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Open source AI is the path forward

• deleted 2y ago
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• manishrana 2y ago
  really useful insights
• amusingimpala75 2y ago
  Sure but under what license? Because slapping “open source” on the model doesn’t make it open source if it’s not actually license that way. The 3.1 license still contains their non-commercial clause (over 700m users) and requires derivatives, whether fine tunings or trained on generated data, to use the llama name.
  • redleader55 2y ago
    "Use it for whatever you want(conditions apply), but not if you are Google, Amazon, etc. If you become big enough talk to us." That's how I read the license, but obviously I might be missing some nuance.
    • mesebrec 2y ago
      You also can't use it for training or improving other models. You also can't use it if you're the government of India. Neither can sex workers use it. (Do you know if your customers are sex workers?) There are also very vague restrictions for things like discrimination, racism etc.
      • war321 2y ago
        They're actually updating their license to allow LLAMA outputs for training! https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/1815766335219249513 https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/1815766335219249513
      • sumedh 2y ago
        > You also can't use it if you're the government of India. Why is that?
        • hskalin 2y ago
          I'm also very curious. On the other hand I don't want governments touching AI models either
  • frabcus 2y ago
    Also it isn't source code, it is a binary. You need at least the data curation code and preferably the data itself for it to be actually source code in the practical sense that anyone can remake the build. Llama could change the license on later versions to kill your business and you have no options as you don't know how they trained it or have the budget to. It's not much more free than binary software.
• deleted 2y ago
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• aliljet 2y ago
  And this is happening RIGHT as a new potential leader is emerging in Llama 3.1. I'm really curious about how this is going to match up on the leaderboards...
• deleted 2y ago
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• maxdo 2y ago
  so that North Korea will create small call centers for cheaper, since they can get these models for free?
  • HanClinto 2y ago
    The article argues that the threat of foreign espionage is not solved by closing models. > Some people argue that we must close our models to prevent China from gaining access to them, but my view is that this will not work and will only disadvantage the US and its allies. Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult. It seems most likely that a world of only closed models results in a small number of big companies plus our geopolitical adversaries having access to leading models, while startups, universities, and small businesses miss out on opportunities.
  • tempfile 2y ago
    This argument implies that cheap phones are bad since telemarketers can use them.
  • mrfinn 2y ago
    You guys really need to get over your bellicose POV of the world. Actually, before it destroys you. Really, is not necessary. Most people in the world just want to leave in peace, and see their children grow happily. For each data center NK would create there will be a thousand of peaceful, kind, and well-intentioned AI projects going on. Or maybe more.
• InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  CrowdStrike just added "Centralized Company Controlled Software Ecosystem" to every risk data sheet on the planet. Everything futureproof is self-hosted and open source.
• kart23 2y ago
  > This is how we’ve managed security on our social networks – our more robust AI systems identify and stop threats from less sophisticated actors who often use smaller scale AI systems. Ok, first of all, has this really worked? AI moderators still can't capture the mass of obvious spam/bots on all their platforms, threads included. Second, AI detection doesn't work, and with how much better the systems are getting, it's probably never going to, unless you keep the best models for yourself, and it's is clear from the rest of the note that its not zuck's intention to do so. > As long as everyone has access to similar generations of models – which open source promotes – then governments and institutions with more compute resources will be able to check bad actors with less compute. This just doesn't make sense. How are you going to prevent AI spam, AI deepfakes from causing harm with more compute? What are you gonna do with more compute about nonconsensual deepfakes? People are already using AI to bypass identity verification on your social media networks, and pump out loads of spam.
  • OpenComment 2y ago
    Interesting quotes. Less sophisticated actors just means humans who already write in 2020 what the NYT wrote in early 2022 to prepare for Biden's State Of The Union 180° policy reversals (manufacturing consent). FB was notorious for censorship. Anyway, what is with the "actions/actors" terminology? This is straightforward totalitarian language.
  • simonw 2y ago
    "AI detection doesn't work, and with how much better the systems are getting, it's probably never going to, unless you keep the best models for yourself" I don't think that's true. I don't think even the best privately held models will be able to detect AI text reliably enough for that to be worthwhile.
  • zmmmmm 2y ago
    I found this dubious as well, especially how it is portrayed as a simple game of compute power. For a start, there is an enormous asymmetry which is why we have a spam problem in the first place. For example a single bot can send out millions of emails at almost no cost and we have to expend a lot more "energy" to classify each one and decide if it's spam or not. So you don't just need more compute power you need drastically more compute power, and as AI models improve and get refined, the operation at ten times the scale is probably going to be marginally better, not orders of magnitude better. I still agree with his general take - bad actors will get these models or make them themselves, you can't stop it. But the logic about compute power is odd.
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Only if it is truly open source (open data sets, transparent curation/moderation/censorship of data sets, open training source code, open evaluation suites, and an OSI approved open source license). Open weights (and open inference code) is NOT open source, but just some weak open washing marketing. The model that comes closest to being TRULY open is AI2’s OLMo. See their blog post on their approach: https://blog.allenai.org/hello-olmo-a-truly-open-llm-43f7e7359222 https://blog.allenai.org/hello-olmo-a-truly-open-llm-43f7e73... I think the only thing they’re not open about is how they’ve curated/censored their “Dolma” training data set, as I don’t think they explicitly share each decision made or the original uncensored dataset: https://blog.allenai.org/dolma-3-trillion-tokens-open-llm-corpus-9a0ff4b8da64 https://blog.allenai.org/dolma-3-trillion-tokens-open-llm-co... By the way, OSI is working on defining open source for AI. They post weekly updates to their blog. Example: https://opensource.org/blog/open-source-ai-definition-weekly-update-july-15 https://opensource.org/blog/open-source-ai-definition-weekly...
  • haolez 2y ago
    There is also the risk of companies like Meta introducing ads in the training itself, instead of inference time.
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Only if it is truly open source (open data sets, transparent curation/moderation/censorship of data sets, open training source code, open evaluation suites, and an OSI approved open source license) You’re missing a then to your if. What happens if it’s “truly” open per your definition versus not?
    • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      I think you are asking what the benefits are? The main benefit is that we can trust what these systems are doing better. Or we can self host them. If we just take the weights, then it is unclear how these systems might be lying to us or manipulating us. Another benefit is that we can learn from how the training and other steps actually work. We can change them to suit our needs (although costs are impractical today). Etc. It’s all the usual open source benefits.
• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  “The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1]. $279mm in 1957 dollars is about $3.2bn today [2]. A public cluster of GPUs provided for free to American universities, companies and non-profits might not be a bad idea. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program [2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=279&year1=195701&year2=202406 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=279&year1=1957...
  • CardenB 2y ago
    Doubtful that GPUs purchased today would be in use for a similar time scale. Govt investment would also drive the cost of GPUs up a great deal. Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Doubtful that GPUs purchased today would be in use for a similar time scale Totally agree. That doesn't mean it can't generate massive ROI. > Govt investment would also drive the cost of GPUs up a great deal Difficult to say this ex ante. On its own, yes. But it would displace some demand. And it could help boost chip production in the long run. > Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants Those receiving the grants have to pay a private owner of the GPUs. That gatekeeping might be both problematic, if there is a conflict of interests, and inefficient. (Consider why the government runs its own supercomputers versus contracting everything to Oracle and IBM.)
      • rvnx 2y ago
        It would be better that the government removes IP on such technology for public use, like drugs got generics. This way the government pays 2'500 USD per card, not 40'000 USD or whatever absurd.
• gazelle21 2y ago
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• ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  On every post like this on hacker news, I post my pro meta speech. My opinion has always been the same: 1. Meta pushed engineering wages higher across the industry. 2. They promote high performing engineers very quickly. There are engineers making 7 figures there with just a few years experience. 3. They have open sourced the most important frameworks: React and Pytorch This company is a guiding light forcing the hand of other large corporations. Mark Zuckerberg is a hero, and has done a fantastic job
  • givinguflac 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 2y ago
      Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, even if someone else started it. We're trying to avoid that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • LorenDB 2y ago
    I never really liked Zuck due to Facebook's massive black hole of user tracking, but you've gotta give it to him: the Llama models are insanely good, and the commitment to making Horizon OS available to other VR manufacturers is commendable, although I'd like to see it truly open sourced.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • dang 2y ago
    Ok, but please don't post repetitive comments or recite speeches on HN. We're trying to avoid that kind of thing here, because repetition is tedious and bad for curiosity. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• the8thbit 2y ago
  "Eventually though, open source Linux gained popularity – initially because it allowed developers to modify its code however they wanted ..." I find the language around "open source AI" to be confusing. With "open source" there's usually "source" to open, right? As in, there is human legible code that can be read and modified by the user? If so, then how can current ML models be open source? They're very large matrices that are, for the most part, inscrutable to the user. They seem akin to binaries, which, yes, can be modified by the user, but are extremely obscured to the user, and require enormous effort to understand and effectively modify. "Open source" code is not just code that isn't executed remotely over an API, and it seems like maybe its being conflated with that here?
  • bilsbie 2y ago
    Can’t you do fine tuning on those binaries? That’s a modification.
    • the8thbit 2y ago
      You can fine tune the models, and you can modify binaries. However, there is no human readable "source" to open in either case. The act of "fine tuning" is essentially brute forcing the system to gradually alter the weights such that loss is reduced against a new training set. This limits what you can actually do with the model vs an actual open source system where you can understand how the system is working and modify specific functionality. Additionally, models can be (and are) fine tuned via APIs, so if that is the threshold required for a system to be "open source", then that would also make the GPT4 family and other such API only models which allow finetuning open source.
      • whimsicalism 2y ago
        I don't find this argument super convincing. There's a pretty clear difference between the 'finetuning' offered via API by GPT4 and the ability to do whatever sort of finetuning you want and get the weights at the end that you can do with open weights models. "Brute forcing" is not the correct language to use for describing fine-tuning. It is not as if you are trying weights randomly and seeing which ones work on your dataset - you are following a gradient.
