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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#421

Post by [deleted] »

baby wrote: post #380
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

[deleted]

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#422

Post by aerzen »

causal wrote: post #41
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…

"Open weights" is a more appropriate term but I'll point out that these weights are also largely inscrutable to the people with the code that trained it. And for licensing reasons, the datasets may not be possible to share. There is still a lot of modifying you can do with a set of weights, and they make great foundations for new stuff, but yeah we may never see a competitive model that's 100% buildable at home. Edit…

LLAMA is an open-weights model. I like this term, let's use that instead of open source.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#424

Post by MaxBarraclough »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #347
Flimm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

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] Who died and made OSI God?

This isn't helpful. The community defers to the OSI's definition because it captures what they care about.

We've seen people try to deceptively describe non-OSS projects as open source, and no doubt we will continue to see it. Thankfully the community (including Hacker News) is quick to call it out, and to insist on not cheapening the term.

This is one the topics that just keeps turning up:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24483168

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31203209

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36591820

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#425

Post by stavros »

causal wrote: post #41
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…

"Open weights" is a more appropriate term but I'll point out that these weights are also largely inscrutable to the people with the code that trained it. And for licensing reasons, the datasets may not be possible to share. There is still a lot of modifying you can do with a set of weights, and they make great foundations for new stuff, but yeah we may never see a competitive model that's 100% buildable at home. Edit…

"Open weights" means you can use the weights for free (as in beer). "Open source" means you get the training dataset and the methodology. ~Nobody does open source LLMs.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#426

Post by war321 »

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…

They've been working on AI for a good bit now. Open source especially is something they've championed since the mid 2010s at least with things like PyTorch, GraphQL, and React. It's not something they've suddenly pivoted to since ChatGPT came in 2022.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#427

Post by macrolime »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #416
mkolodny wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The file I linked to, model.py, contains the Llama 3 model itself. You can use that model with open data to train it from scratch yourself. Or you can load Meta’s open weights and have a working LLM.

> The file I linked to, model.py, contains the Llama 3 model itself. That makes it source available ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software ), not open source

Source available means you can see the source, but not modify it. This is kinda the opposite, you can modify the model, but you don't see all the details of its creation.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#428

Post by kertoip_1 »

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…

They are giving it "for free" because:

* they need LLMs that they can control for features on their platforms (Fb/Instagram, but I can see many use cases on VR too)

* they cannot sell it. They have no cloud services to offer.

So they would spend this money anyways, but to compensate some losses they just decided to use it to fix their PR by contenting developers

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#429

Post by war321 »

y04nn wrote: post #358
cs702 wrote: post #74

> We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. Bravo! While I don't agree with Zuck's views and actions on many fronts, on this occasion I think he and the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude. With this release, they have brought the cost of pretraining a frontier 400B+ parameter model to ZERO for pretty much ever…

Don't be fooled, it is a "embrace extend extinguish" strategy. Once they have enough usage and be the default standard they will start to find any possible ways to make you pay.

Hasn't really happened with PyTorch or any of their other open sourced releases tbh.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#430

Post by bun_at_work »

apwell23 wrote: post #419
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…

I am not sure I follow this. 1. Is there such a thing as 'attention grabbing AI content' ? Most AI content I see is the opposite of 'attention grabbing'. Kindle store is flooded with this garbage and none of it is particularly 'attention grabbing'. 2. Why would creation of such content, even if it was truly attention grabbing, benefit meta in particular ? 3. How would poliferation of AI content lead to more ad spend…

Sure - there is plenty of attention grabbing AI content - it doesn't have to grab _your_ attention, and it won't work for everyone. I have seen people engaging with apps that redo a selfie to look like a famous character or put the person in a movie scene, for example.

Every piece of content in any feed (good, bad, or otherwise) benefits the aggregator (Meta, YouTube, whatever), because someone will look at it. Not everything will go viral, but it doesn't matter. Scroll whatever on Twitter, YouTube Shorts, Reddit, etc. Meta has a massive presence in social media, so content being generated is shared there.

The more content of any type leads to more engagement on the platforms where it's being shared. Every Meta feed serves the viewer an ad (for which Meta is paid) every 3 or so posts (pieces of content). It doesn't matter if the user doesn't like 1/5 posts or whatever, the number of ads still goes up.

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