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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we've collectively figured out how to describe what "weights openly available" means, so open-source is probably a reasonable descriptor.

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I disagree. Open source involves the "source" being available, not just the "compiled".

The concept of “source” is nebulous for ML models. If you have the weights you can recreate a model without access to the source code originally used to train it, and similarly just having the source code without the training data won’t allow you to recreate the model.

While it would be nice to have the data set Meta used I think open sourcing the weights is good enough.

No. The weights encode recorded parameters they don’t encode essential components like hyperparameters or modules without recorded parameters.

You're right. Either way it's impossible to recreate Llama 2 without the data set so perhaps "free to use model" is a better description than "open source model"

I think some marketers are trying to use this term "open source" to try to ride on the goodwill and perceived benefits of open source, without actually doing it.

Also, people who just want to be able to run something on their computer without paying money for it shouldn't call it "open source", unless it actually is.

These distinctions have been going on for decades, for very good reasons. No need to throw away that progress now.

Maybe we could call it... Open Weights™.

More like Weights Available in the case of llama2 (and Bring Your Own Pirate Treasure in case of llama1?).

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