• Oras 2y ago
  This is obviously good news, but __personally__ I feel the open-source models are just trying to catch up with whoever the market leader is, based on some benchmarks. The actual problem is running these models. Very few companies can afford the hardware to run these models privately. If you run them in the cloud, then I don't see any potential financial gain for any company to fine-tune these huge models just to catch up with OpenAI or Anthropic, when you can probably get a much better deal by fine-tuning the closed-source models. Also this point: > We need to protect our data. Many organizations handle sensitive data that they need to secure and can’t send to closed models over cloud APIs. First, it's ironic that Meta is talking about privacy. Second, most companies will run these models in the cloud anyway. You can run OpenAI via Azure Enterprise and Anthropic on AWS Bedrock.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • simonw 2y ago
    "Very few companies can afford the hardware to run these models privately." I can run Llama 3 70B on my (64GB RAM M2) laptop. I haven't tried 3.1 yet but I expect to be able to run that 70B model too. As for the 405B model, the Llama 3.1 announcement says: > To support large-scale production inference for a model at the scale of the 405B, we quantized our models from 16-bit (BF16) to 8-bit (FP8) numerics, effectively lowering the compute requirements needed and allowing the model to run within a single server node.
• mesebrec 2y ago
  Note that Meta's models are not open source in any interpretation of the term. * You can't use them for any purpose. For example, the license prohibits using these models to train other models. * You can't meaningfully modify them given there is almost no information available about the training data, how they were trained, or how the training data was processed. As such, the model itself is not available under an open source license and the AI does not comply with the "open source AI" definition by OSI. It's an utter disgrace for Meta to write such a blogpost patting themselves on the back while lying about how open these models are.
  • ChadNauseam 2y ago
    > you can't meaningfully modify them given there is almost no information available about the training data, how they were trained, or how the training data was processed. I was under the impression that you could still fine-tune the models or apply your own RLHF on top of them. My understanding is that the training data would mostly be useful for training the model yourself from scratch (possibly after modifying the training data), which would be extremely expensive and out of reach for most people
    • mesebrec 2y ago
      Indeed, fine-tuning is still possible, but you can only go so far with fine-tuning before you need to completely retrain the model. This is why Silo AI, for example, had to start from scratch to get better support for small European languages.
    • chasd00 2y ago
      From what i understand the training data and careful curation of it is the hard part. Everyone wants training data sets to train their own models instead of producing their own.
  • causal 2y ago
    You are definitely allowed to train other models with these models, you just have to give credit in the name, per the license: > If you use the Llama Materials or any outputs or results of the Llama Materials to create, train, fine tune, or otherwise improve an AI model, which is distributed or made available, you shall also include “Llama” at the beginning of any such AI model name.
• tw04 2y ago
  >In the early days of high-performance computing, the major tech companies of the day each invested heavily in developing their own closed source versions of Unix. Because they sold the resultant code and systems built on it for money... this is the gold miner saying that all shovels and jeans should be free. Am I happy Facebook open sources some of their code? Sure, I think it's good for everyone. Do I think they're talking out of both sides of their mouth? Absolutely. Let me know when Facebook opens up the entirety of their Ad and Tracking platforms and we can start talking about how it's silly for companies to keep software closed. I can say with 100% confidence if Facebook were selling their AI advances instead of selling the output it produces, they wouldn't be advocating for everyone else to open source their stacks.
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > if Facebook were selling their AI advances instead of selling the output it produces, they wouldn't be advocating for everyone else to open source their stack You're acting as if commoditizing one's complements is either new or reprehensible [1]. [1] https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement
    • tw04 2y ago
      >You're acting as if commoditizing one's complements is either new or reprehensible [1]. I'm acting as if calling on other companies to open source their core product, just because it's a complement for you, and acting as if it's for the benefit of mankind is disingenuous, which it is.
      • stale2002 2y ago
        > as if it's for the benefit of mankind But it does benefit mankind. More free tech products is good for the world. This is a good thing. When people or companies do good things, they should get the credit for doing good things.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > acting as if it's for the benefit of mankind is disingenuous, which it is Is it bad for mankind that Meta publishes its weights? Mutually beneficial is a valid game state--there is no moral law that requires anything good be made as a sacrifice.
• abetusk 2y ago
  Another case of "open-washing". Llama is not available open source, under the common definition of open source, as the license doesn't allow for commercial re-use by default [0]. They provide their model, with weights and code, as "source available" and it looks like they allow for commercial use until a 700M monthly subscriber cap is surpassed. They also don't allow you to train other AI models with their model: """ ... v. You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Meta Llama 3 or derivative works thereof). ... """ [0] https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/LICENSE
  • sillysaurusx 2y ago
    They cannot legally enforce this, because they don’t have the rights to the content they trained it on. Whoever’s willing to fund that court battle would likely win. There’s a legal precedent that says hard work alone isn’t enough to guarantee copyright, i.e. it doesn’t matter that it took millions of dollars to train.
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    i think these clauses are unenforceable. it's telling that OAI hasn't tried a similar suit despite multiple extremely well-known cases of competitors training on OAI outputs
• deleted 2y ago
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• nuz 2y ago
  Everyone complaining about not having data access: Remember that without meta you would have openai and anthropic and that's it. I'm really thankful they're releasing this, and the reason they can't release the data is obvious.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • mesebrec 2y ago
    Without Meta, you would still have Mistral, Silo AI, and the many other companies and labs producing much more open models with similar performance.
• Invictus0 2y ago
  The irony of this letter being written by Mark Zuckerburg at Meta, while OpenAI continues to be anything but open, is richer than anyone could have imagined.
• 1024core 2y ago
  "open source AI" ... "open" ... "open" .... And you can't even try it without an FB/IG account. Zuck will never change.
  • causal 2y ago
    I think you can use an HF account as well https://huggingface.co/meta-llama https://huggingface.co/meta-llama
    • Gracana 2y ago
      You can also wait a bit for someone to upload quantized variants, finetunes, etc, and download those. FWIW I'm not making a claim about the legality of that, just saying it's an easy way around needing to sign the agreement.
  • CamperBob2 2y ago
    It doesn't require an account. You do have to fill in your name and email (and birthdate, although it seems to accept whatever you feed it.)
• anuranjan87 2y ago
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• mvkel 2y ago
  It's a real shame that we're still calling Llama "open source" when at best it's "open weights." Not that anyone would go buy 100,000 H100s to train their own Llama, but words matter. Definitions matter.
  • sidcool 2y ago
    Honest question. As far as LLMs are concerned, isn't open weights same as open source?
    • mesebrec 2y ago
      Open source requires, at the very least, that you can use it for any purpose. This is not the case with Llama. The Llama license has a lot of restrictions, based on user base size, type of use, etc. For example you're not allowed to use Llama to train or improve other models. But it goes much further than that. The government of India can't use Llama because they're too large. Sex workers are not allowed to use Llama due to the acceptable use policy of the license. Then there is also the vague language probibiting discrimination, racism etc.. good luck getting something like that approved by your legal team.
    • aloe_falsa 2y ago
      GPL defines the “source code” of a work as the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. If Meta released a petabyte of raw training data, would that really be easier to extend and adapt (as opposed to fine-tuning the weights)?
    • paulhilbert 2y ago
      No, I would argue that from the three main ingredients - training data, model source code and weights - weights are the furthest away from something akin to source code. They're more like obfuscated binaries. When it comes to fine-tuning only however things shift a little bit, yes.
      • sidcool 2y ago
        I don't expect them to release the data used to train the models. But I agree that the code is an important ingredient of 'open'.
• rybosworld 2y ago
  Huge companies like facebook will often argue for solutions that on the surface, seem to be in the public interest. But I have strong doubts they (or any other company) actually believe what they are saying. Here is the reality: - Facebook is spending untold billions on GPU hardware. - Facebook is arguing in favor of open sourcing the models, that they spent billions of dollars to generate, for free...? It follows that companies with much smaller resources (money) will not be able to match what Facebook is doing. Seems like an attempt to kill off the competition (specifically, smaller organizations) before they can take root.
  • Salgat 2y ago
    The reason for Meta making their model open source is rather simple: They receive an unimaginable amount of free labor, and their license only excludes their major competitors to ensure mass adoption without benefiting their competition (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, etc). Public interest, philanthropy, etc are just nice little marketing bonuses as far as they're concerned (otherwise they wouldn't be including this licensing restriction).
    • noiseinvacuum 2y ago
      All correct, Meta does obviously benefit. It's helpful to also look at what do the developers and companies (everyone outside of top 5/10 big tech companies) get out of this. They get open access to weights of SOTA LLM models that take billions of dollars to train and 10s of billions a year to run the AI labs that make these. They get the freedom to fine tune them, to distill them, and to host them on their own hardware in whatever way works best for their products and services.
      • gradientsrneat 2y ago
        Interesting. So llama isn't actually open source! That would partially explain why they feel their moat isn't compromised. Also... Wow, Mark Zuckerberg is such a liar! Implying that llama is open source when it isn't, while at the same time trying to gather the goodwill of FOSS developers.
• cs702 2y ago
  > We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. Bravo! While I don't agree with Zuck's views and actions on many fronts, on this occasion I think he and the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude. With this release, they have brought the cost of pretraining a frontier 400B+ parameter model to ZERO for pretty much everyone -- well, everyone except Meta's key competitors.[a] THANK YOU ZUCK. Meanwhile, the business-minded people at Meta surely won't mind if the release of these frontier models to the public happens to completely mess up the AI plans of competitors like OpenAI/Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, etc. Come to think of it, the negative impact on such competitors was likely a key motivation for releasing the new models. --- [a] The license is not open to the handful of companies worldwide which have more than 700M users.
  • swyx 2y ago
    > the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude We interviewed Thomas who led Llama 2 and 3 post training here in case you want to hear from someone closer to the ground on the models https://www.latent.space/p/llama-3 https://www.latent.space/p/llama-3
  • throwaway_2494 2y ago
    > We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B Is it possible to run this with ollama?
