alt Hacker NewsRegardless of the motivations behind the paper, the fact is that they are right. It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens, and I hope it gets corrected soon.
And besides, it seems to me like the ethical choice. Given how these models are, in some very real sense, mechanical plagiators, built on the generosity of creators past and present, some of them now in danger of being replaced by the machine. I think the least the labs can do is open these models up. These and other such considerations were the reason OpenAI started with that name. Of course, it was questionable that those ideals would survive the encounter with generational wealth. Just look up what the founders of Google were saying about advertising when they were two students tinkering at an as of yet unproven tech. Same thing for OpenAI, self-interest speaks that much louder when there's real money on the table.
It just boggles the mind that people now make excuses for their all-too-predictable about-turn.
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> It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens
There's nothing "open" about China. Google, meta, openai, etc all blocked. Go visit and see how it goes when you try to access your gmail or open facebook. Try to use chatgpt. Try to get citizenship and see how that goes. China blocks many western companies with their great firewall and force internal similar products. This is smart, China wants to prioritize their own.
well let's be clear, there's nothing open about an open-weight model.
To me, "open these models up. " must mean provide all the data and supporting documentation required to reproduce the model. That would be "open". Postgres is open because you can download all the data and supporting documentation and reproduce the binary yourself. However, being able to only download a postgres binary would make it no longer open.
Additional training on top of an open-weight model sounds analogous to writing mods for minecraft. You may change some behavior but that doesn't make minecraft "open".
> I think the least the labs […]
Perhaps worth not calling them "labs". Are they not (for-profit) companies?