logoalt Hacker News

petcatyesterday at 11:11 PM2 repliesview on HN

"open weight" models are not open source. They are still deeply proprietary. It is not possible to know what they do or what they are capable of without interrogating them since we have no access to their source materials.

The only difference is the Chinese labs have allowed 3rd party inference providers run the proprietary models for them since they cannot do it themselves due to domestic GPU compute constraints.


Replies

sanderjdyesterday at 11:17 PM

It would be awesome to have actual open source (and open weights) models! I hope someone will make a real go of this at some point.

show 1 reply
llm_nerdyesterday at 11:46 PM

I...don't follow. How in the world does your comment about open weight and open source relate? Ignoring that it has nothing to do with this post (did you mean to reply to someone), are you aware that Anthropic, OpenAI and others allow 3rd party inference providers to run their proprietary models? Like, what does this non-sequitur even mean?

You understand Moonshot AI could have had other parties run inference for them without releasing the weights, right? These two points are utterly unrelated, unless you think Fable and GPT5-6 are also "open weight" because other providers are providing inference?

Further, having access to the source material in no universe allows you to know what a model is "capable of". I'm not sure how this follows.