    • jessechin 2y ago
      Sure, if you have a H100 cluster. If you quant it to int4 you might get away with using only 4 H100 GPUs!
      • sheepscreek 2y ago
        Assuming $25k a pop, that’s at least $100k in just the GPUs alone. Throw in their linking technology (NVLink) and cost for the remaining parts, won’t be surprised if you’re looking at $150k for such a cluster. Which is not bad to be honest, for something at this scale. Can anyone share the cost of their pre-built clusters, they’ve recently started selling? (sorry feeling lazy to research atm, I might do that later when I have more time).
• jorblumesea 2y ago
  Cynically I think this position is largely due to how they can undercut OpenAI's moat.
  • wayeq 2y ago
    It's not cynical, it's just an awareness that public companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders.
• userabchn 2y ago
  Interview with Mark Zuckerberg released today: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2024-07-23/mark-zuckerberg-s-open-source-ai-play https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2024-07-23/mark-zucker...
• FinchNova12 2y ago
  > Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult. Mostly unrelated to the correctness of the article, but this feels like a bad argument. AFAIK, Anthropic/OpenAI/Google are not having issues with their weights being leaked (are they?). Why is it that Meta's model weights are?
  • meowface 2y ago
    >AFAIK, Anthropic/OpenAI/Google are not having issues with their weights being leaked. Why is it that Meta's model weights are? The main threat actors there would be powerful nation-states, in which case they'd be unlikely to leak what they've taken. It is a bad argument though, because one day possession of AI models (and associated resources) might confer great and dangerous power, and we can't just throw up our hands and say "welp, no point trying to protect this, might as well let everyone have it". I don't think that'll happen anytime soon, but I am personally somewhat in the AI doomer camp.
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    We have no way of knowing whether nation-state level actors have access to those weights.
  • skybrian 2y ago
    I think it’s hard to say. We simply don’t know much from the outside. Microsoft has had some pretty bad security lapses, for example around guarding access to Windows source code. I don’t think we’ve seen a bad security break-in at Google in quite a few years? It would surprise me if Anthropic and OpenAI had good security since they’re pretty new, and fast-growing startups have a lot of organizational challenges. It seems safe to assume that not all the companies doing leading-edge LLM’s have good security and that the industry as a whole isn’t set up to keep secrets for long. Things aren’t locked down to the level of classified research. And it sounds like Zuckerberg doesn’t want to play the game that way. At the state level, China has independent AI research efforts and they’re going to figure it out. It’s largely a matter of timing, which could matter a lot. There’s still an argument to be made against making proliferation too easy. Just because states have powerful weapons doesn’t mean you want them in the hands of people on the street.
• turdistheword 2y ago
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• probablybetter 2y ago
  I would avoid Facebook and Meta products in general. I do NOT trust them. We have approx. 20 years of their record to go upon.
• diggan 2y ago
  > Today we’re taking the next steps towards open source AI becoming the industry standard. We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, Why do people keep mislabeling this as Open Source? The whole point of calling something Open Source is that the "magic sauce" of how to build something is publicly available, so I could built it myself if I have the means. But without the training data publicly available, could I train Llama 3.1 if I had the means? No wonder Zuckerberg doesn't start with defining what Open Source actually means, as then the blogpost would have lost all meaning from the get go. Just call it "Open Model" or something. As it stands right now, the meaning of Open Source is being diluted by all these companies pretending to doing one thing, while actually doing something else. I initially got very exciting seeing the title and the domain, but hopelessly sad after reading through the article and realizing they're still trying to pass their artifacts off as Open Source projects.
  • valine 2y ago
    The codebase to do the training is way less valuable than the weights for the vast majority of people. Releasing the training code would be nice, but it doesn't really help anyone but Meta's direct competitors. If you want to train on top of Llama there's absolutely nothing stopping you. Plenty of open source tools to do parameter optimization.
    • diggan 2y ago
      Not just the training code but the training data as well, should be under a permissive license, otherwise you cannot call the project itself Open Source, which Facebook does here. > is way less valuable than the weights for the vast majority of people The same is true for most Open Source projects, most people use the distributed binaries or other artifacts from the projects, and couldn't care less about the code itself. But that doesn't warrant us changing the meaning of Open Source just because companies feel like it's free PR. > If you want to train on top of Llama there's absolutely nothing stopping you. Sure, but in order for the intent of Open Source to be true for Llama, I should be able to build this project from scratch. Say I have a farm of 100 A100's, could I reproduce the Llama model from scratch today?
• hubraumhugo 2y ago
  The big winners of this: devs and AI startups - No more vendor lock-in - Instead of just wrapping proprietary API endpoints, developers can now integrate AI deeply into their products in a very cost-effective and performant way - Price race to the bottom with near-instant LLM responses at very low prices are on the horizon As a founder, it feels like a very exciting time to build a startup as your product automatically becomes better, cheaper, and more scalable with every major AI advancement. This leads to a powerful flywheel effect: https://www.kadoa.com/blog/ai-flywheel https://www.kadoa.com/blog/ai-flywheel
  • danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    It creates the opposite of a flywheel effect for you. It creates a leapfrog effect.
    • boringg 2y ago
      AI might cannabalize a lot of first gen AI businesses.
      • jstummbillig 2y ago
        What Meta is doing is borderline market distortion. It's not that they have figured out some magic sauce they are happy to share. They are just deciding to burn brute force money that they made elsewhere and give their stuff away below cost, first of all because they can.
        • anon373839 2y ago
          I know, and it's beautiful to see. Bad actors like "Open"AI tried to get in first and monopolize this tech with lawfare. But that game plan has been mooted by Meta's scorched-earth generosity.
          • jstummbillig 2y ago
            Meta has actually figured out where the moot is: Ecosystem, tooling. As soon as "we" build it, they an still do whatever they want with the core/llm, starting with Llama 4 or any other point in the future. The best kind of open source: All the important ingredients to make it work (more and more data and money) are either not open source or in the hands of Meta. It's prohibitive by design. People seem happy to help build Metas empire once again in return for scraps.
• mav3ri3k 2y ago
  I am not deep into llms so I ask this. From my understanding, their last model was open source but it was in a way that you can use them but the inner working were "hidden"/not transparent. With the new model, I am seeing alot of how open source they are and can be build upon. Is it now completely open source or similar to their last models ?
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    It's intrinsic to transformers that the inner workings are largely inscrutable. This is no different, but it does not mean they cannot be built upon. Gradient descent works on these models just like the prior ones.
  • zmmmmm 2y ago
    they give you the code and they give you the model it runs, and you can customise and redistribute both. It's all open source in that respect. What people are complaining about (totally unreasonably in my view) is obviously Meta is not "open sourcing" all the training data, so nobody can retrain the model from scratch themselves. This argument to me is just silly. The whole point of these models is they distil pretraining on massive data sets you wouldn't have access to otherwise. If you insist on them releasing the data set, they will have to cut it down to 0.1% of the size and you will be getting what you had access to already in the first place.
    • Flimm 2y ago
      That's not the only thing that people are complaining about. Even the code is not open source, despite being called open source.
    • frabcus 2y ago
      They could release the code that gathers and curates the data. Give a reproducible system for getting the pre training data. And presumably they own the post training RLHF stuff so could open that. Without those you're locked in to them in terms of licensing of future versions.
• carimura 2y ago
  Looks like you can already try out Llama-3.1-405b on Groq, although it's timing out. So. Hugged I guess.
  • TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    All the big providers should have it up by end of day. They just change their API configs (they're just reselling you AWS Bedrock).
    • jamiedg 2y ago
      405B and the other Llama 3.1 models are working and available on Together AI. https://api.together.ai https://api.together.ai
    • Havoc 2y ago
      >they're just reselling you AWS Bedrock Meta announced they have 25 providers ready on day 1, so no it's not all AWS.
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  It’s easy to support open source AI when the code is 1,000 lines and the execution costs $100,000,000 of electricity. Only the big players can afford to push go, and FB would love to see OpenAI’s code so they can point it to their proprietary user data.
• bun_at_work 2y ago
  Meta makes their money off advertising, which means they profit from attention. This means they need content that will grab attention, and creating open source models that allow anyone to create any content on their own becomes good for Meta. The users of the models can post it to their Instagram/FB/Threads account. Releasing an open model also releases Meta from the burden of having to police the content the model generates, once the open source community fine-tunes the models. Overall, this move is good business move for Meta - the post doesn't really talk about the true benefit, instead moralizing about open source, but this is a sound business move for Meta.
  • jklinger410 2y ago
    This is a great point. Eventually, META will only allow LLAMA generated visual AI content on its platforms. They'll put a little key in the image that clears it with the platform. Then all other visual AI content will be banned. If that is where legislation is heading.
  • natural219 2y ago
    AI moderators too would be an enormous boon if they could get that right.
    • KaiserPro 2y ago
      It would be good, but the cost per moderation is still really high for it to be practical.
  • noiseinvacuum 2y ago
    Creating content with AI will surely be helpful for social media to some extent but I think it's not that important in larger scheme of things, there's already a vast sea of content being created by humans and differentiation is already in recommending the right content to right people at right time. More important is the products that Meta will be able to make if the industry standardizes on Llama. They would have the front seat in not just with access the latest unreleased models but also settings the direction of progress and next gen LLM optimizes for. If you're Twitter or Snap or TikTok or compete with Meta on the product then good luck in trying to keep up.
• resters 2y ago
  This is really good news. Zuck sees the inevitability of it and the dystopian regulatory landscape and decided to go all in. This also has the important effect of neutralizing the critique of US Government AI regulation because it will democratize "frontier" models and make enforcement nearly impossible. Thank you, Zuck, this is an important and historic move. It also opens up the market to a lot more entry in the area of "ancillary services to support the effective use of frontier models" (including safety-oriented concerns), which should really be the larger market segment.
  • passion__desire 2y ago
    Probably, Yann Lecun is the Lord Varys here. He has Mark's ear and Mark believes in Yann's vision.
