Hugging Face, GitHub and more unite to defend open source in EU AI legislation | Hacker News Reader

Hugging Face, GitHub and more unite to defend open source in EU AI legislation

venturebeat.com

10 pointsandy999 comments

I can't read through the euphemisms. Are they uniting to defend their right to read open-source code, process it into blobs, and "release" the output with their own licences?

No, it's about how the regulations governing OpenAI and Google's commercial models, research by non-profits like EleutherAI and AI2, and finetunes of public models done by hobbyists should not be the same. The current law puts all three groups in the same bucket.

One more in the endless parade of examples of the fact that Open Source is meaningless. It's Free Software methodology with ethics stripped from it, and therefore is malleable in its meaning to the point that it has none.

What is the problem with what they are doing?

By regulating AI or associating legal process with the development of AI, there is a real cost that may exceed or distract from the underlying lower technical cost. People could no longer work on AI for fun, you see. Big companies won't be hindered by this because they can pay the cost, but open source developers wanting to play by the rules would be unable to continue in many cases. If you have read the famous "we have no moat and neither does openai" piece, this regulation would be creating that moat to protect large companies. I take a similar view of what Sam Altman requested from the US (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-...).

This situation is like cryptography in the early web. Some governments shut it down for domestic use and inadvertantly enabled weakness in their own infrastructure. Will governments hinder the development of AI in the same way?

Sorry, I meant, what is the problem with what the open source advocates in the article. The comment i replied to seemed to say open source is worthless. I am no fan of OpenAI and it's closed nature.

To save you time engaging with a zealot, I am a Free Software zealot; I consider the entirety of "Open Source" to be a delusion of capital, whereby they can adopt the methods and reap the benefits of Free Software while disregarding the underlying ethics that gave it birth, and therefore, end up with a corrupt verbal chimera that means whatever the capital wants it to mean.

Let them defend Open Source all they like, I could give a shit. I'll be over here defending Free Software.

[edit: ...which actually means something.]

The Open Source Definition is effectively identical to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

Given that the FSF plays games to pretend the GFDL is a Free license when it really shouldn't be, in practice Open Source is preferable to Free Software.

Instead of flaming about "open source" vs "free software" why don't we talk about how whichever terminology you prefer, organizations like EleutherAI, Hugging Face, and LAION (the AI orgs on this letter) release software that is licensed in a way you approve of.

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