About as open source as a binary blob without the training data

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You don°t have access to the source.

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It's constantly referred to as "open source".

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Creative commons and MIT licence are distinct, though.

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Yeah - but it isnt

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Open weights

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what a weird hill to die on

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Great, so we agree. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

xttweaponttx

Just wanted to thank you both for this discourse! As somebody who's interested in AI but totally ignorant to how the hell it works, I found this conversation very helpful! I would say you both have good points. Happy days to you both!

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But it is factually inaccurate. We don't call binaries open-source, we don't even call visible-source open-source. An AI model is an artifact just like a binary is.

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I don't understand your objections. Even if the amount of data is rather big, it doesn't change that this data is part of the source, and leaving it out makes the whole project non-open-source.

Under that standard of scrutiny not only could there never be an LLM that would qualify, but projects that are considered open source would not be. Thus making the distinction meaningless.

What? No? Open-source projects literally do meet this standard.

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On the contrary. What they open sourced was just a small part of the project. What they did not open source is what makes the AI tick. Having less than one percent of a project open sourced does not make it an "Open Source" project.

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That "specific block of data" is more than 99% of such a project. Hardly insignificant.

Fushuan [he/him]

The engine is open source, the model is not.

The enumqtor is open source, the games it can run are not.

I don't see how it's so hard to understand.

They are saying that the model that the engine is running is open source because they released the model. That's like saying that a game is open source because I released an emulator and the exscutable file. It's just not true.

Fushuan [he/him]

What most people understand as deepseek is the app thauses their trained model, not the running or training engines.

This post mentions open source, not open source code, big distinction. The source of a trained model is part the training engine, and way bigger part the input data. We only have access to a fraction of that "source". So the service isn't open source.

Just to make clear, no LLM service is open source currently.

Fushuan [he/him]

The running engine and the training engine are open source. The service that uses the model trained with the open source engine and runs it with the open source runner is not, because a biiiig big part of what makes AI work is the trained model, and a big part of the source of a trained model is training data.

When they say open source, 99.99% of the people will understand that everything is verifiable, and it just is not. This is misleading.

As others have stated, a big part of open source development is providing everything so that other users can get the exact same results. This has always been the case in open source ML development, people do provide links to their training data for reproducibility. This has been the case with most of the papers on natural language processing (overarching branch of llm) I have read in the past. Both code and training data are provided.

acargitz

Arguably they are a new type of software, which is why the old categories do not align perfectly. Instead of arguing over how to best gatekeep the old name, we need a new classification system.

Fushuan [he/him]

The source OP is referring to is the training data what they used to compute those weights. Meaning, petabytes of text. Without that we don't know which content theynused for training the model.

The running/training engines might be open source, the pretrained model isn't and claiming otherwise is wrong.

Nothing wrong with it being this way, most commercial models operate the same way obviously. Just don't claim that themselves is open source because a big part of it is that people can reproduce your training to verify that there's no fowl play in the input data. We literally can't. That's it.

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It's not just the weights though is it? You can download the training data they used, and run your own instance of the model completely separate from their servers.

Fushuan [he/him]

The runner is open source, the model is not

The service uses both so calling their service open source gives a false impression to 99,99% of users that don't know better.

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Did "they" publish the training data? And the hyperparameters?