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I'm really not a fan of how these releases of model binaries are being referred to as open source. How do I make changes to this model? How do I integrate cha

I'm really not a fan of how these releases of model binaries are being referred to as open source. How do I make changes to this model? How do I integrate changes to this model that others have made? The data pipeline is the source here. Just because it's not locked behind a SaaS veneer doesn't make it open source any more than Windows is.

scosman 3y ago
You could fine tune and release that. It’s not software so exact parallels don’t make sense, but the open permissions are great.
- monocasa 3y ago
  I mean, it's absolutely software.
  - scosman 3y ago
    Software is used to make models, but the models aren’t software anymore than Toy Story is software.
    - monocasa 3y ago
      There's literally a list of opcodes to be executed in the model. There's a whole lot of data too, but that's part of the build just as much as anything in a .data section.
    - mbakke 3y ago
      Forgive my ignorance, I haven't studied the AI tooling landscape yet. Are you saying these models have a structured binary format and "running" them is just a matter of having a "player" with the right "codec"? Or are they directly executing CPU instructions?
      - monocasa 3y ago
        They are basically a series of intermediate bytecodes to be compiled to the hardware they actually run on, in addition to the large tables of weights that bytecode references.
        scosman 3y ago
        Just a few billion of them that no person created or understands, which are based on the their input data and not design decisions, which include random initialization. I see no reason to treat them any differently than software in a conversation about OSS.
        kanwisher 3y ago
        Model inputs are definitely design decisions, what data to use, how to fine tune them, what methods were used in weighting things. This is LITERALLY the source of the model. The model is a binary like an EXE
    - camgunz 3y ago
      Toy Story is also software. It's a program you run on a renderer to generate a/v.
LoganDark 3y ago
Windows is not open source. In order to access the source code, you need a government contract. These aren't given out lightly.
- piperswe 3y ago
  Right, that's the point they're making.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    Recent models may not be fully open source, but could you point me to one that's subject to the same amount of scrutiny as Windows source code access? Because I'm not sure if there is one out there.
    - monocasa 3y ago
      Windows source access is given out pretty freely to academics as the Windows Research Kernel (WRK). But the point is that the data pipeline and tensorflow or what have you that trained the model is the source here. The model is the binary.
      - LoganDark 3y ago
        That's parts of the NT kernel, not actaul Windows source access. Governments get access to the whole thing. Some large OEMs get access to Windows Server source code as well.
        monocasa 3y ago
        https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ Microsoft has other mechanisms for sharing source and is remarkably open. The symbol servers are relatively public as well. They are at a scale where they rely more on legal strength to keep their IP rather than it not being externally accessible in the first place, at least for Windows.
- 3y ago
squeaky-clean 3y ago
You can do your own fine tuning on existing models > How do I integrate changes to this model that others have made Typically with a LoRA
- monocasa 3y ago
  Is that how the engineers at Mistral iterated on this model? I can patch windows and other binaries too (I'm actually pretty decent at that; 20 or so years with IDA/ghidra). That doesn't make them open source.
  - spullara 3y ago
    You don't iterate on the model weights, you train them on billions of tokens. There was no real iteration, you set it up and wait for the GPUs to do the work. The model architecture itself is done before you start training. If you change it, you generally have to start training from scratch. You do get the ability to further train the model using fine-tuning or LoRas.
    - monocasa 3y ago
      There's absolutely state space iteration in model training. Layer sizes, composition, construction. > There was no real iteration, you set it up and wait for the GPUs to do the work. The model architecture itself is done before you start training. If you change it, you generally have to start training from scratch. That's like saying there's no design iteration in software because you type 'make' and the executable is built.
      - spullara 3y ago
        The point is that iteration is before training. You don't iterate post starting the training and presumably this person doesn't want to train the model themselves. If they do, they can do that but they need to get the training data and a huge amount of GPUs.
        3y ago
godelski 3y ago
