alt Hacker NewsThe only true defense is actual open source. Open "weights" is not that. You need the entire training pipeline open-sourced, plus the entire training corpus, so someone can independently train the model from scratch.
Obviously this will never happen. And even if it did, it still probably wouldn't be that hard to hide something in that mountain of data.
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anonym29 • today at 12:45 AM
It has already happened repeatedly. Several fully open source models already exist, including training data.
They suck, but they do exist.
The idea of dropping >half a million dollars in gpu credits to re-train a model to confirm no tampering is laughable at this point. Until training costs fall, that’s not really a solution.
Also, is training even deterministic? Does the same code with the same training data always result in the same model?
I’m all for open source models (not just open weight) but I feel like a way to scan the model weights for backdoors is going to be an easier problem to solve than obtaining training data.