Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open source AI is the path forward

about.fb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 936 posts

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#711

Post by ajxlasA »

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…

Really? I have to check out the training code again. Last time I looked the training and inference code were just example toys that were barely usable.

Has that changed?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#712

Post by dilliwal »

sebastiennight wrote: post #525

I've summarized this entire thread in 4 lines (didn't even use AI for it!) Step 1. Chick-Fil-A releases a grass-fed beef burger to spite other fast-food joints, calls it "the vegan burger" Step 2. A couple of outraged vegans show up in the comments, pointing out that beef, even grass-fed beef, isn't vegan Step 3. Fast food enthusiasts push back: it's unreasonable to want companies to abide by this restrictive definit…

On point, and pretty good analogy

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#713

Post by bjornsing »

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…

The term “source code” can mean many things. In a legal context it’s often just defined as the preferred format for modification. It can be argued that for artificial neural networks that’s the weights (along with code and preferably training data).

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#714

Post by yard2010 »

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #668

I thoroughly support Meta's open-sourcing of these AI models going forward. However, for a company that absolutely closed down discussions about providing API access to their platform, I'm left wondering what's in it (monetarily) for them by doing this? Is it to simply undercut competition in the space, like some grocery store selling below cost?

Stay assured these guys are working day and night to make our world a darker place

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#715

Post by yard2010 »

chx wrote: post #706

A total ban on generative AI is the way forward. If the industry refuses to make it safe by self regulating then the regulator must step in and ban it until better, more fine tuned regulation can be made. It is needed to protect our environment, our democracy, our very lives.

Isn't it like banning Christianity? I don't think it can be done

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#716

Post by tarruda »

From the "Why Open Source AI Is Good for Meta" section, none of the four given reasons seem to justify spending so much money to train these powerful models and give them away for free.

> Third, a key difference between Meta and closed model providers is that selling access to AI models isn’t our business model. That means openly releasing Llama doesn’t undercut our revenue, sustainability, or ability to invest in research like it does for closed providers. (This is one reason several closed providers consistently lobby governments against open source.)

Maybe this is a strategic play to hurt other AI companies that depend on this business model?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#717

Post by croemer »

_heimdall wrote: post #436
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.

Why is the dataset required for it to be open source? If I self host a project that is open sourced rather than paying for a hosted version, like Sentry.io for example, I don't expect data to come along with the code. Licensing rights are always up for debate in open source, but I wouldn't expect more than the code to be available and reviewable for anything needed to build and run the project. In the case of an LLM…

But surely you wouldn't call it open source if sentry just gave you a binary - and the source code wasn't available.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#718

Post by sensanaty »

Meanwhile Facebook is flooded with AI-generated slop with hundreds of thousands of other bots interacting with it to boost it to whoever is insane enough to still use that putrid hellhole of a mass-data-harvesting platform.

Dead internet theory is very much happening in real time, and I dread what's about to come since the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap. And people on this site are unironically excited about this garbage that is indistinguishable from spam getting more and more popular. What a fucking joke

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#719

Post by danielrhodes »

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…

For models of this size, the code used to train them is going to be very custom to the architecture/cluster they are built on. It would be almost useless to anybody outside of Meta. The dataset would be more a lot more interesting, as it would at the very least show everybody how they got it to behave in certain ways.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#720

Post by saurik »

_heimdall wrote: post #653
saurik wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing they are pointing at and which is the thing people want is the output of the training engine, not the inputs. This is like someone saying they have an open source kernel, but they only release a compiler and a binary... the kernel code is never released, but the kernel is the only reason anyone even wants the compiler. (For avoidance of anyone being somehow confused: the training code is a compiler which ta…

The output of the training engine, I.E. the model itself, isn't source code at all though. The best approximation would be considering it obfuscated code, and even then it's a stretch since it is more similar to compressed data. It sounds like Meta doesn't share source for the training logic. That would be necessary for it to really be open source, you need to be able to recreate and modify the codebase but that has…

I didn't claim the output is source code, any more than the kernel is. Are you sure you don't simply agree with me?
Post reply on HN