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No it is not object code unless you want to get so stupidly pedantic that you want to argue a Python script in a zip file can’t be considered open source becaus

No it is not object code unless you want to get so stupidly pedantic that you want to argue a Python script in a zip file can’t be considered open source because it’s compressed. The model pickles unpack back to their original form. The picked binary forms are merely for convenience.

jchw 2y ago
Look, please go do research as to what "object code" and "source code" are before saying my argument is "stupidly pedantic". I'm not elaborating because the example you gave has nothing to do with what I said.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  Your analogy does not make sense. ML weights are distributed in binary form, like object code, but it is nothing like compiled binary. It’s just temporarily in binary form for convenience. It unpacks directly into its original form. This is not a technicality like “technically up can reverse engineer or modify binary code”. The binary form of model weights is just a fancy zip file format that is useful because they are so large that text is impractical.
  - jchw 2y ago
    Source code is human readable. Object code is not, and produced from some mechanical process. Model weights are not written by hand. You don't manually tweak individual weights. You have to run a training process that has multiple "raw" inputs. Trying to read model weights directly is no better than trying to read object code directly. Heck, reading object code directly is probably easier, because at least it's just machine code at the bottom; I will never be able to comprehend what's going on in an ML model just by reading the weights. The closest thing to "source code" in ML models would be the inputs to the training process, because that's the "source" of the model weights that pops out the other end. If the analogy doesn't make sense, that's because ML models are probably not really code in the same sense that source code and object code. (It may be tempting to look at "ML weights" as source code because of the existence of "closed-weight" API services. Please consider the following: If Amazon offers me a unique database service that I can only use with Amazon Web Services, and then releases a closed-source binary that you can run locally, that is still closed-source, because you don't have the source code.)
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      “Human readable” is not a requirement. Visual programming code breaks down to some obtuse data structure. But with the right tools, it’s easy for humans to interact with it. Visual programming node workflows can be open sourced. ML models are the same. Tooling is required to interact with it. The limits of your human understanding do not determine if something is open source. Otherwise a really complicated traditional program might be argued as not open source. You can individually explore specific vectors and layers of a model and their significance. Produced by a non mechanistic process is not a requirement. I can generate a hello world script with code, and open source the hello world script. It does not matter how it was formed. I do not need to open source the hello world generator either. Data and training code is not source code of the model. That is the source code of a model maker. That’s `make_hello_world.py` not `hello_world.py` The closed source database is not a correct analogy. Excluding unreasonably difficult efforts to decompile the binary, you CANNOT modify the program without expecting it to break. With an ML model, the weights are the PREFERRED method of modifying the program. You do NOT want the original data and training code. That will just be a huge expense to get you what you already have. If you want the model to be different, you take the model weights and change them. Not recreate them differently from scratch. Which is the same for all traditional code. Open source does not mean I provide you with the design documents and testing feedback to demonstrate how the code base got created. It means you get the code base. Recreating the codebase is not something we think about because it doesn’t make sense because we have the code and we have the models.
      - jchw 2y ago
        Human readable is a requirement. The existence of things that don't fit into this paradigm doesn't invalidate it entirely, it just proves that it is imperfect. However, it being imperfect does not mean that 1 + 1 != 2. Semantics debates don't grant you the power to just invalidate the entire purpose of words. What you are proving repeatedly is that model weights are not code, not that they are "source" code. - The existence (barely, btw) of visual programming does not prove that model weights are code. It proves that there are forms of code other than source code that are useful to humans. There are not really forms of model weights that are directly useful to humans. I can't open any set of model weights in some software and get a useful visualization of what's going on. It's not source code. (Any visual programming language can output some useful human readable equivalent if it wants to. For some of them, the actual on-disk format is in fact human-readable source code.) (A key point here: if you write assembly code, it's source code. If you assemble it, it's object code. This already stresses the paradigm a bit, because disassembly is reversible... but it's only reversible to some degree. You lose macros, labels, and other details that may not be possible to recover. Even if it was almost entirely reversible though, that doesn't mean that object code is source code. It just means that you can convert the object code into meaningful source code, which is not normally the case, but sometimes it is.) - The existence of fine-tuning doesn't have anything to do with source code versus object code. Bytecode is easy to modify. Minecraft is closed source but the modding community has absolutely no trouble modifying it to do literally anything without almost any reverse engineering effort. This is a reflection of how much information is lost during the compilation process, which is a lot more for most AOT-compiled languages (where you lose almost all symbols, relocations, variable and class names, etc.) than it is for some other languages (and it's not even split on that paradigm, either; completely AOT languages can still lose less information depending on a lot of factors.) The mechanical process of producing model weights loses some information too; in some models, you can even produce models that are less suitable for fine-tuning (by pruning them and removing meta information that is useful for training). A closer analogy here would be closed source with or without symbols.

