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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#551

Post by zmmmmm »

sandworm101 wrote: post #338
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…

>> 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. Nope. Not one bit. Supporting F/OSS when it suits you in one area and then being totally dismissive of it in every other area should not be lauded. How about open sourcing some of FB's VR efforts?

They open sourced Gear VR. The are a stark contrast to other players in terms of how they have built everything on open standards (OpenXR, WebXR, etc), and they have just opened their platform by allowing third parties to build and customise it to make their own commercial offerings. Not open source, but a quite a contrast to every other player in that industry so far.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#552

Post by Havoc »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #168
carimura wrote: post #115

Looks like you can already try out Llama-3.1-405b on Groq, although it's timing out. So. Hugged I guess.

All the big providers should have it up by end of day. They just change their API configs (they're just reselling you AWS Bedrock).

>they're just reselling you AWS Bedrock

Meta announced they have 25 providers ready on day 1, so no it's not all AWS.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#553

Post by zmmmmm »

sebastiennight wrote: post #537
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…

I think people massively underestimate how much time/attention span (and ad revenue) will be up for grabs once a platform really nails the "AI friend" concept. And it makes sense for Meta to position themselves for it.

yes ... I remember when online dating was absolutely cringe / weird thing to do. Ten years later and it's the primary way a whole generation seeks a partner.

It will seem incredibly weird today to have an imaginary friend that you treat as a genuine relationship but I genuinely expect this will happen and become a commonplace thing within the next two decades.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#554

Post by proteal »

larodi wrote: post #515
stavros wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Indeed, since when the deliverable being a jpeg/exe, which is similar to what the model file is, is considered the source? it is more like open result or freely available vm image, which works, but has its core FS scrambled or crypted. Zuck knows this very well and it does him no honour to speak like, and from his position this equals attempt ate trying to change the present semantics of open source. Of course, other…

Even if everything was released how you described, what good would that really do for an individual without access to heaps of compute? Functionally there seems to be no difference between open weights and open compute because nobody could train a facsimile model. Furthermore, all frontier models are inscrutable due to their construction. It’s wild to me seeing people complain semantics when meta dropped their model for cheap. Now I’m not saying we should suck the zuck for this act of charity, but you have to imagine that other frontier models are not thrilled that meta has invalidated their compute moats with the release of llama. Whether we like it or not, we’re on this AI rollercoaster and I’m glad that it’s not just oligopolists dictating the direction forward. I’m happy to see meta take this direction, knowing that the alternatives are much worse.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#556

Post by zmmmmm »

kart23 wrote: post #5

> This is how we’ve managed security on our social networks – our more robust AI systems identify and stop threats from less sophisticated actors who often use smaller scale AI systems. Ok, first of all, has this really worked? AI moderators still can't capture the mass of obvious spam/bots on all their platforms, threads included. Second, AI detection doesn't work, and with how much better the systems are getting, i…

I found this dubious as well, especially how it is portrayed as a simple game of compute power. For a start, there is an enormous asymmetry which is why we have a spam problem in the first place. For example a single bot can send out millions of emails at almost no cost and we have to expend a lot more "energy" to classify each one and decide if it's spam or not. So you don't just need more compute power you need drastically more compute power, and as AI models improve and get refined, the operation at ten times the scale is probably going to be marginally better, not orders of magnitude better.

I still agree with his general take - bad actors will get these models or make them themselves, you can't stop it. But the logic about compute power is odd.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#557

Post by beloch »

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…

It's no secret that implementing AI usually involves far more investment into training and teaching than actual code. You can know how a neural net or other ML model works. You can have all the code before you. It's still a huge job (and investment) to do anything practical with that. If Meta shares the code their AI runs on with you, you're not going to be able to do much with it unless you make the same investment in gathering data and teaching to train that AI. That would probably require data Meta won't share. You'd effectively need your own Facebook.

If everyone open sources their AI code, Meta can snatch the bits that help them without much fear of helping their direct competitors.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#558

Post by alfalfasprout »

meowtimemania wrote: post #526
war321 wrote: post #450

Even if it's just open weights and not "true" open source, I'll still give Meta the appreciation of being one of the few big AI companies actually committed to open models. In an ecosystem where groups like Anthropic and OpenAI keep hemming and hawing about safety and the necessity of closed AI systems "for our sake", they stand out among the rest.

Why would openai/anthropic's approach be more safe? Are people able to remove all the guard rails on the llama models?

They're not safer. The claim is that OpenAI will enforce guard rails and take steps to ensure model outputs and prompts are responsible... but only a fool would take them at their word.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#559

Post by zmmmmm »

mav3ri3k wrote: post #114

I am not deep into llms so I ask this. From my understanding, their last model was open source but it was in a way that you can use them but the inner working were "hidden"/not transparent. With the new model, I am seeing alot of how open source they are and can be build upon. Is it now completely open source or similar to their last models ?

they give you the code and they give you the model it runs, and you can customise and redistribute both. It's all open source in that respect.

What people are complaining about (totally unreasonably in my view) is obviously Meta is not "open sourcing" all the training data, so nobody can retrain the model from scratch themselves. This argument to me is just silly. The whole point of these models is they distil pretraining on massive data sets you wouldn't have access to otherwise. If you insist on them releasing the data set, they will have to cut it down to 0.1% of the size and you will be getting what you had access to already in the first place.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#560

Post by root_axis »

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.

No. The text is an asset used by the source to train the model. The source can process arbitrary text. Text is just text, it was written for communication purposes, software (defined by source code) processes that text in a particular way to train a model.
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