  • war321 2y ago
    Unfortunately, there are a number of AI safety people that are still crowing about how AI models need to be locked down, with some of them loudly pivoting to talking about how open source models aid China. Plus there's still the spectre of SB-1047 hanging around.
• amelius 2y ago
  > One of my [Mark Zuckerberg, ed.] formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it’s clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. This is hard to disagree with.
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  • glhaynes 2y ago
    I think it's very easy to disagree with! If Zuckerberg had his way, mobile device OSes would let Meta ingest microphone and GPS data 24/7 (just like much of the general public already thinks they do because of the effectiveness of the other sorts of tracking they are able to do). There are certainly legit innovations that haven't shipped because gatekeepers don't allow them. But there've been lots of harmful "innovations" blocked, too.
    • amelius 2y ago
      This is a bit like saying that free speech is bad, because what bad things might happen if people could talk freely. So glad there is a dictator that forbids it!
• throwaway1194 2y ago
  I strongly suspect that what AI will end up doing is push companies and organizations towards open source, they will eventually realize that code is already being shared via AI channels, so why not do it legally with open source?
  • talldayo 2y ago
    > they will eventually realize that code is already being shared via AI channels Private repos are not being reproduced by any modern AI. Their source code is safe, although AI arguably lowers the bar to compete with them.
• whimsicalism 2y ago
  OpenAI needs to release a new model setting a new capabilities highpoint. This is existential for them now.
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  Related: Llama 3.1 Official Launch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41046540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41046540
• baceto123 2y ago
  The value of AI is in the information used to train the models, not the hardware.
• m3kw9 2y ago
  The truth is we need both closed and open source, they both have their discovery path and advantages and disadvantages, there shouldn’t be a system where one is eliminated over the other. They also seem to be driving each other forward via competition.
• typpo 2y ago
  Thanks to Meta for their work on safety, particularly Llama Guard. Llama Guard 3 adds defamation, elections, and code interpreter abuse as detection categories. Having run many red teams recently as I build out promptfoo's red teaming featureset [0], I've noticed the Llama models punch above their weight in terms of accuracy when it comes to safety. People hate excessive guardrails and Llama seems to thread the needle. Very bullish on open source. [0] https://www.promptfoo.dev/docs/red-team/ https://www.promptfoo.dev/docs/red-team/
  • swyx 2y ago
    is there a #2 to llamaguard? Meta seems curiously alone in doing this kind of, lets call it, "practical safety" work
• enriquto 2y ago
  It's alarming that he refers to llama as if it was open source. The definition of free software (and open source, for that mater), is well-established. The same definition applies to all programs, whether they are "AI" or not. In any case, if a program was built by training against a dataset, the whole dataset is part of the source code. Llama is distributed in binary form, and it was built based on a secret dataset. Referring to it as "open source" is not ignorance, it's malice.
  • Nesco 2y ago
    The training data contains most likely insane amounts of copyrighted material. That’s why virtually none of the “open models” come with their training data
    • enriquto 2y ago
      > The training data contains most likely insane amounts of copyrighted material. If that is the case then the weights must inherit all these copyrights. It has been shown (at least in image processing) that you can extract many training images from the weights, almost verbatim. Hiding the training data does not solve this issue. But regardless of copyright issues, people here are complaining about the malicious use of the term "open source", to signify a completely different thing (more like "open api").
      • tempfile 2y ago
        > If that is the case then the weights must inherit all these copyrights. Not if it's a fair use (which is obviously the defence they're hoping for)
        • anon373839 2y ago
          Also, fair use is just one defense to a copyright infringement claim. The plaintiff first has to prove the elements of infringement; if they can't do this, no defense is needed.
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• indus 2y ago
  Is there an argument against Open Source AI? Not the usual nation-state rhetoric, but something that justifies that closed source leads to better user-experience and fewer security and privacy issues. An ecosystem that benefits vendors, customers, and the makers of close source? Are there historical analogies other than Microsoft Windows or Apple iPhone / iOS?
  • kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Lets take the iphone. Secured by the industries best security teams I am sure. Closed source, yet teenagers in eastern europe have cracked into it dozens of times making jailbreaks. Every law enforcement agency can crack into it. Closed source is not a security moat, but a trade protection moat.
  • finolex1 2y ago
    Replace "Open Source AI" in "is there an argument against xxx" with bioweapons or nuclear missiles. We are obviously not at that stage yet, but it could be a real, non-trivial concern in the near future.
• GaggiX 2y ago
  Llama 3.1 405B is on par with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the 70B model is better than GPT 3.5 turbo, incredible.
• itissid 2y ago
  How are smaller models distilled from large models, I know of LoRA, quantization like technique; but does distilling also mean generating new datasets for conversing with smaller models entirely from the big models for many simpler tasks?
  • tintor 2y ago
    Smaller models can be trained to match log probs of the larger model. Larger model can be used to generate synthethic data for the smaller model.
  • Havoc 2y ago
    I believe these were separately trained not distilled. Though the 405B was used for synth data for the other two
• popcorncowboy 2y ago
  > Developers can run inference on Llama 3.1 405B on their own infra at roughly 50% the cost of using closed models like GPT-4o Does anyone have details on exactly what this means or where/how this metric gets derived?
  • rohansood15 2y ago
    I am guessing these are prices on services like AWS Bedrock (their post is down right now).
  • PlattypusRex 2y ago
    a big chunk of that is probably the fact that you don't need to pay someone who is trying to make a profit by running inference off-premises.
• wesleyyue 2y ago
  Just added Llama 3.1 405B/70B/8B to https://double.bot https://double.bot (VSCode coding assistant) if anyone would like to try it. --- Some observations: * The model is much better at trajectory correcting and putting out a chain of tangential thoughts than other frontier models like Sonnet or GPT-4o. Usually, these models are limited to outputting "one thought", no matter how verbose that thought might be. * I remember in Dec of 2022 telling famous "tier 1" VCs that frontier models would eventually be like databases: extremely hard to build, but the best ones will eventually be open and win as it's too important to too many large players. I remember the confidence in their ridicule at the time but it seems increasingly more likely that this will be true.
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• didip 2y ago
  Is it really open source though? You can't run these models for your company. The license is extremely restrictive and there's NO SOURCE CODE.
• jamiedg 2y ago
  Looks like it's easy to test out these models now on Together AI - https://api.together.ai https://api.together.ai
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• KingOfCoders 2y ago
  Open Source AI needs to include training data.
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• fsndz 2y ago
  Small language models is the path forward https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/small-language-models-are-the-future-6e8909567198 https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/small-langua...
• pja 2y ago
  “Commoditise your complement” in action!
• manishrana 2y ago
  rally useful insights
• smusamashah 2y ago
  Meta's article with more details on the new LLAMA 3.1 https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3-1/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3-1/
• bufferoverflow 2y ago
  Hard disagree. So far every big important model is closed-source. Grok is sort-of the only exception, and it's not even that big compared to the (already old) GPT-4. I don't see open source being able to compete with the cutting-edge proprietary models. There's just not enough money. GPT-5 will take an estimated $1.2 billion to train. MS and OpenAI are already talking about building a $100 billion training data center. How can you compete with that if your plan is to give away the training result for free?
  • sohamgovande 2y ago
    Where is the $1.2b number from?
    • bufferoverflow 2y ago
      There are a few numbers floating around, $1.2B being the lowest estimate. HSBC estimates the training cost for GPT-5 between $1.7B and $2.5B. Vlad Bastion Research estimates $1.25B - 2.25B. Some people on HN estimate $10B: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860293
• jmward01 2y ago
  I never thought I would say this but thanks Meta. *I reserve the right to remove this praise if they abuse this open source model position in the future.
  • frabcus 2y ago
    If it was actually open source with data and the data curation code releases, they wouldn't be able to abuse it the same way. It is open weights, closed training data.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 2y ago
  > Third, a key difference between Meta and closed model providers is that selling access to AI models isn’t our business model. That means openly releasing Llama doesn’t undercut our revenue, sustainability, or ability to invest in research like it does for closed providers. (This is one reason several closed providers consistently lobby governments against open source.) The whole thing is interesting, but this part strikes me as potentially anticompetitive reasoning. I wonder what the lines are that they have to avoid crossing here?
  • phkahler 2y ago
    >> ...but this part strikes me as potentially anticompetitive reasoning. "Commoditize your complements" is an accepted strategy. And while pricing below cost to harm competitors is often illegal, the reality is that the marginal cost of software is zero.
    • Palomides 2y ago
      spending a very quantifiable large amount of money to release something your nominal competitors charge for without having your own direct business case for it seems a little much
      • phkahler 2y ago
        Companies spend very large amounts of money on all sorts of things that never even get released. Nothing wrong with releasing something for free that no longer costs you anything. Who knows why they developed it in the first place, it makes no difference.
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• frabjoused 2y ago
  Who knew FB would hold OpenAI's original ideals, and OpenAI now holds early FB ideals/integrity.
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  • boringg 2y ago
    FB needed to differentiate drastically. FB is at its best creating large data infra.
  • krmboya 2y ago
    Mark Zuckerberg was attacked by the media when it suited their tech billionaire villain narrative. Now there's Elon Musk so Zuckerberg gets to be on the good side again
• gooob 2y ago
  why do they keep training on publicly available online data, god dammit? what the fuck. don't they want to make a good LLM? train on the classics, on the essentials reference manuals for different technologies, on history books, medical encyclopedias, journal notes from the top surgeons and engineers, scientific papers of the experiments that back up our fundamental theories. we want quality information, not recent information. we already have plenty of recent information.
