get that right.

It would be good, but the cost per moderation is still really high for it to be practical.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#380

Post by baby »

light_triad wrote: post #354

They are positioning themselves as champions of AI open source mostly because they were blindsided by OpenAI, are not in the infra game, and want to commoditize their complements as much as possible. This is not altruism although it's still great for devs and startups. All FB GPU investments is primarily for new AI products "friends", recommendations and selling ads. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy…

Meta does a good thing

HN spends a day figuring out how it’s actually bad

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