alt Hacker Newsthere are no open models. none. zero.
there are binary files that some companies are allowing you to download, for now. it was called shareware in the old days.
one day the tap will close and we'll see then what open models really means
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Not true; e.g. https://allenai.org/open-models .
For my own purposes, open weights are 95% as good, to be honest. I understand that not everyone will agree with that. As long as training takes hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of somebody else's compute, we're always going to be at the big companies' mercy to some extent.
At some point they will start to restrict access, as you suggest, and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful. What I advocate is simply to save up enough outrage for that battle. Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests.
From a political perspective there's no closing that tap, only opening it further. As long as China exists there will be constant pressure to try to stay ahead, or at least match Chinese models. And China is gleefully increasing that pressure over time, just waiting for the slip that causes a serious migration to their models.