alt Hacker NewsOn this very thread you already have people talking about "open weights" and similar nonsense. What is open about them? They're free to download, but that hardly qualifies as open. Where is the source? Where are the instructions to modify and build your own?
I'd never though I'd have to utter the expression "open as in beer".
The blatant attempt at manipulating vocabulary here is... quite blatant.
Replies
cortesoft • today at 4:50 AM
What would the 'source' be for an LLM? There is the structure, and the weights, there is no 'source'.
singpolyma3 • today at 3:24 AM
There is no source because it's not software. You can of course modify and make your own.
I'm a strong proponent of Open Source (TM) but I disagree with this take.
The weights are the useful artifact here. You can modify them, fine tune them and do what you want with them.
Unlike binary software there is nothing limiting that.
It is also useful to have access to the training recipes and to some extent the data. But I'm of the opinion that learning on something is not copyright infringement, so there are many circumstances where distributing the raw training data will not be possible.
For me this is like Open Office: it is open source, and largely inspired by and learned from Microsoft Office. But they don't need to distribute MS Office for Open Office to be Open Source.
In addition there are models that meet the criteria you appear to propose. The AllenAI models are a good example.