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The parameters and the license. Mistral uses Apache 2.0, a neatly permissive open source license. As such, it's an open source model. Models are similar to cod

The parameters and the license. Mistral uses Apache 2.0, a neatly permissive open source license. As such, it's an open source model. Models are similar to code you might run on a compiled vm or native operating system. Llama.cpp is to a model as Python is to a python script. The license lays out the rights and responsibilities of the users of the software, or the model, in this case. The training data, process, pipeline to build the model in the first place is a distinct and separate thing from the models themselves. It'd be nice if those were open, too, but when dealing with just the model: If it uses an OSI recognized open source license, it is an open source model. If it doesn't use an OSI recognized open source license, it's not. Llama is not open source. It's corporate freeware.

littlestymaar 3y ago
Mistral is not “open source” either since we cannot reproduce it (the training data is not published). Both are open weight models, and they are both released under a license whose legal basis is unclear: it's not actually clear if they own any intellectual property over the model at all. Of course they claim such IP, but no court has ruled on this yet AFAIK and legislators could also enact laws that make these public domain altogether.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Is “reproducibility” actually the right term here? It’s a bit like arguing that Linux is not open source because you don’t have every email Linus and the maintainers ever received. Or that you don’t know what lectures Linus attended or what books he’s read. The weights “are the thing” in the same sense that the “code is the thing”. You can modify open code and recompile it. You can similarly modify weights with fine tuning or even architectural changes. You don’t need to go “back to the beginning” in the same sense that Linux would continue to be open source even without the Git history and the LKM mailing list.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > It’s a bit like arguing that Linux is not open source because you don’t have every email Linus and the maintainers ever received. Or that you don’t know what lectures Linus attended or what books he’s read. Linux is open source, because you can actually compile it yourself! You don't need Linus's email for that (and if you needed some secret cryptographic key on Linus' laptop to decrypt and compile the kernel, then it wouldn't make sense to call it open-source either). A language model isn't a piece of code, it's a huge binary blob that's being executed by a small piece of code that contains little of the added value, everything that matters is in the blob. Sharing only the compiled blob and the code to run makes it unsuitable for an “open source qualifier” (It's kind of the same thing as proprietary Java code: the VM is open-source but the bytecode you run on it isn't). And yes, you can fine-tune and change things in the model weights themselves the same way you can edit the binary of a proprietary game to disable DRMs, that doesn't make it open-source either. Fine tuning doesn't give you the same level of control over the behavior of the model as the initial training does, like binary hacking doesn't give you the same control as having the source code to edit and rebuild.
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      It's a blob that costs over $10,000,000 in electricity costs to compile. Even if they released everything only the rich could push go.
      - soulofmischief 3y ago
        There is an argument to be made about the importance of archeological preservation of the provenance of models, especially the first few important LLMs, for study by future generations. In general, software rot is a huge issue, and many projects which may be of future archeological importance are increasingly non-reproducible as dependencies are often not vendored and checked into source, but instead downloaded at compile time from servers which lack strong guarantees about future availability.
        _akhe 3y ago
        This is comment is cooler than my Arctic Vault badge on GitHub. Who were the countless unknown contemporaries of Giotto and Cimabue? Of Da Vinci and Michelangelo? Most of what we know about Renaissance art comes from 1 guy - Giorgio Vasari. We have more diverse information about ancient Egypt than the much more recent Italian Renaissance because of, essentially, better preservation techniques. Compliance, interoperability, and publishing platforms for all this work (HuggingFace, Ollama, GitHub, HN) are our cathedrals and clay tablets. Who knows what works will fill the museums of tomorrow.
- touisteur 3y ago
  I have a hard time about the "cannot reproduce" categorization. There are places (e.g. in the Linux kernel? AMD drivers?) where lots of generated code is pushed and (apart from the rants of huge unwieldy commits and complaints that it would be better engineering-wise to get their hands on the code generator, it seems no one is saying the AMD drivers aren't GPL compliant or OSI-compliant? There are probably lots of OSS that is filled with constants and code they probably couldn't rederive easily, and we still call them OSS?
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    But with generated code what you end up with is still code, that can be edited by whoever needs. If AMD stopped maintaining their drivers then people would be maintaining the generated code, it wouldn't be a nice situation but it would work, whereas model weights are akin to the binary blobs you get in the Android world, binary blobs that nobody call open-source…
    - pama 3y ago
      I personally think that the model artifacts are simply programs with tons of constants. Many math routines have constants in their approximations and I don’t expect the source to include the full derivation for these constants all the time. I see LLMs as a same category but with (much) larger sets of parameters. What is better about the LLMs than some of the mathematical constants in complicated function approximations, is that I can go and keep training an LLM whereas the math/engineering libraries might not make it easy for me to modify them without also figuring out the details that led to those particular parameter choices.

