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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> TL;DR - Red Hat views the minimum criteria for open source AI as open source-licensed model weights combined with open source software components.

That's not open source!

I'm going to call this "Wizard of Ozzing". You give away the spectacle of magic tricks, but none of the science and machinery to do it yourself. You're still hiding it all behind fake virtue signalling.

Open source in AI is open weights, open training scripts, open inference scripts, open training datasets, and associated helper utilities. Without the science lab, you cannot replicate the science.

Weights in a vacuum are not open. It's a trick.

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You have the preferred form for making modifications, and the relevant permissions to now get in trouble for it.

If you actually go look at the open source or few software definitions, that's what they're about - being able to make modifications.

Just like an open source software project doesn't need a public record of the rationale for all architectural decisions in order to qualify.

Open source means that you can build from said source.

You can e.g. give away a closed-source game engine with an editor, where you can modify the prebuilt levels, and create your own, to your heart's content. But you can't build it from scratch in a controlled environment, and can't audit it. You also can't do modifications where the level editor interface is not sufficient, e.g. in the renderer. That's not open source, that's freeware.

For ML models, the training set is a crucial part of their source.

Open source means being able to verify how the sausage is made. Getting a premade sausage and saying “oh you can still eat it and spice it up however you like” isn’t that.

I’m happy open weights exist, but it is not truly open source.

Define these terms:

- Pretrain

- Fine tune

- Catastrophic forgetting

- Learning rate

- Adapter layer

If you understand these terms, then you understand why "open weights" are not the same as "open source".

"Open weights" are obfuscated and minified freeware.

Red Hat is on your team and you are criticizing them for not doing enough, why not side with red hat against companies that don't even publish shit and still consider there models to be open?

The prevailing strategy for most companies is to publish some bullshit (like a cli or a model downloader) and call it open source, the bar is waaay low and we are just trying to raise it a couple of inches, it's not helpful to go for the throat and demand that it be raised to the sky!

The term "open" in AI is being muddied and redefined. We shouldn't stand for that in any of its manifestations, lest we find ourselves in a world where "open" means completely dependent upon the giant foundation model companies.

This definition of "open source" for AI must not be allowed to take hold. It's pernicious.

Weights are a compiled binary. Encumbered freeware.

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