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falcor84today at 9:39 AM5 repliesview on HN

Isn't that a bit like saying that if I open source a tool, but not a full compendium of all the code that I had read, which led me to develop it, then it's not really open source?


Replies

KaiserProtoday at 10:52 AM

No its like releasing a binary. I can hook into it and its API and make it do other things. But I can't rebuild it from scratch.

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nextaccountictoday at 10:03 AM

No, it's like saying that if you release under Apache license, it's not open source even though it's under an open source license

For something to be open source it needs to have sources released. Sources are the things in the preferred format to be edited. So the code used for training is obviously source (people can edit the training code to change something about the released weights). Also the training data, under the same rationale: people can select which data is used for training to change the weights

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exe34today at 11:08 AM

"open source" as a verb is doing too much work here. are you proposing to release the human readable code or the object/machine code?

if it's the latter, it's not the source. it's free as in beer. not freedom.

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nurettintoday at 10:03 AM

Is this a troll? They don't want to reproduce your open source code, they want to reproduce the weights.

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fragmedetoday at 9:42 AM

No. In that case, you're providing two things, a binary version of your tool, and the tool's source. That tool's source is available to inspect and build their own copy. However, given just the weights, we don't have the source, and can't inspect what alignment went into it. In the case of DeepSeek, we know they had to purposefully cause their model to consider Tiananmen Square something it shouldn't discuss. But without the source used to create the model, we don't know what else is lurking around inside the model.

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