> these releases of model binaries Are they binaries? I haven't seen a binary in awhile tbh. Usually they're releasing both the raw architecture (i.e. code) and the weights of the models (i.e. what numbers go into what parts of the architecture). The latter is in a readable format that you can generally edit by hand if you wanted to. But even if it was a binary as long as you have the architecture you can always load into the model and decide if you want to probe it (extract values) or modify it by tuning (many methods to do this). As far as I'm concerned, realistically the only issue here is the standard issue around the open source definition. Does it mean the source is open as available or open as "do what the fuck you want"? I mean it's not like OpenAI is claiming that GPT is open sourced. It's just that Meta did and their source is definitely visible. Fwiw, they are the only major company to do so. Google doesn't open source: they, like OpenAI, use private datasets and private models. I'm more upset at __Open__AI and Google than I am about Meta. To me people are barking up the wrong tree here. (It also feels weird that Meta is the "good guy" here... relatively at least) Edit: I downloaded their checkpoint. It is the standard "pth" file. This is perfectly readable, it is just a pickle file. I like to use graftr to view checkpoints, but other tools exist (https://github.com/lmnt-com/graftr https://github.com/lmnt-com/graftr)
- monocasa 3y ago
  First off tokenizer.model in their release is absolutely a binary by any definition. Secondly, is hand editing the pickle file the way Mistral's engineers constructed this pickle file? Why not? The automation that constructed that file (and tokenizer.model) is the source. Binaries in this context can certainly be an ASCII encoded file. Just because other vendors are worse doesn't make this open source.
  - syntaxing 3y ago
    Not OP but I don’t get it though, you can modify the tokenizer all you want and fine tune the weights all you want. There’s nothing inherently hidden behind a binary
    - monocasa 3y ago
gfodor 3y ago
Sounds false, this is only an analogy wrapped up in what sounds like an argument. If you think about what you’re actually getting it’s open source.
- monocasa 3y ago
  What do Mistral's engineers work with? Do they have this 14GB pickle file open in their IDEs at 3PM? If not, why is that not the source to this?
  - uoaei 3y ago
    It's remarkably telling that no one who's pushing back has any answer to this line of reasoning. I wonder how they might benefit from retconning the notion of open source to fit the ways they're describing models now. At this point it seems bad faith in more than just a naive way.
    - gfodor 3y ago
      The reason is because "open source" is a vague enough concept anyone can project what they want onto it. Being able to fully replicate the construction of the model is one lens on it, but being able to modify it to suit your own needs is another. Given that a released base model allows things like fine tuning, generating your own training sets, and so on, it's not obviously closed source in the way the poster is acting like it is. Releasing the full training data and reproduction pipeline would be "more" open source, but having the raw, non RLHF'ed model is extremely open compared to most alternatives beyond that.
      - monocasa 3y ago
        It's not as vague as you're making it sound. Open source would mean what the engineers who work on this build artifact edit. This is clearly not that. This is 'more open' than other releases, yes. That doesn't mean it reaches the bar of what 'open source' means.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hcks 3y ago
This fallacious talking point is getting annoying.
Dowwie 3y ago
You want to see the source code of the transformer that created the compiled llm model, the dictionary corresponding to token values, etc. Instead, you got the weights and binary. I don't know what's going on in this discussion thread, as to whether you are being gaslit or engaging with people who shouldn't comment.
- uoaei 3y ago
  Right, my interpretation (and I think monocasa's too) is that the training and packaging pipeline is not published therefore the code used to build the model is not open, therefore there is no source available to rebuild the model as Mistral's engineers have done. In essence the output of the training pipeline is "data" (weights), not code. The way those data are read to make things work is the "model". In the (bad) analogy of the JPEG, the data is the coefficients and the model is the encoding/decoding scheme. I'm impressed by the patience monocasa has in the face of so many (seemingly intentionally) obtuse responses.
  - artursapek 3y ago
    The JPEG analogy makes no sense. A more correct analogy is: they released compiled binaries, not the source code. The difference is though, here compiling from source is prohibitively expensive for the average person. And the source is massive.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      My analogy makes perfect sense. Also, being able to reverse-engineer the precise build process is an orthogonal concern to having the source code available.
zwaps 3y ago
Here's the model code https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/src/transformers/models/mistral/modeling_mistral.py#L655 https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/src/tr...
- monocasa 3y ago
  That's not the code the use to build the vast majority of the release.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dang 3y ago
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37676210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37676210)

scosman 3y ago

You could fine tune and release that. It’s not software so exact parallels don’t make sense, but the open permissions are great.

