alt Hacker NewsThe models are open source, it’s never been a requirement for someone to document the entire process of creating something to be “open source”. Just sharing the source, in this case, the weights, meets the criteria. Software engineering’s obsession with precise terms is actually one of the things I’m glad is dying with ai automation.
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Model weights are literally a compressed blob of binary data. The end result of a compilation process.
The source is actually all training data, plus the software used for training, including some scripts or instructions to run the entire thing end to end on your own computer. That's what open source has always been about.
The weights are the output of a program, it's a binary. It's not source.
> Software engineering’s obsession with precise terms is actually one of the things I’m glad is dying with ai automation.
Yes. The next time you go to your doctor you should hope he's not being overly precise; or the engineer that builds the bridge; or the software engineer that implemented the embedded software in your insulin pump.
There is no precise thinking without precise terms.
> obsession with precise terms
They’re not really even being precise. The relevant software freedom, from the FSF is []
Ported to the model world, this is fulfilled by sharing the weights and implementation. There’s almost nothing that having the training data gets you (other than actually training it). The weights plus a reference implementation let you see all the states to study the behavior, and let you fine tune it to do your bidding (the abliteration etc). The freedom is satisfied.Some might argue that without the training data you couldn’t do some classes of experiments to see how it works, say leave-one-out retraining. I’d argue things like that are not really about the model but about ML research or the class of models, which while interesting is not a free software pre-requisite.
[] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms