The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
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Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#2D.O.A without adoption from the major model labs (including the "opener" ones like AI2 and lets say Together/Eleuther). i dont like the open source old guard feeling like they have any say in defining things when they dont have skin in the game. (and yes, this is coming from a fan of their current work defending the "open source" term in traditional dev tools). a good way to ensure decline to irrelevance is to do a lot of busywork without ensuring a credible quorum of the major players at the table.
please dont let me discourage tho, i think this could be important work but if and only if this gets endorsement from >1 large model lab producing any interesting work
Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#3The definition is good because currently many call their open model weights as open "source". But I suspect most companies will still call their models open source even when they're not.
Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#4Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#5[deleted]
Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#6> The aim of Open Source is not and has never been to enable reproducible software.
Okay, well just because you have the domain name "opensource.org" doesn't give you the ability to speak for the community, and the community's understanding of the term.
opensource.org is irrelevant.
Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#7A reinforcement of definitions is needed. Open weights is NOT open source. But there are people like Meta that are rampantly open washing their work. The point of open source is that you can recreate the product yourself, for example by compiling the source code. Clearly the equivalent for an LLM is being able to retrain the model to produce the weights. Yes I realize this is impractical without access to the hardware, but the transparency is still important, so we know how these models are designed, and how they may be influencing us through biases/censorship.
The only actually open source model I am aware of is AI2’s OLMo (https://blog.allenai.org/olmo-open-language-model-87ccfc95f5...), which includes training data, training code, evaluation code, fine tuning code, etc.
The license also matters. A burdened license that restricts what you can do with the software is not really open source.
I do have concerns about where OSI is going with all this. For example, why are they now saying that reproducibility is not a part of the definition? These two paragraphs below contradict each other - what does it mean to be able to “meaningfully fork” something and be able to make it more useful if you don’t have the ingredients to reproduce it in the first place?
> The aim of Open Source is not and has never been to enable reproducible software. The same is true for Open Source AI: reproducibility of AI science is not the objective. Open Source’s role is merely not to be an impediment to reproducibility. In other words, one can always add more requirements on top of Open Source, just like the Reproducible Builds effort does.
> Open Source means giving anyone the ability to meaningfully “fork” (study and modify) a system, without requiring additional permissions, to make it more useful for themselves and also for everyone.
Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#8D.O.A without adoption from the major model labs (including the "opener" ones like AI2 and lets say Together/Eleuther). i dont like the open source old guard feeling like they have any say in defining things when they dont have skin in the game. (and yes, this is coming from a fan of their current work defending the "open source" term in traditional dev tools). a good way to ensure decline to irrelevance is to do a l…
Why should the “old guard” not have to have the say when they came up with the idea of open source? It is misleading to adopt terminology with well known definitions and abuse it. People like Meta are free to use some other terminology that isn’t “open source” to describe their models, which I cannot reproduce because they’ve release nothing except weights and inference code.
Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#9> The aim of Open Source is not and has never been to enable reproducible software. Okay, well just because you have the domain name "opensource.org" doesn't give you the ability to speak for the community, and the community's understanding of the term. opensource.org is irrelevant.
I agree.
"never been to enable reproducible software"
I'd say, sure "Never" is a big word.
Having open code that everyone can read and run, was partly to allow for reproducibility. In the closed world, how is anybody reproducing anything, being open does enable that.
Re: The Open Source AI Definition RC1 Is Available for Comments
#10> The aim of Open Source is not and has never been to enable reproducible software. Okay, well just because you have the domain name "opensource.org" doesn't give you the ability to speak for the community, and the community's understanding of the term. opensource.org is irrelevant.
I mean, I've never understood "open source" to require reproducibility? That concept barely even existed as a thing people strove for until 15 years ago, a lot of software still only barely supports such, and there are tons of tradeoffs that come with it (as you effectively then also inherit your entire toolchain as vendor maintained, and a lot of projects end up making that result in awkward binaries, as almost no one reproduces entirely from a small bit of bootstrapped lisp).