monocasa 3y ago
I mean, it's absolutely software.
- scosman 3y ago
  Software is used to make models, but the models aren’t software anymore than Toy Story is software.
  - monocasa 3y ago
    There's literally a list of opcodes to be executed in the model. There's a whole lot of data too, but that's part of the build just as much as anything in a .data section.
  - mbakke 3y ago
    Forgive my ignorance, I haven't studied the AI tooling landscape yet. Are you saying these models have a structured binary format and "running" them is just a matter of having a "player" with the right "codec"? Or are they directly executing CPU instructions?
    - monocasa 3y ago
      They are basically a series of intermediate bytecodes to be compiled to the hardware they actually run on, in addition to the large tables of weights that bytecode references.
      - scosman 3y ago
        Just a few billion of them that no person created or understands, which are based on the their input data and not design decisions, which include random initialization. I see no reason to treat them any differently than software in a conversation about OSS.
        kanwisher 3y ago
        Model inputs are definitely design decisions, what data to use, how to fine tune them, what methods were used in weighting things. This is LITERALLY the source of the model. The model is a binary like an EXE
  - camgunz 3y ago
    Toy Story is also software. It's a program you run on a renderer to generate a/v.

LoganDark 3y ago

Windows is not open source. In order to access the source code, you need a government contract. These aren't given out lightly.

piperswe 3y ago
Right, that's the point they're making.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Recent models may not be fully open source, but could you point me to one that's subject to the same amount of scrutiny as Windows source code access? Because I'm not sure if there is one out there.
  - monocasa 3y ago
    Windows source access is given out pretty freely to academics as the Windows Research Kernel (WRK). But the point is that the data pipeline and tensorflow or what have you that trained the model is the source here. The model is the binary.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      That's parts of the NT kernel, not actaul Windows source access. Governments get access to the whole thing. Some large OEMs get access to Windows Server source code as well.
      - monocasa 3y ago
        https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ Microsoft has other mechanisms for sharing source and is remarkably open. The symbol servers are relatively public as well. They are at a scale where they rely more on legal strength to keep their IP rather than it not being externally accessible in the first place, at least for Windows.
3y ago

squeaky-clean 3y ago

You can do your own fine tuning on existing models > How do I integrate changes to this model that others have made Typically with a LoRA

monocasa 3y ago
Is that how the engineers at Mistral iterated on this model? I can patch windows and other binaries too (I'm actually pretty decent at that; 20 or so years with IDA/ghidra). That doesn't make them open source.
- spullara 3y ago
  You don't iterate on the model weights, you train them on billions of tokens. There was no real iteration, you set it up and wait for the GPUs to do the work. The model architecture itself is done before you start training. If you change it, you generally have to start training from scratch. You do get the ability to further train the model using fine-tuning or LoRas.
  - monocasa 3y ago
    There's absolutely state space iteration in model training. Layer sizes, composition, construction. > There was no real iteration, you set it up and wait for the GPUs to do the work. The model architecture itself is done before you start training. If you change it, you generally have to start training from scratch. That's like saying there's no design iteration in software because you type 'make' and the executable is built.
    - spullara 3y ago
      The point is that iteration is before training. You don't iterate post starting the training and presumably this person doesn't want to train the model themselves. If they do, they can do that but they need to get the training data and a huge amount of GPUs.
      - 3y ago

