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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

D.O.A without adoption from the major model labs (including the "opener" ones like AI2 and lets say Together/Eleuther). i dont like the open source old guard feeling like they have any say in defining things when they dont have skin in the game. (and yes, this is coming from a fan of their current work defending the "open source" term in traditional dev tools). a good way to ensure decline to irrelevance is to do a lot of busywork without ensuring a credible quorum of the major players at the table.

please dont let me discourage tho, i think this could be important work but if and only if this gets endorsement from >1 large model lab producing any interesting work

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> they have any say in defining things when they dont have skin in the game.

Then, maybe don't go around stealing and bastardizing the "open source" concept when absolutely none of the serious AI research is open source or reproductible. Just because you read a fancy word online once and think you can use it doesn't mean you're right.

How does this constitute a meaningful reply to OP? What’s your point? That you’re angry? That doesn’t rebut anything they’ve said.

> D.O.A without adoption from the major model labs

I definitely disagree. Adoption of open licenses has historically been "bottom-up", starting with academia and hobbyists and then eventually used by big names. I have zero idea why that can't be the case here.

I know I'll be releasing my models under an open license once finalized.

Where hobbyists and small players could release code as easily as anyone big...i don't believe that's the case with AI, especially llms. Is it not only the large companies that are able to release meaningful content?

Important work still gets done on smaller models using consumer GPUs. I've trained protein LLMs for my PhD on as little as a single RTX 3090. This is even more so the case with Computer Vision.

Why should the “old guard” not have to have the say when they came up with the idea of open source? It is misleading to adopt terminology with well known definitions and abuse it. People like Meta are free to use some other terminology that isn’t “open source” to describe their models, which I cannot reproduce because they’ve release nothing except weights and inference code.

Because language is rarely if ever prescriptive. It evolves organically and without much rhyme or reason beyond “because that’s how things went”. The fact that you think that software neckbeards, err, greybeards, are somehow exempted from that is a hilarious example of ‘tech exceptionalism’ brought to its natural conclusion.

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