Open source != open weight.
Big difference and it bugs me that nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.
OTOH, to the extent that the original model trainers rely on training on certain data not requiring a license from the copyright holder, there is at least an argument that with an open source licenses for the weights and training and inference code, a transparent training corpus to which the original trainer has relied on no special permissions not granted to the general public to train on it, to the extent that the legal theory behind the original trainer believing that it is free to train on the data is correct, provides all of the essential features of open source.
At the same time, there are things portrayed as open weights where training data is undisclosed and the weights have a license which limits purpose of use and other aspects of use; the models are free-of-charge (for limited uses) but not meaningfully open.
https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
That 7B model also worked well in my experiments on a laptop.
Within tech circles, open weight != open source. Outside them, they’re synonyms.
The correct battle would have been weights + regime. But extremists insisted on data, too, which left Meta as the only other real voice arguing with anything practical. They had open weights. I think eventually open use was negotiated and that closed the case except for the folks still arguing about how to pronounce GIF.
I could rerun Kimi K3 with full transformers instead of the hybrid mamba architecture and it would only get better.
For example, if I was being pedantic:
> nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.
"nobody" would include you.
And then I might complain about we use the word "weight" for something massless, or how "bugs me" is *ento*mologically incorrect: https://xkcd.com/1012/
This is of course not a good use of time. I wonder if illustrating the point about how language is dynamic and meanings are descriptive not proscriptive, was a good use?
"Communicating": https://xkcd.com/1860/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/descriptive-vs-presc...
Prescriptively, a "model weight" weighs nothing. Descriptively, this is stupid: a new meaning was created by common use.
*Common* use says the weights you can download and run locally are "open source". May not like it, but it's not one person acting alone; and neither are the objectors to the shifting language, it's just the former is more "common" than the latter.