• mmmore 2y ago
  I appreciate that Mark Zuckerberg soberly and neutrally talked about some of the risks from advances in AI technology. I agree with others in this thread that this is more accurately called "public weights" instead of open source, and in that vein I noticed some issues in the article. > This is one reason several closed providers consistently lobby governments against open source. Is this substantially true? I've noticed a tendency of those who support the general arguments in this post to conflate the beliefs of people concerned about AI existential risk, some of whom work at the leading AI labs, with the position of the labs themselves. In most cases I've seen, the AI labs (especially OpenAI) have lobbied against any additional regulation on AI, including with SB1047[1] and the EU AI Act[2]. Can anyone provide an example of this in the context of actual legislation? > On this front, open source should be significantly safer since the systems are more transparent and can be widely scrutinized. Historically, open source software has been more secure for this reason. This may be true if we could actually understand what was happening in neural networks, or train them to consistently avoid unwanted behaviors. As things are, the public weights are simply inscrutable black boxes, and the existence of jailbreaks and other strange LLM behaviors show that we don't understand how our training processes create models' emergent behaviors. The capabilities of these models and their influence are growing faster than our understand of them, and our ability to steer them to behave precisely how we want, and that will only get harder as the models get more powerful. > At this point, the balance of power will be critical to AI safety. I think it will be better to live in a world where AI is widely deployed so that larger actors can check the power of smaller bad actors. This paragraph ignores the concept of offense/defense balance. It's much easier to cause a pandemic than to stop one, and cyberattacks, while not as bad as pandemics, seem to also favor the attacker (this one is contingent on how much AI tools can improve our ability to write secure code). At the extreme, it would clearly be bad if everyone had access to a anti-matter weapon large enough to destroy the Earth; at some level of capability, we have to limit the commands an advanced AI will follow from an arbitrary person. That said, I'm unsure if limiting public weights at this time would be good regulation. They do seem to have some benefits in increasing research around alignment/interpretability, and I don't know if I buy the argument that public weights are significantly more dangerous from a "misaligned ASI" perspective than many competing closed companies. I also don't buy the view of some in the leading labs that we'll likely have "human level" systems by the end of the decade; it seems possible but unlikely. But I worry that Zuckerberg's vision of the future does not adequately guard against downside risks, and is not compatible with the way the technology will actually develop. [1] https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/california-ai-bill-becomes-a-lightning-rod-for-safety-advocates-and-developers-alike/ https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/california-ai-bill-becomes-a... [2] https://time.com/6288245/openai-eu-lobbying-ai-act/ https://time.com/6288245/openai-eu-lobbying-ai-act/
• btbuildem 2y ago
  The "open source" part sounds nice, though we all know there's nothing particularly open about the models (or their weights). The barriers to entry remain the same - huge upfront investments to train your own, and steep ongoing costs for "inference". Is the vision here to treat LLM-based AI as a "public good", akin to a utility provider in a civilized country (taxpayer funded, govt maintained, non-for-profit)? I think we could arguably call this "open source" when all the infra blueprints, scripts and configs are freely available for anyone to try and duplicate the state-of-the-art (resource and grokking requirements nonwithstanding)
  • brrrrrm 2y ago
    check out the paper. it's pretty comprehensive https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/the-llama-3-herd-of-models/ https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/the-llama-3-herd-o...
• openrisk 2y ago
  Open source "AI" is a proxy for democratising and making (much) more widely useful the goodies of high performance computing (HPC). The HPC domain (data and compute intensive applications that typically need vector, parallel or other such architectures) have been around for the longest time, but confined to academic / government tasks. LLM's with their famous "matrix multiply" at their very core are basically demolishing an ossified frontier where a few commercial entities (Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung etc) have defined for decades what computing looks like for most people. Assuming that the genie is out of the bottle, the question is: what is the shape of end-user devices that are optimally designed to use compute intensive open source algorithms? The "AI PC" is already a marketing gimmick, but could it be that Linux desktops and smartphones will suddenly be "ΑΙ natives"? For sure its a transformational period and the landscape T+10 yrs could be drastically different...
  • frabcus 2y ago
    Unfortunately it is barely more open source than Windows. Llama 3 weights are binary code and while the license is pretty good it isn't open source.
• LarsDu88 2y ago
  Obligatory reminder of why tech companies subsidize open source projects: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
• avivo 2y ago
  The FTC also recently put out a statement that is fairly pro-open source: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2024/07/open-weights-foundation-models https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202... I think it's interesting to think about this question of open source, benefits, risk, and even competition, without all of the baggage that Meta brings. I agree with the FTC, that the benefits of open-weight models are significant for competition. The challenge is in distinguishing between good competition and bad competition. Some kind of competition can harm consumers and critical public goods, including democracy itself. For example, competing for people's scarce attention or for their food buying, with increasingly optimized and addictive innovations. Or competition to build the most powerful biological weapons. Other kinds of competition can massively accelerate valuable innovation. The FTC must navigate a tricky balance here — leaning into competition that serves consumers and the broader public, while being careful about what kind of competition it is accelerating that could cause significant risk and harm. It's also obviously not just "big tech" that cares about the risks behind open-weight foundation models. Many people have written about these risks even before it became a subject of major tech investment. (In other words, A16Z's framing is often rather misleading.) There are many non-big tech actors who are very concerned about current and potential negative impacts of open-weight foundation models. One approach which can provide the best of both worlds, is for cases where there are significant potential risks, to ensure that there is at least some period of time where weights are not provided openly, in order to learn a bit about the potential implications of new models. Longer-term, there may be a line where models are too risky to share openly, and it may be unclear what that line is. In that case, it's important that we have governance systems for such decisions that are not just profit-driven, and which can help us continue to get the best of all worlds. (Plug: my organization, the AI & Democracy Foundation; https://ai-dem.org/ https://ai-dem.org/; is working to develop such systems and hiring.)
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    making food that people want to buy is good actually i am not down with this concept of the chattering class deciding what are good markets and what are bad, unless it is due to broad-based and obvious moral judgements.
• tpurves 2y ago
  405 sounds like a lot of B's! What do you need to practically run or host that yourself?
  • sumedh 2y ago
    You cannot run it locally
• tpurves 2y ago
  405 is a lot of B's. What does it take to run or host that?
  • danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    quantize to 0 bit. Run on a potato. Jokes aside ~ 405b x 2 bytes of memory (FP16), so say 810 gigs, maybe 1000 gigs or so required in reality, need maybe 2 aws p5 instances?
• dang 2y ago
  Related ongoing thread: Llama 3.1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41046540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41046540 - July 2024 (114 comments)
• littlestymaar 2y ago
  I love how Zuck decided to play a new game called “commoditize some other billionaire's business to piss him”, I can't wait until this becomes a trend and we get plenty of open source cool stuff. If he really wants to replicate Linux's success against proprietary Unices, he needs to release Llama with some kind of GPL equivalent, that forces everyone to play the open source game.
• Dwedit 2y ago
  Without the raw data that trained the model, how is it open source?
• suyash 2y ago
  Open source is a welcome step but what we really need is complete decentralisation so people can run their own private AI Models that keep all the data private to them. We need this to happen locally on laptops, mobile phones, smart devices etc. Waiting for when that will become ubiquitous.
  • frabcus 2y ago
    It is open weights not open source. If you can't train it and don't know the training data and can't use it to train your own models, it is a closed model aa a whole. Even if you have the binary weights.
• zoogeny 2y ago
  Totally tangential thought, probably doomed to be lost in the flood of comments on this very interesting announcement. I was thinking today about Musk, Zuckerberg and Altman. Each claims that the next version of their big LLMs will be the best. For some reason it reminded me of one apocryphal cause of WW1, which was that the kings of Europe were locked in a kind of ego driven contest. It made me think about the Nation State as a technology. In some sense, the kings were employing the new technology which was clearly going to be the basis for the future political order. And they were pitting their own implementation of this new technology against the other kings. I feel we are seeing a similar clash of kings playing out. The claims that this is all just business or some larger claim about the good of humanity seem secondary to the ego stakes of the major players. And when it was about who built the biggest rocket, it felt less dangerous. It breaks my heart just a little bit. I feel sympathy in some sense for the AIs we will create, especially if they do reach the level of AGI. As another tortured analogy, it is like a bunch of competitive parents forcing their children into adversarial relationships to satisfy the parent's ego.
• light_triad 2y ago
  They are positioning themselves as champions of AI open source mostly because they were blindsided by OpenAI, are not in the infra game, and want to commoditize their complements as much as possible. This is not altruism although it's still great for devs and startups. All FB GPU investments is primarily for new AI products "friends", recommendations and selling ads. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
  • baby 2y ago
    Meta does a good thing HN spends a day figuring out how it’s actually bad
    • shnock 2y ago
      It’s not actually bad, OP’s point is that it is not motivated by altruism. An action can be beneficial to the people without that effect being the incentive
      • j_maffe 2y ago
        Of course, it's not altruism; it's a publicly traded corporation. No one should ever believe in any such claims by these organizations. Non-altruistic organizations can still make positive-impact actions when they align with their goals.
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    • deleted 2y ago
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    • satvikpendem 2y ago
      No one said it was bad. It's just self interested (as companies generally are) and are using that to have a PR spin on the topic. But again, this is what all companies do and nothing about it is bad per se.
• anthomtb 2y ago
  > My framework for understanding safety is that we need to protect against two categories of harm: unintentional and intentional. Unintentional harm is when an AI system may cause harm even when it was not the intent of those running it to do so. For example, modern AI models may inadvertently give bad health advice. Or, in more futuristic scenarios, some worry that models may unintentionally self-replicate or hyper-optimize goals to the detriment of humanity. Intentional harm is when a bad actor uses an AI model with the goal of causing harm. Okay then Mark. Replace "modern AI models" with "social media" and repeat this statement with a straight face.
• j_m_b 2y ago
  > We need to protect our data. This is a very important concern in Health Care because of HIPAA compliance. You can't just send your data over the wire to someone's proprietary API. You would at least need to de-identify your data. This can be a tricky task, especially with unstructured text.
• xpe 2y ago
  Zuck needs to get real. They are Open Weights not Open Source.
