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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#501

Post by mym1990 »

pmarreck wrote: post #411
mym1990 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing something right vs doing something that seems right but has a hidden self interest that is harmful in the long run can be vastly different things. Often this kind of strategy will allow people to let their guard down, and those same people will get steamrolled down the road, left wondering where it all went wrong. Get smarter.

How in the heck is an open source model that is free and open today going to lock me down, down the line? This is nonsense. You can literally run this model forever if you use NixOS (or never touch your windows, macos or linux install again). Zuck can't come back and molest it. Ever. The best I can tell is that their self-interest here is more about gathering mindshare. That's not a terrible motive; in fact, that's a…

Yeah because history isn't absolutely littered with examples of shiny things being dangled in front of people with the intent to entrap them /s.

Can you really say this model will still be useful in 2 years, 5 years for you? And that FB's stance on these models will still be open source at that time once they incrementally make improvements? Maybe, maybe not. But FB doesn't give anything away for free, and the fact that you think so is your blindness, not mine. In case you haven't figured it out, this isn't a technology problem, this is a "FB needs marketshare and it needs it fast" problem.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#502

Post by cheema33 »

ab5tract wrote: post #492
gowld wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RMS has no interest in governing Open Source, so your comment bears no particular relevance. RMS is an advocate for Free Software. Free Software generally implies Open Source, but not the converse. RMS considers openness of source to be a separate category from the freeness of software. "Free software is a political movement; open source is a development model." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

Are you really pretending that OSI and the open source label itself wasn’t a reactionary movement that vilified free software principles in hopes of gaining corporate traction? Most of us who were there remember it differently. True open source advocates will find little to refute in what I’ve said.

> True open source advocates will find little to refute in what I’ve said.

No true Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

OSI helped popularize the open source movement. They not only make it palatable to businesses, but got them excited about it. I think that FSF/Stallman alone would not have been very successful on this front with GPL/AGPL.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#503

Post by [deleted] »

pmarreck wrote: post #411
mym1990 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing something right vs doing something that seems right but has a hidden self interest that is harmful in the long run can be vastly different things. Often this kind of strategy will allow people to let their guard down, and those same people will get steamrolled down the road, left wondering where it all went wrong. Get smarter.

How in the heck is an open source model that is free and open today going to lock me down, down the line? This is nonsense. You can literally run this model forever if you use NixOS (or never touch your windows, macos or linux install again). Zuck can't come back and molest it. Ever. The best I can tell is that their self-interest here is more about gathering mindshare. That's not a terrible motive; in fact, that's a…

[deleted]

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#505

Post by j_maffe »

szundi wrote: post #500
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 source = reproducible binaries (weights) by you on your computer, IMO. Strategy of FB is that they are good to be a user only and fine ruining competitor’s business with good enough free alternatives while collecting awards as saviors of whatever.

Not sure what you mean by "they are good to be a user only." Whatever their strategy is, this is great for the community.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#506

Post by wrs »

sailingparrot wrote: post #402
wrs wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling that “open source” renders the word “source” meaningless. By your definition, I can release a binary executable freely and call it “open source” because you can modify it to do whatever you want. Model weights are like a binary that nobody has the source for. We need another term.

No it’s not the same as releasing a binary, feels like we can’t get out of the pedantics. I can in theory modify a binary to do whatever I want. In practice it is intractably hard to make any significant modification to a binary, and even if you could, you would then not be legally allowed to e.g. redistribute. Here, modifying that model is not harder that doing regular ML, and I can redistribute. Meta doesn’t have a…

Can you change the tokenizer? No, because all you have is the weights trained with the current tokenizer. Therefore, by any normal definition, you don’t have the source. You have a giant black box of numbers with no ability to reproduce it.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#507

Post by tmsh »

Palmik wrote: post #467
tmsh wrote: post #431

Software 2.0 is about open licensing. I.e., the more important thing - the more "free" thing - is the licensing now. E.g., I play around with different image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and specific fine-tuned variations for ControlNet or LoRA that I plug into ComfyUI. But I can't use it at work because of the licensing. I have to use InvokeAI instead of ComfyUI if I want to be careful and only very specif…

In the LLM world there are many open source solutions to find tuning, maybe the best one being from Meta: https://github.com/pytorch/torchtune In terms of inference and interface (since you mentioned comfy) there are many truly open source options such as vLLM (though there isn't a single really performant open source solution for inference yet).

Thanks! Good to know.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#508

Post by Xelynega »

_heimdall wrote: post #490
stavros wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data is to models what code is to software.

I don't quite agree there. Based on other comments it sounds like Meta doesn't open source the code used to train the model, that would make it not open source in my book. The trained model doesn't need to be open source though, and frankly I'm not sure what the value there is specifically with regards to OSS. I'm not aware of a solution to interpretability problem, even if the model is shared we can't understand wha…

Wouldn't the "source code" of the model be closer to the source code of a compiler or the runtime library?

IMO a pre-trained model given with the source code used to train/run it is analogous to a company shipping a compiler and a compiled binary without any of the source, which is why I don't think it's "open source" without the training data.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#509

Post by frays »

No matter how "open source" they actually will be, I'm glad this exists as a competitor to Gemini and ChatGPT to help push innovation from a different angle.

Can't wait to see how the landscape will look in 2027 and beyond.

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