Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software, like a random person in Nebraska can produce a critical piece of the world's infrastructure in their spare time, don't apply.

Actually open source AI is more like scientific research. It needs public funding and reputable institutions as stewards of that funding. I'm hopeful Allen AI is able to do the things, but I'm not sure the US is moving in the direction it needs to be to get to the point where AI in the public interest is something we invest in.

But, also Photoshop is not at all comparable to open weight models. I can't legally give you a copy of Photoshop, but I can give you a copy of GLM 5.2. There are free proprietary applications out there that fit the bill, Photoshop isn't one of them.

View on HN

OK so replace the Photoshop example with a compiled GIMP or shareware binary. It doesn't change the fact that it is not open source.

The free software community complains all the time about binary blobs that are otherwise legal to freely distribute. Like firmwares. But somehow this is all overlooked with these "open weight" models.

Lord forbid open source models have as horrible a user interface as GIMP!

I agree with you in general, it's not "Open Source". But in many cases you're allowed to fork them, and create and distribute derivative works (finetunes) from open models, and the training and inference code is also permissively licensed. That's not shareware.

And working with the binary weights of a huge pretained model is much easier and cheaper than doing it based on the entirety of its humongous source datasets.

I'm not at all disagreeing with you about calling these models "open source". They mostly aren't and we should stop conflating the two things.

I think using the term "open" at all in relation to these models is a misnomer. Much in the same way we've spent a lot of time and effort distinguishing "open source" from "source available"

Perhaps instead of "Open weight model" it should be "Weights available model"

Definitely, but there's also a distinction between "weights available" and "you can do stuff with those weights". There are models you can download but the license prohibits redistribution, fine-tuning, etc. The earlier Gemma models had license encumbrances, for instance, that Gemma 4 do not.

But again, I think you're dancing around "Stallman was right," which is frankly why I come to the reverse idea.

I think it is fine to call these things "open" because "open" was loosey-goosey already. It wasn't Free.

> The free software community complains all the time about binary blobs that are otherwise legal to freely distribute. Like firmwares.

With software there are two things: the source code, and the binary.

Firmware usually has restrictions on modification, so it violates the four freedoms.

Open weights is not perfect, but at least you can finetune as you wish, and for example add more knowledge about the current day to those models, or give it knowledge about company internals so you don't need to put stuff into the context.

Many smaller AI labs finetune chinese models and release the result. Finetuning is very valuable!

> Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software, like a random person in Nebraska can produce a critical piece of the world's infrastructure in their spare time, don't apply.

No, but a small university team with dark time on the state school system's cluster can build a basic, functional LLM.

It will be a few years (or more) until true "open source" LLMs are available and high quality, for sure. But it's not as impenetrable as it seems, IMO.

"No, but a small university team with dark time on the state school system's cluster can build a basic, functional LLM."

Hey, remember when we were just talking about how it "needs public funding and reputable institutions as stewards of that funding"? (Hint: A state school system is a reputable institution running on public funding.)

I have nothing to say back other than: That's a very snarky and unnecessarily hostile tone to take with someone who is agreeing with you.

Sorry, I took "No, but" as a disagreement. You're right I was unnecessarily snarky about it.

The challenge is all legal. Every single AI shops is training on pirated data corpuses and grey area scraped data so obviously not a single company is willing to reveal their data.

> Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software

Compiling/creating the Linux kernel or Chromium is no child's dance either, doesn't make them more/less FOSS than other things. Open Source AI gets its name from the license, not how easy/difficult it is to run/produce yourself.

"Compiling/creating the Linux kernel or Chromium is no child's dance either"

I can compile the Linux kernel on a modest 15 year old laptop. Sure, it took 35 years and thousands of people to build it into what it is today, but anyone with pretty much any computer can meaningfully participate in Linux kernel development, and many Linux contributors have done so using modest hardware. The same is not true of AI. And, the Linux kernel is the biggest open source project, but plenty of small ones with one or two developers are in use on millions of systems.

I have pretty big hardware for local AI, more than most people have (a Strix Halo and a couple of 32GB GPUs in my desktop), but I can barely train anything useful locally; I can do QLoRAs for small models, or LoRAs for very small models, that's about the extent of it. I would need to rent big GPUs to do anything more than an experiment.

That's not comparable.

Not comparable today. But in 10 or 20 years the situation might be considerably different. Hopefully closer to a everyone-can-build-using-hardware-they-already-have.

> But, also Photoshop is not at all comparable to open weight models. I can't legally give you a copy of Photoshop

Please tell me this level of obtuseness is deliberate.

I don't know what you mean, so, if I am obtuse it is from a genuine lack of understanding. What is obtuse about that statement?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com