• Sparkyte 2y ago
  The real path forward is recognizing what AI is good at and what it is bad at. Focus on making what it is good at even better and faster. Open AI will definitely give us that option but it isn't a miracle worker. My impression is that AI if done correctly will be the new way to build APIs with large data sets and information. It can't write code unless you want to dump billions of dollars into a solution with millions of dollars of operational costs. As it stands it loses context too quickly to do advance human tasks. BUT this is where it is great at assembling data and information. You know what is great at assembling data and information? APIs. Think of it this way if we can make it faster and it trains on a datalake for a company it could be used to return information faster than a nested micro-service architecture that is just a spiderweb of dependencies. Because AI loses context simple API requests could actually be more efficient.
• Bluescreenbuddy 2y ago
  >This is how we’ve managed security on our social networks – our more robust AI systems identify and stop threats from less sophisticated actors who often use smaller scale AI systems. So about all the bots and sock puppets on social media..
• pjkundert 2y ago
  Deployment of PKI-signed distributed software systems to use community-provisioned compute, bandwidth and storage at scale is, now quite literally, the future. We mostly don’t all want or need the hardware to run these AIs ourselves, all the time. But, when we do, we need lots of it for a little while. This is what Holochain was born to do. We can rent massive capacity when we need it, or earn money renting ours when we don’t. All running cryptographically trusted software at Internet scale, without the knowledge or authorization of commercial or government “do-gooders”. Exciting times!
• ayakang31415 2y ago
  Massive props to AI teams at Meta that released this model open source
• ceva 2y ago
  They have earned so much money on all of their users, this is least they can do to give back to the community, if this can be considered that ;)
• seydor 2y ago
  That assumes LLMs are the path to AI, which is increasingly becoming an unpopular opinion
• animanoir 2y ago
  "Says the Meta Inc".
• tmsh 2y ago
  Software 2.0 is about open licensing. I.e., the more important thing - the more "free" thing - is the licensing now. E.g., I play around with different image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and specific fine-tuned variations for ControlNet or LoRA that I plug into ComfyUI. But I can't use it at work because of the licensing. I have to use InvokeAI instead of ComfyUI if I want to be careful and only very specific image diffusion models without the latest and greatest fine-tuning. As others have said - the weights themselves are rather inscrutable. So we're building on more abstract shapes now. But the key open thing is making sure (1) the tools to modify the weights are open and permissive (ComfyUI, related scripts or parts of both the training and deployment) and (2) the underlying weights of the base models and the tools to recreate them have MIT or other generous licensing. As well as the fine-tuned variants for specific tasks. It's not going to be the naive construction in the future where you take a base model and as company A you produce company A's fine tuned model and you're done. It's going to be a tree of fine-tuned models as a node-based editor like ComfyUI already shows and that whole tree has to be open if we're to keep the same hacker spirit where anyone can tinker with it and also at some point make money off of it. Or go free software the whole way (i.e., LGPL or equivalent the whole tree of tools). In that sense unfortunately Llama has a ways to go to be truly open: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36816395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36816395
  • Palmik 2y ago
    In the LLM world there are many open source solutions to find tuning, maybe the best one being from Meta: https://github.com/pytorch/torchtune https://github.com/pytorch/torchtune In terms of inference and interface (since you mentioned comfy) there are many truly open source options such as vLLM (though there isn't a single really performant open source solution for inference yet).
    • tmsh 2y ago
      Thanks! Good to know.
  • bjt12345 2y ago
    The LLAMA 3.1 license addresses some of this.
• jameson 2y ago
  It's hard to say Llama is an "open source" when their license states Meta has full control under certain circumstances https://raw.githubusercontent.com/meta-llama/llama-models/main/models/llama3_1/LICENSE https://raw.githubusercontent.com/meta-llama/llama-models/ma... > 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 3.1 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.
  • __loam 2y ago
    It should be transparently clear that this move was taken by Meta to drive their competitors out of business in a capital intensive space.
    • apwell23 2y ago
      not sure how it drives competitors out of business. OpenAI is losing money on queries not on model creation. This opensource model has no impact of their business model of charging users money to run queries. on a side note OpenAI is losing users on its own. It doesn't need meta to put it out of business.
      • __loam 2y ago
        A free alternative to their product has no impact to their business model?
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
  • systemvoltage 2y ago
    Tbh, it’s incredibly generous.
• nailer 2y ago
  Llama isn't open source. The license is at https://llama.meta.com/llama3/license/ https://llama.meta.com/llama3/license/ and includes various restrictions on use, which means it falls outside the rules created by the https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
• war321 2y ago
  Even if it's just open weights and not "true" open source, I'll still give Meta the appreciation of being one of the few big AI companies actually committed to open models. In an ecosystem where groups like Anthropic and OpenAI keep hemming and hawing about safety and the necessity of closed AI systems "for our sake", they stand out among the rest.
  • meowtimemania 2y ago
    Why would openai/anthropic's approach be more safe? Are people able to remove all the guard rails on the llama models?
    • alfalfasprout 2y ago
      They're not safer. The claim is that OpenAI will enforce guard rails and take steps to ensure model outputs and prompts are responsible... but only a fool would take them at their word.
      • seoulmetro 2y ago
        Yeah.. and Facebook said they would enforce censorship on their platforms to ensure content safety.. that didn't turn out so well. Now it just censors anything remotely controversial, such as World War 2 historical facts or even just slightly offensive wording.
        • Spivak 2y ago
          You're really just arguing about the tuning. I get that it's annoying as a user but as a moderator going into it with the mentality that any post is expendable and bringing down the banhammer on everything near the line keeps things civil. HN does that too with the no flame-bait rule.
          • koolala 2y ago
            Censorship isn't moderation.
• rednafi 2y ago
  How’s only sharing the binary artifact is open source? There’s the data aspect of things that they can’t share because of licensing and the code itself isn’t accessible.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Palmik 2y ago
    It's much better than sharing a binary artifact of regular software, since the weights can be and are easily and frequently modified by fine tuning the model. This means you can modify the "binary artifact" to your needs, similar to how you might change the code of open source software to add features etc.
• bigmattystyles 2y ago
  Am I too skeptical or is this the approach taken when they've decided they can't make proprietary work for them.
• nothrowaways 2y ago
  I love llamas but how fb can profit from leading this effort is not clear to me.
• AMICABoard 2y ago
  Okay if anyone wants to try Llama 3.1 inference on CPU, try this: https://github.com/trholding/llama2.c https://github.com/trholding/llama2.c (L2E) It's a bit buggy but it is fun. Disclaimer: I am the author of L2E
• BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
  What is the best of the llama 3.1 models that I can fine-tune with a macbook m3 max w/ 96GB of ram?
  • lostmsu 2y ago
    None unless you are prepared to spend 5+ years. Macs just don't have flops.
    • BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
      Really? You can't even fine-tune a quantized 8B model on such a machine? That's a bummer.
      • lostmsu 2y ago
        You can't really fine-tune quantized models as-is. Gradients require floating-point calculations at descent precision.
        • BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
          I see... I'm a little out of my depth, but I did see that Meta has some documentation that talks about fine-tuning using LoRA and QLoRA, and at a glance it sounds like its doable on consumer hardware. Are you familiar with those? Am I misunderstanding? https://llama.meta.com/docs/how-to-guides/fine-tuning/ https://llama.meta.com/docs/how-to-guides/fine-tuning/
          • lostmsu 2y ago
            Both still compute FP16 gradients. It comes back to the original point that Mac is just going to be too slow even on 8B model.
• frays 2y ago
  No matter how "open source" they actually will be, I'm glad this exists as a competitor to Gemini and ChatGPT to help push innovation from a different angle. Can't wait to see how the landscape will look in 2027 and beyond.
• rbren 2y ago
  If you're interested in getting Llama 3.1 to build software, check out https://github.com/OpenDevin/OpenDevin https://github.com/OpenDevin/OpenDevin
• sebastiennight 2y ago
  I've summarized this entire thread in 4 lines (didn't even use AI for it!) Step 1. Chick-Fil-A releases a grass-fed beef burger to spite other fast-food joints, calls it "the vegan burger" Step 2. A couple of outraged vegans show up in the comments, pointing out that beef, even grass-fed beef, isn't vegan Step 3. Fast food enthusiasts push back: it's unreasonable to want companies to abide by this restrictive definition of "vegan". Clearly this burger is a gamechanger and the definition needs to adapt to the times. Step 4. Goto Step 2 in an infinite loop
  • 123yawaworht456 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • nathansherburn 2y ago
    Open source software is one of our best and most passionately loved inventions. It'd be much easier to have a nuanced discussion about "open weights" but I don't think that's in Facebook's interest.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    More like vegetarians show up claiming to be vegans, then vegans show up and explain why eating animal products is still wrong. That's the difference between open source and free software.
    • dogcomplex 2y ago
      Yeah the moral step up from the status quo is still laudable. Open weights are still much improved over the closed creepy spy agency clusterfucks that OpenAI/Microsoft/Google/Apple are bringing to the table.
  • dilliwal 2y ago
    On point, and pretty good analogy
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• fimdomeio 2y ago
  This is very amusing: - We need to control our own destiny and not get locked into a closed vendor. - We need to protect our data. - We want to invest in the ecosystem that’s going to be the standard for the long term. Thank you Meta for being the bright light of ethical guidance for us all.
• dev1ycan 2y ago
  Reality: they've realize gpt 4 is a wall, they can't keep pouring trillions of dollars into it for no improvement or little at all, so now they want to put it to the open source until someone figures out the next step then they'll take it behind closed doors again. I hate how the moment it's too late will be, by design, closed doors.
  • Ukv 2y ago
    > Reality: they've realize gpt 4 is a wall, they can't keep pouring trillions of dollars into it for no improvement or little at all, so now they want to put it to the open source [...] This is Meta (LLaMA, which has had available weights for a while), not OpenAI (GPT).
    • dev1ycan 2y ago
      How does that change anything about my comment? what does "available weights" change about the system being closed source? additionally, they have the developers, the second they figure out a way to achieve AGI or something close to it they'll take it closed source, this is just outsourcing maintenance and small tweaks.