littlestymaar 3y ago

Mistral is not “open source” either since we cannot reproduce it (the training data is not published). Both are open weight models, and they are both released under a license whose legal basis is unclear: it's not actually clear if they own any intellectual property over the model at all. Of course they claim such IP, but no court has ruled on this yet AFAIK and legislators could also enact laws that make these public domain altogether.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Is “reproducibility” actually the right term here? It’s a bit like arguing that Linux is not open source because you don’t have every email Linus and the maintainers ever received. Or that you don’t know what lectures Linus attended or what books he’s read. The weights “are the thing” in the same sense that the “code is the thing”. You can modify open code and recompile it. You can similarly modify weights with fine tuning or even architectural changes. You don’t need to go “back to the beginning” in the same sense that Linux would continue to be open source even without the Git history and the LKM mailing list.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > It’s a bit like arguing that Linux is not open source because you don’t have every email Linus and the maintainers ever received. Or that you don’t know what lectures Linus attended or what books he’s read. Linux is open source, because you can actually compile it yourself! You don't need Linus's email for that (and if you needed some secret cryptographic key on Linus' laptop to decrypt and compile the kernel, then it wouldn't make sense to call it open-source either). A language model isn't a piece of code, it's a huge binary blob that's being executed by a small piece of code that contains little of the added value, everything that matters is in the blob. Sharing only the compiled blob and the code to run makes it unsuitable for an “open source qualifier” (It's kind of the same thing as proprietary Java code: the VM is open-source but the bytecode you run on it isn't). And yes, you can fine-tune and change things in the model weights themselves the same way you can edit the binary of a proprietary game to disable DRMs, that doesn't make it open-source either. Fine tuning doesn't give you the same level of control over the behavior of the model as the initial training does, like binary hacking doesn't give you the same control as having the source code to edit and rebuild.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    It's a blob that costs over $10,000,000 in electricity costs to compile. Even if they released everything only the rich could push go.
    - soulofmischief 3y ago
      There is an argument to be made about the importance of archeological preservation of the provenance of models, especially the first few important LLMs, for study by future generations. In general, software rot is a huge issue, and many projects which may be of future archeological importance are increasingly non-reproducible as dependencies are often not vendored and checked into source, but instead downloaded at compile time from servers which lack strong guarantees about future availability.
      - _akhe 3y ago
        This is comment is cooler than my Arctic Vault badge on GitHub. Who were the countless unknown contemporaries of Giotto and Cimabue? Of Da Vinci and Michelangelo? Most of what we know about Renaissance art comes from 1 guy - Giorgio Vasari. We have more diverse information about ancient Egypt than the much more recent Italian Renaissance because of, essentially, better preservation techniques. Compliance, interoperability, and publishing platforms for all this work (HuggingFace, Ollama, GitHub, HN) are our cathedrals and clay tablets. Who knows what works will fill the museums of tomorrow.
touisteur 3y ago
I have a hard time about the "cannot reproduce" categorization. There are places (e.g. in the Linux kernel? AMD drivers?) where lots of generated code is pushed and (apart from the rants of huge unwieldy commits and complaints that it would be better engineering-wise to get their hands on the code generator, it seems no one is saying the AMD drivers aren't GPL compliant or OSI-compliant? There are probably lots of OSS that is filled with constants and code they probably couldn't rederive easily, and we still call them OSS?
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  But with generated code what you end up with is still code, that can be edited by whoever needs. If AMD stopped maintaining their drivers then people would be maintaining the generated code, it wouldn't be a nice situation but it would work, whereas model weights are akin to the binary blobs you get in the Android world, binary blobs that nobody call open-source…
  - pama 3y ago
    I personally think that the model artifacts are simply programs with tons of constants. Many math routines have constants in their approximations and I don’t expect the source to include the full derivation for these constants all the time. I see LLMs as a same category but with (much) larger sets of parameters. What is better about the LLMs than some of the mathematical constants in complicated function approximations, is that I can go and keep training an LLM whereas the math/engineering libraries might not make it easy for me to modify them without also figuring out the details that led to those particular parameter choices.