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Open source AI is the path forward
841–850 of 936 posts
Re: Open source AI is the path forward
#842I'm really unsure if it's a good idea given the current geopolitics. Open-Source Code in the past was fantastic because the West had a monopoly on CPUs and computers. Sharing and contributing was amazing while ensured that tyrants couldn't use this tech to harm people simply because they don't have a hardware to run. But now, things are different. China is advancing in chip technology, and Russia is using open-source…
You think Russia and China wouldn't be able to steal any closed model for a couple million dollars?
stealing a model and building the entire AI community is a very very big difference :
Fine tune, update, Run model without very deep domain knowledge, that's what we receive as an outcome.
If you are a software engineer and you steal a model in some close format of Open AI , you will not get lots of benefits even if you understand the format of that model, it's a complex beast by all means.
This is a playbook how anyone can run it.
So yeah, big corp is evil from one side, but oh well, think of North Korea, Russia etc level of evilness and what they can do whit that.
Re: Open source AI is the path forward
#843Can't it be divided into multiple parts to have a more meaningful discussion? For example the terminology could identify four key areas:
- Open training data (this is very big)
- Open training algorithms (does it include infrastructure code?)
- Open weights (result of previous two)
- Open runtime algorithmRe: Open source AI is the path forward
#844I'm really unsure if it's a good idea given the current geopolitics. Open-Source Code in the past was fantastic because the West had a monopoly on CPUs and computers. Sharing and contributing was amazing while ensured that tyrants couldn't use this tech to harm people simply because they don't have a hardware to run. But now, things are different. China is advancing in chip technology, and Russia is using open-source…
So, only the west should be able to use AI to kill people because they're the good guys?
Re: Open source AI is the path forward
#845I'm really unsure if it's a good idea given the current geopolitics. Open-Source Code in the past was fantastic because the West had a monopoly on CPUs and computers. Sharing and contributing was amazing while ensured that tyrants couldn't use this tech to harm people simply because they don't have a hardware to run. But now, things are different. China is advancing in chip technology, and Russia is using open-source…
This argument reminds me a lot of restrictions on exporting encryption in the 90s.
Re: Open source AI is the path forward
#846Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 3.1 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under…
Which open source costs dedicated usage of 16 thousand H100 over several months? C'mon folks, they're opening up for free to 99.99% of potential users what cost hundreds of millions of dollars, if not in the ballpark of a billion. Let's appreciate that, instead of focusing on semantics for a while.
Licensing is not a simple semantic problem. It is a legal problem that have strong ramifications, especially things are on their way to standardize. What Facebook is trying to do with their "open source" models is to exhaust possibility of fully open source models to be industry standarts. and create an alternative monopoly to Microsoft/OpenAI. Think of it as if an entity had right to ISO standards, they would be extremely rich. Eventually researchers will release pretty advance ML models that are fully open source(from dataset to training code) and Facebook is trying to block them even before start to prevent of the possibility of this models to be standard. This is a complementary tactic of the industry to closed source rivals and should not be understood as challenging to them.
A good wording for this is "open-washing" as described in this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3630106.3659005
Re: Open source AI is the path forward
#847Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI might cannabalize a lot of first gen AI businesses.
What Meta is doing is borderline market distortion. It's not that they have figured out some magic sauce they are happy to share. They are just deciding to burn brute force money that they made elsewhere and give their stuff away below cost, first of all because they can.
It's strange you are downvoted for this. It is a legitimate take on things (even if it is likely not accurate as far as intent is concerned).
Re: Open source AI is the path forward
#848Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You make a good point but those are also just limitations of the technology (or at least our current understanding of it)" Yeah, that is my point. Things that don't have source code can't be open source. "Maybe an analogy would help. A family spent generations breeding the perfect apple tree and they decided to “open source” it. What would open sourcing look like?" I think we need to be weary of dilemmas without sol…
Be charitable and intellectually curious. What would "open" look like? GNU says "The GNU GPL can be used for general data which is not software, as long as one can determine what the definition of “source code” refers to in the particular case. As it turns out, the DSL (see below) also requires that you determine what the “source code” is, using approximately the same definition that the GPL uses." and offers these c…
"Be charitable and intellectually curious. What would "open" look like?"
To really be intellectually curious we need to be open to the idea that there is not (yet) a solution to this problem. Or in the analogy you laid out, that it is simply not possible for the system to be "open source".
Note that most of the licenses listed under the "Licenses for Other Works" section say "It is incompatible with the GNU GPL. Please don't use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL." This is because these are not free software/open source licenses. They are licenses that the FSF endorses because they encourage openness and copyleft in non-software mediums, and play nicely with the GPL when used appropriately (i.e. not for software).
The GPL is appropriate for many works that we wouldn't conventionally view as software, but in those contexts the analogy is usually so close to the literal nature of software that it stops being an analogy. The major difference is public perception. For example, we don't generally view jpegs as software. However, jpegs, at their heart, are executable binaries with very domain specific instructions that are executed in a very much non-Turing complete context. The source code for the jpeg is the XCF or similar (if it exists) which contains a specification (code) for building the binary. The code becomes human readable once loaded into an IDE, such as GIMP, designed to display and interact with the specification. This is code that is most easily interacted with using a visual IDE, but that doesn't change the fact that it is code.
There are some scenarios where you could identify a "source code" but not a "software". For example, a cake can be open sourced by releasing the recipe. In such a context, though, there is literally source code. It's just that the code never produces a binary, and is compiled by a human and kitchen instead of a computer. There is open source hardware, where the source code is a human readable hardware specification which can be easily modified, and the hardware is compiled by a human or machine using that specification.
The scenario where someone has bred a specific plant, however, can not be open source, unless they have also deobfuscated the genome, released the genome publicly, and there is also some feasible way to convert the deobfuscated genome, or a modification of it, into a seed.
Re: Open source AI is the path forward
#849I'm really unsure if it's a good idea given the current geopolitics. Open-Source Code in the past was fantastic because the West had a monopoly on CPUs and computers. Sharing and contributing was amazing while ensured that tyrants couldn't use this tech to harm people simply because they don't have a hardware to run. But now, things are different. China is advancing in chip technology, and Russia is using open-source…
You're vastly overestimating the capability of LLMs to create new knowledge not already contained in their training material.
Re: Open source AI is the path forward
#850The question is what is "open source" in the case of a matrix of numbers, as opposed to code.
Also, are there any "IP" rights attached at all to a bunch numbers coming out of a formula that someone else calculated for you? (edit: after all, a "model" is just a matrix of numbers coming out of running a training algorithm that is not owned by Meta over training data that is not owned by Meta.)
Meta imposes a notification duty AND a request for another license (no mention of the details of these) for applications of their model with a large number of users. This is against the spirit of open source. (In practical terms it is not a show stopper since you can easily switch models, although they all have subtlely different behaviours and quality levels.)