We’ve already seen real world examples of severe bias injected into LLMs. For example, Google’s Gemini had secret meta prompts that biased it towards certain types of answers and also caused it to produce hallucinated images that were funny but also dystopian (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...). I don’t think we can just let closed AI systems take over society when they can easily be manipulated by the model owners without transparency.
What I like about AI2’s approach with OLMo is that they are actually open, not just trading on the marketing benefits of the word “open”. Most “open” models are just open weights not open source. That’s like sharing an executable and not the source code. In my view, being open means that others have to be able to reproduce the final product (the model) if they wanted to and had the means (in terms of training hardware). It also means that they should be able to use whatever is provided freely for any purpose, rather than being subject to proprietary licensing. AI2 shares the training source code, training data, evaluation suite, and the model weights that they’ve produced by running the training process. It all uses the Apache license. And it’s also interesting that they used AMD hardware to train this LLM rather than Nvidia/CUDA.
Open weight models like Llama keep repeatedly catching up to the best closed models from OpenAI or Anthropic or others. My hope is that truly open models like OLMa keep developing quickly enough to also keep up. Lastly, I hope that regulation does not block open source private development of AI systems. These systems will be the vehicle for speech for much of society in the future, so blocking private AI systems is a lot like restricting speech. But leaving that aside, open development will also drive innovation and reducing competitive pressure will hurt innovation.