godelski 3y ago

> these releases of model binaries Are they binaries? I haven't seen a binary in awhile tbh. Usually they're releasing both the raw architecture (i.e. code) and the weights of the models (i.e. what numbers go into what parts of the architecture). The latter is in a readable format that you can generally edit by hand if you wanted to. But even if it was a binary as long as you have the architecture you can always load into the model and decide if you want to probe it (extract values) or modify it by tuning (many methods to do this). As far as I'm concerned, realistically the only issue here is the standard issue around the open source definition. Does it mean the source is open as available or open as "do what the fuck you want"? I mean it's not like OpenAI is claiming that GPT is open sourced. It's just that Meta did and their source is definitely visible. Fwiw, they are the only major company to do so. Google doesn't open source: they, like OpenAI, use private datasets and private models. I'm more upset at __Open__AI and Google than I am about Meta. To me people are barking up the wrong tree here. (It also feels weird that Meta is the "good guy" here... relatively at least) Edit: I downloaded their checkpoint. It is the standard "pth" file. This is perfectly readable, it is just a pickle file. I like to use graftr to view checkpoints, but other tools exist (https://github.com/lmnt-com/graftr https://github.com/lmnt-com/graftr)

monocasa 3y ago
First off tokenizer.model in their release is absolutely a binary by any definition. Secondly, is hand editing the pickle file the way Mistral's engineers constructed this pickle file? Why not? The automation that constructed that file (and tokenizer.model) is the source. Binaries in this context can certainly be an ASCII encoded file. Just because other vendors are worse doesn't make this open source.
- syntaxing 3y ago
  Not OP but I don’t get it though, you can modify the tokenizer all you want and fine tune the weights all you want. There’s nothing inherently hidden behind a binary
  - monocasa 3y ago

gfodor 3y ago

Sounds false, this is only an analogy wrapped up in what sounds like an argument. If you think about what you’re actually getting it’s open source.

monocasa 3y ago
What do Mistral's engineers work with? Do they have this 14GB pickle file open in their IDEs at 3PM? If not, why is that not the source to this?
- uoaei 3y ago
  It's remarkably telling that no one who's pushing back has any answer to this line of reasoning. I wonder how they might benefit from retconning the notion of open source to fit the ways they're describing models now. At this point it seems bad faith in more than just a naive way.
  - gfodor 3y ago
    The reason is because "open source" is a vague enough concept anyone can project what they want onto it. Being able to fully replicate the construction of the model is one lens on it, but being able to modify it to suit your own needs is another. Given that a released base model allows things like fine tuning, generating your own training sets, and so on, it's not obviously closed source in the way the poster is acting like it is. Releasing the full training data and reproduction pipeline would be "more" open source, but having the raw, non RLHF'ed model is extremely open compared to most alternatives beyond that.
    - monocasa 3y ago
      It's not as vague as you're making it sound. Open source would mean what the engineers who work on this build artifact edit. This is clearly not that. This is 'more open' than other releases, yes. That doesn't mean it reaches the bar of what 'open source' means.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hcks 3y ago

This fallacious talking point is getting annoying.

Dowwie 3y ago

You want to see the source code of the transformer that created the compiled llm model, the dictionary corresponding to token values, etc. Instead, you got the weights and binary. I don't know what's going on in this discussion thread, as to whether you are being gaslit or engaging with people who shouldn't comment.

uoaei 3y ago
Right, my interpretation (and I think monocasa's too) is that the training and packaging pipeline is not published therefore the code used to build the model is not open, therefore there is no source available to rebuild the model as Mistral's engineers have done. In essence the output of the training pipeline is "data" (weights), not code. The way those data are read to make things work is the "model". In the (bad) analogy of the JPEG, the data is the coefficients and the model is the encoding/decoding scheme. I'm impressed by the patience monocasa has in the face of so many (seemingly intentionally) obtuse responses.
- artursapek 3y ago
  The JPEG analogy makes no sense. A more correct analogy is: they released compiled binaries, not the source code. The difference is though, here compiling from source is prohibitively expensive for the average person. And the source is massive.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    My analogy makes perfect sense. Also, being able to reverse-engineer the precise build process is an orthogonal concern to having the source code available.

zwaps 3y ago

Here's the model code https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/src/transformers/models/mistral/modeling_mistral.py#L655 https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/src/tr...

monocasa 3y ago
That's not the code the use to build the vast majority of the release.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dang 3y ago

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37676210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37676210)