• smashah 2y ago
  Actually open source Whatsapp is the way forward.
• petetnt 2y ago
  Great, now release the datasets used for training your AI so everyone can get compensated accordingly and ask that your competition follow suit.
• twelve40 2y ago
  It'll be interesting to come back here in a couple of years and see what's left. What do they even do anymore? They have Facebook, which hasn't visibly changed in a decade. They have Instagram, which feels a bit sleeker but also remained more or less the same. and Whatsapp. Ad network that runs on top of those services and floods them with trash. Bunch of stuff that doesn't seem to exist anymore - Libra, the grandiose multibillion dollar Legless VR, etc. But they still have 70 thousand people (a small country) doing _something_. What are they doing? Updating Facebook UI? Not really, the UI hasn't been updated, and you don't need 70 thousand people to do that. Stuff like React and Llama? Good, I guess, we'll see how they make use of Llama in a couple of years. Spellcheck for posts maybe?
  • therealdrag0 2y ago
    And still making 135B dollars in revenue, or 2M per employee. I don’t know what they do either lol, but I don’t mind that revenue supporting jobs.
• benreesman 2y ago
  In general I look back on my time at FB with mixed feelings, I’m pretty skeptical that modern social media is a force for good and I was there early enough to have moved the needle. But this is really positive stuff and it’s nice to view my time there through the lens of such a change for the better. Keep up the good work on this folks. Time to start thinking about opening up a little on the training data.
• ysofunny 2y ago
  or else is not even scientific
• bentice 2y ago
  Ironically, this benefits Apple so much.
  • netsec_burn 2y ago
    How? They are prohibited from using it in the license.
• elecush 2y ago
  Ok one notable difference: did the linux researchers of yore warn about adversarial giants getting this tech? Or is this unique to the current moment? That for me is the largest question when considering the logical progression on "linux open is better therefore ai open is better".
  • Spivak 2y ago
    We can't open source Linux because bad people might run servers? Can you imagine the disinformation they could spread with those? With enough of them you could have a massively global site made entirely for spreading it. God what if such a thing got into the hands of an egocentric billionaire?
    • endorphine 2y ago
      An operating system is not "generative", hence it's not a force multiplier.
      • Spivak 2y ago
        Are we on the same forum? Our entire field is building force multipliers to extend ourselves well beyond of what we're capable as individuals and the OS is tool that lets you get it done. Scale is like.. our entire thing. I feel like we're just so used to the world with computers that we forget how much power they allow people to wield. Which, honestly is maybe a good sign for the next of tools because AI isn't going to be more impactful than computers and we all survived.
      • Zuiii 2y ago
        I don't understand. A bad actor can use a linux server to automatically run botnets and exploit new devices. How is that not a force multiplier?
• turingbook 2y ago
  Open-weights models are not really open source.
• scotty79 2y ago
  It's more like a freeware than open source. You can launch it on your hardware and use it but how it was created is mostly not published. Still huge props to them for doing what they do.
• casebash 2y ago
  I expect this to end up having been one of the worst timed blog posts in history. Open source AI has mostly been good for the world up until now, but we're getting to the point where we're about to find out why open-sourcing sufficiently bad models is a terrible idea.
• tananaev 2y ago
  I don't think weights is the source. Data is the source. But still better than nothing.
• cratermoon 2y ago
  You first, Zuck.
• ofou 2y ago
  Llama 3 Training System Total: 19.2 exaFLOPS | +-------------+-------------+ | | Cluster 1 Cluster 2 9.6 exaFLOPS 9.6 exaFLOPS | | +------+------+ +------+------+ | | | | 12K GPUs 12K GPUs 12K GPUs 12K GPUs | | | | [####] [####] [####] [####] 400+ 400+ 400+ 400+ TFLOPS/GPU TFLOPS/GPU TFLOPS/GPU TFLOPS/GPU
• tomjen3 2y ago
  Re safety: Just release two models, one that has been tuned and one that hasn't. Claude is supposed to be better, but it is also even more locked down than ChatGPT. Word will let me write a manifest for a new Nazi party, but Claude is so locked down that it won't find a cartoon in a picture and Gemini... well. If AIs are not to harm society, they need to enable us to think in new ways.
• slowhadoken 2y ago
  First you’re going to have to write some laws that prevent openwashing and legitimate open source projects from becoming proprietary.
• thntk 2y ago
  When Zuck said spy can easily steal models, I wonder how much of it comes from experiences. I remember they struggled to train OPT not long ago. On a more serious note, I don't really buy his arguments about safety. First, widespread AI does not reduce unintentional harm but increases it, because the rate of accident is compound. Second, the chance of success for threat actors will increase, because of the asymmetric advantage of gaining access to all open information and hiding their own information. But there is no reverse at this point, I enjoy it while it lasts, AGI will come sooner or later anyway.
• Simon_ORourke 2y ago
  I thoroughly support Meta's open-sourcing of these AI models going forward. However, for a company that absolutely closed down discussions about providing API access to their platform, I'm left wondering what's in it (monetarily) for them by doing this? Is it to simply undercut competition in the space, like some grocery store selling below cost?
  • yard2010 2y ago
    Stay assured these guys are working day and night to make our world a darker place
  • GreenWatermelon 2y ago
    Meta open sources its tools: React, GraphQL, PyTorch, and now these new models. Meta seems to be about open sourcing tools, not providing open access to their platforms. The AI model complements the platform, and their platform is the money maker. They hold the belief that open sourcing their tools benefit their platform on the long run, which is why they're doing it. And in doing so, they aren't under the control of any competitors. I would say it's more like a grocery store providing free parking, a bus stop, self-checkout, online menu, and free delivery.
• msnkarthik 2y ago
  Interesting discussion! While I agree with Zuckerberg's vision, the comments raise valid concerns. The point about GPU accessibility and cost is crucial. Public clusters are great, but sustainable funding and equitable access are essential to avoid exacerbating existing inequalities. I also resonate with the call for CUDA alternatives. Breaking the dependence on proprietary technology is key for a truly open AI ecosystem. While existing research clusters offer some access, their scope and resources often pale in comparison to what companies like Meta are proposing. We need a multi-pronged approach: open-sourcing models AND investing in accessible infrastructure, diverse hardware options, and sustainable funding models for a truly democratic AI future.
  • fnordpiglet 2y ago
    I suspect we are still early in the optimization evolution. The weights are what matter. The ability to run them anywhere might come.
    • troupo 2y ago
      The training datasets and methodology are what matters. None of that is disclosed by anyone
  • narrator 2y ago
    3nm chip fabs take years to build. You don't just go to AWS and spin one up. This is the very hard part about AI that breaks a lot of the usual tech assumptions. We have entered a world where suddenly there isn't enough compute, because it's just too damn hard to build capacity and that's different from the past 40 years.
• ohthehugemanate 2y ago
  Has anyone taken apart the llama community license and compared it to validated open source licenses? Red Hat is making a big deal about releasing the Granite LLM released under Apache. Is there a real difference between that and what Llama does? https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/ai/open-source-llm https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/ai/open-source-llm
• rightbyte 2y ago
  What would be the speed of a querry of running this model from disk on a ordinary PC? Has anyone tried that?
• v3ss0n 2y ago
  We welcome Mark Zuckerberg's Redemption Arc! Opensource AI Here we go!
• rldjbpin 2y ago
  this is very cool indeed that meta has made available more than they need to in terms of model weights. however, the "open-source" narrative is being pushed a bit too much like descriptive ML models were called "AI", or applied statistics "data science". with reinforced examples such as this, we start to lose the original meaning of the term. the current approach of startups or small players "open-sourcing" their platforms and tools as a means to promote network effect works but is harmful in the long run. you will find examples of terraform and red hat happening, and a very segmented market. if you want the true spirit of open-source, there must be a way to replicate the weights through access to training data and code. whether one could afford millions of GPU hours or not, real innovation would come from remixing the internals, and not just fine-tuning existing stuff. i understand that this is not realistically going to ever happen, but don't perform deceptive marketing at the same time.
• avereveard 2y ago
  they said, while not releasing the video part of chamleon model
• chx 2y ago
  A total ban on generative AI is the way forward. If the industry refuses to make it safe by self regulating then the regulator must step in and ban it until better, more fine tuned regulation can be made. It is needed to protect our environment, our democracy, our very lives.
  • yard2010 2y ago
    Isn't it like banning Christianity? I don't think it can be done
• yard2010 2y ago
  I don't believe in any word coming out from this lizard. He is the most evil villain I know, and I live in the middle east, can you imagine
• pandaswo 2y ago
  Way to go!
• tarruda 2y ago
  From the "Why Open Source AI Is Good for Meta" section, none of the four given reasons seem to justify spending so much money to train these powerful models and give them away for free. > Third, a key difference between Meta and closed model providers is that selling access to AI models isn’t our business model. That means openly releasing Llama doesn’t undercut our revenue, sustainability, or ability to invest in research like it does for closed providers. (This is one reason several closed providers consistently lobby governments against open source.) Maybe this is a strategic play to hurt other AI companies that depend on this business model?
• sensanaty 2y ago
  Meanwhile Facebook is flooded with AI-generated slop with hundreds of thousands of other bots interacting with it to boost it to whoever is insane enough to still use that putrid hellhole of a mass-data-harvesting platform. Dead internet theory is very much happening in real time, and I dread what's about to come since the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap. And people on this site are unironically excited about this garbage that is indistinguishable from spam getting more and more popular. What a fucking joke
  • rocgf 2y ago
    I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's is not necessarily the case that "the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap". You only need a relatively small number of bad actors for this to be the case.
    • consf 2y ago
      I think the situation highlights the need for better regulation
      • throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
        No thank you. Use existing laws that cover wide nets and actually enforce them.
  • TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
    I think there's room for a middle-ground. I agree that there's a lot of slop being generated and shared around. Part of it is due to the initial excitement over these AI tools. Part of it is that most AI tools still kinda suck at the moment. In the long term I expect tools to get way better, which I'm hopefully could help enable smaller teams of people than ever before to execute on their creative vision. Personally I have tons of creative ideas which I think would be interesting and engaging but for which I lack the resources to bring into this world, so I'm hoping that in the long term AI tools can help bridge this gap. I'm really hopeful for a world where people from all over the world can share their creative stories, rather than being mostly limited to a few rich people in Hollywood. Unfortunately I do expect this to end up being the minority of content, especially as we continue being flooded by increasing amounts of trash. But maybe that's just opening up the opportunity for someone to develop new content curation tools. If anything, even before the rise of AI stuff there were mountains of content, and we saw with the rise of TikTok that a good recommendation algorithm still leaves room for new platforms.
• codedokode 2y ago
  AI should not be open source because it can be used in military applications. It doesn't make sense to give away a technology others might use against you.
• ChanderG 2y ago
  I think all this discussion around Open-source AI is a total distraction from the elephants in the room. Let's list what you need to run/play around with something like Llama: 1. Software: this is all Pytorch/HF, so completely open-source. This is total parity between what corporates have and what the public has. 2. Model weights: Meta and a few other orgs release open models - as opposed to OpenAI's closed models. So, ok, we have something to work with. 3. Data: to actually do anything useful you need tons of data. This is beyond the reach of the ordinary man, setting aside the legality issues. 4. Hardware: GPUs, which are extremely expensive. Not just that, even if you have the top dollars, you have to go stand in a queue and wait for O(months), since mega-corporates have gotten there before you. For Inference, you need 1,2 and 4. For training (or fine-tuning), you need all of these. With newer and larger models like the latest Llama, 4 is truly beyond the reach of ordinary entities. This is NOTHING like open-source, where a random guy can edit/recompile/deploy software on a commodity computer. Wrt LLMs, Data/Hardware are in the equation, the playing field is complete stacked. This thread has a bunch of people discussing nuances of 1 and 2, but this bike-shedding only hides the basic point: Control of LLMs are for mega-corps, not for individuals.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • fishermanbill 2y ago
    But there is an insidiousness to Meta calling their software 'open source'. It feels as if they are riding on the coat tails of the term as if they are being altruistic, when in fact they are being no more altruistic than any large corporation that wants to capture market share via their financial muscle - which I suppose touches on your last point.
• fishermanbill 2y ago
  Its not open source. We don't get the data or training code. The small runtime framework is open source but that's of little use as its largely fixed in implementation due to the weights. Yes we can fine tune but that is akin to modifying video games - we can do it but there's only so much you can do within reasonable effort and no one would call most video games 'open source'*. Its freeware and Meta's strategy is much more akin to the strategy Microsoft used with Internet Explorer to capture the web browser market. No one was saying god bless Microsoft for trying to capture the browser market with I.E. Nothing wrong with Meta's strategy just don't call it open source. *weights are data and so is the video/audio output of a video game. If we gave away that video game output for free we wouldn't call the video game open source as the myriad freeware games essentially do.
  • Palmik 2y ago
    I don't think these analogies work. Meta provides open source code to modify the the weights (fine tune the model). In this context, fine-tuning the model is better converted to being able to modify the code of the game.
    • fishermanbill 2y ago
      So do video game developers (provide source code to modify their games) the analogy absolutely works. I can list a huge amount of actually open source software that I can see the source code and data for which is very different from Llama etc.
• OriginalMrPink 2y ago
  Open Source AI is the path forward, but I have hard time believing that Meta should be affiliated with it.
• pera 2y ago
  I wish Meta stopped using the "open source" misnomer for free of charge weights. In the US the FTC already uses the term Open-Weights, and it seems the industry is also adopting this term (e.g. Mistral). Someone can correct me here but AFAIK we don't even know which datasets are used to train these models, so why should we even use "open" to describe Llama? This is more similar to a freeware than an open-source project. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2024/07/open-weights-foundation-models https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202...
  • benrutter 2y ago
    This is such a good point. The industry is really putting the term "open source" through the ringer at the moment but I don't see any justification for considering the final weight output a "source" anymore than releasing a compiled binary would be open source. In fairness to Llama, the source code itself (though not the training data) is available to access, although not really under a license that many would consider open source.
  • zelphirkalt 2y ago
    Facebook is one of the great when it comes to twisting words and appropriating terms in ways that benefit Facebook.
• largbae 2y ago
  The All-In podcast predicted this exact strategy for keeping OpenAI and other upstarts from disrupting the existing big tech firms. By giving away higher and higher quality models, they undermine the potential return on investment for startups who seek money to train their own. Thus investment in foundation model building stops and they control the ecosystem.
  • giancarlostoro 2y ago
    I enjoy that podcast, only really listened to it a few times, but they definitely bring up some interesting topics, the kind I come on HN for.
  • thierrydamiba 2y ago
    I predicted this 7 months ago-can I get a podcast? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38556771#38559118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38556771#38559118
• zelphirkalt 2y ago
  Open data for open algo for open AI is the path forward.
• dcist 2y ago
  So commoditize the complement.
• ssahoo 2y ago
  Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 3.1 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights. Which open-source has such restrictions and clause?
  • rmbyrro 2y ago
    Which open source costs dedicated usage of 16 thousand H100 over several months? C'mon folks, they're opening up for free to 99.99% of potential users what cost hundreds of millions of dollars, if not in the ballpark of a billion. Let's appreciate that, instead of focusing on semantics for a while.
    • arrosenberg 2y ago
      I don’t think the largest tech companies in the world have earned that view of benevolence. Its real hard to take altruism seriously when it is coming from Zuckerberg.
    • birdalbrocum 2y ago
      Licensing is not a simple semantic problem. It is a legal problem that have strong ramifications, especially things are on their way to standardize. What Facebook is trying to do with their "open source" models is to exhaust possibility of fully open source models to be industry standarts. and create an alternative monopoly to Microsoft/OpenAI. Think of it as if an entity had right to ISO standards, they would be extremely rich. Eventually researchers will release pretty advance ML models that are fully open source(from dataset to training code) and Facebook is trying to block them even before start to prevent of the possibility of this models to be standard. This is a complementary tactic of the industry to closed source rivals and should not be understood as challenging to them. A good wording for this is "open-washing" as described in this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3630106.3659005 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3630106.3659005
• maxdo 2y ago
  I'm really unsure if it's a good idea given the current geopolitics. Open-Source Code in the past was fantastic because the West had a monopoly on CPUs and computers. Sharing and contributing was amazing while ensured that tyrants couldn't use this tech to harm people simply because they don't have a hardware to run. But now, things are different. China is advancing in chip technology, and Russia is using open-source AI to harm people on the scale today, with auto-targeting drones being just the start. Red sea conflict etc. And somehow, Zuckerberg keeps finding ways to mess up people's lives, despite having the best intentions. Right now you can build a semi-autonomous drone with AI to kill people for ~$500-700. The western world will still use safe and secure commercial models. While new axis of evil will use models based on Meta or any other open source to do whatever harm they can imagine with not a hint of control. This particular model. Fine-tune it to develop a nuclear bomb using all possible research that level of government can get on the scale. Killing drone swarms etc. Once the knowledge got public these models can be a base model to get expert-level knowledge to anyone who wants it, uncensored. Especially if you are government that wants to destroy a peaceful order for whatever reason.
  • rmbyrro 2y ago
    You think Russia and China wouldn't be able to steal any closed model for a couple million dollars?
    • that_guy_iain 2y ago
      Wouldn’t even need to pay to steal it. FAANG have been shown to be hacked by state actors. China has some of the best hackers in the world.
    • maxdo 2y ago
      stealing a model and building the entire AI community is a very very big difference : Fine tune, update, Run model without very deep domain knowledge, that's what we receive as an outcome. If you are a software engineer and you steal a model in some close format of Open AI , you will not get lots of benefits even if you understand the format of that model, it's a complex beast by all means. This is a playbook how anyone can run it. So yeah, big corp is evil from one side, but oh well, think of North Korea, Russia etc level of evilness and what they can do whit that.
• Gravityloss 2y ago
  Can't it be divided into multiple parts to have a more meaningful discussion? For example the terminology could identify four key areas: - Open training data (this is very big) - Open training algorithms (does it include infrastructure code?) - Open weights (result of previous two) - Open runtime algorithm
• mattsf1998 2y ago
  [flagged]
• jll29 2y ago
  The question is what is "open source" in the case of a matrix of numbers, as opposed to code. Also, are there any "IP" rights attached at all to a bunch numbers coming out of a formula that someone else calculated for you? (edit: after all, a "model" is just a matrix of numbers coming out of running a training algorithm that is not owned by Meta over training data that is not owned by Meta.) Meta imposes a notification duty AND a request for another license (no mention of the details of these) for applications of their model with a large number of users. This is against the spirit of open source. (In practical terms it is not a show stopper since you can easily switch models, although they all have subtlely different behaviours and quality levels.)
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• abss 2y ago
  Interesting, but we have to consider this information with skepticism since it comes from Meta. Additionally, merely open-sourcing models is insufficient; the training data must also be accessible to verify the outcomes. Furthermore, tools and applications must be freely deployable and capable of storing and sharing data under our personal control. Self-promotion: We have initiated experiments for an AI-based operating system, check AssistOS.org. We recently received a European research grant to support the improvement of AssistOS components. Contact us if you find our work interesting, wish to contribute, conduct research with us, or want to build an application for AssistOS.
• tristanch 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Purplehermann 2y ago
  Well that's it then, we're gonna die
• bzmrgonz 2y ago
  I see it as a new race to build the personal computer (PC) all over again. I hope we can apply the lessons learned and can jump into open source to speed up development and democratize ai for all. We know how Microsoft played dirty in the early days of the PC revolution.
• arisAlexis 2y ago
  Zuckerberg and LeCunn put humans at great risk
• notfed 2y ago
  Great, maybe you (Meta) should actually release the source for your AI then?