jchw 2y ago

Look, please go do research as to what "object code" and "source code" are before saying my argument is "stupidly pedantic". I'm not elaborating because the example you gave has nothing to do with what I said.

jncfhnb 2y ago
Your analogy does not make sense. ML weights are distributed in binary form, like object code, but it is nothing like compiled binary. It’s just temporarily in binary form for convenience. It unpacks directly into its original form. This is not a technicality like “technically up can reverse engineer or modify binary code”. The binary form of model weights is just a fancy zip file format that is useful because they are so large that text is impractical.
- jchw 2y ago
  Source code is human readable. Object code is not, and produced from some mechanical process. Model weights are not written by hand. You don't manually tweak individual weights. You have to run a training process that has multiple "raw" inputs. Trying to read model weights directly is no better than trying to read object code directly. Heck, reading object code directly is probably easier, because at least it's just machine code at the bottom; I will never be able to comprehend what's going on in an ML model just by reading the weights. The closest thing to "source code" in ML models would be the inputs to the training process, because that's the "source" of the model weights that pops out the other end. If the analogy doesn't make sense, that's because ML models are probably not really code in the same sense that source code and object code. (It may be tempting to look at "ML weights" as source code because of the existence of "closed-weight" API services. Please consider the following: If Amazon offers me a unique database service that I can only use with Amazon Web Services, and then releases a closed-source binary that you can run locally, that is still closed-source, because you don't have the source code.)
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    “Human readable” is not a requirement. Visual programming code breaks down to some obtuse data structure. But with the right tools, it’s easy for humans to interact with it. Visual programming node workflows can be open sourced. ML models are the same. Tooling is required to interact with it. The limits of your human understanding do not determine if something is open source. Otherwise a really complicated traditional program might be argued as not open source. You can individually explore specific vectors and layers of a model and their significance. Produced by a non mechanistic process is not a requirement. I can generate a hello world script with code, and open source the hello world script. It does not matter how it was formed. I do not need to open source the hello world generator either. Data and training code is not source code of the model. That is the source code of a model maker. That’s `make_hello_world.py` not `hello_world.py` The closed source database is not a correct analogy. Excluding unreasonably difficult efforts to decompile the binary, you CANNOT modify the program without expecting it to break. With an ML model, the weights are the PREFERRED method of modifying the program. You do NOT want the original data and training code. That will just be a huge expense to get you what you already have. If you want the model to be different, you take the model weights and change them. Not recreate them differently from scratch. Which is the same for all traditional code. Open source does not mean I provide you with the design documents and testing feedback to demonstrate how the code base got created. It means you get the code base. Recreating the codebase is not something we think about because it doesn’t make sense because we have the code and we have the models.
    - jchw 2y ago
      Human readable is a requirement. The existence of things that don't fit into this paradigm doesn't invalidate it entirely, it just proves that it is imperfect. However, it being imperfect does not mean that 1 + 1 != 2. Semantics debates don't grant you the power to just invalidate the entire purpose of words. What you are proving repeatedly is that model weights are not code, not that they are "source" code. - The existence (barely, btw) of visual programming does not prove that model weights are code. It proves that there are forms of code other than source code that are useful to humans. There are not really forms of model weights that are directly useful to humans. I can't open any set of model weights in some software and get a useful visualization of what's going on. It's not source code. (Any visual programming language can output some useful human readable equivalent if it wants to. For some of them, the actual on-disk format is in fact human-readable source code.) (A key point here: if you write assembly code, it's source code. If you assemble it, it's object code. This already stresses the paradigm a bit, because disassembly is reversible... but it's only reversible to some degree. You lose macros, labels, and other details that may not be possible to recover. Even if it was almost entirely reversible though, that doesn't mean that object code is source code. It just means that you can convert the object code into meaningful source code, which is not normally the case, but sometimes it is.) - The existence of fine-tuning doesn't have anything to do with source code versus object code. Bytecode is easy to modify. Minecraft is closed source but the modding community has absolutely no trouble modifying it to do literally anything without almost any reverse engineering effort. This is a reflection of how much information is lost during the compilation process, which is a lot more for most AOT-compiled languages (where you lose almost all symbols, relocations, variable and class names, etc.) than it is for some other languages (and it's not even split on that paradigm, either; completely AOT languages can still lose less information depending on a lot of factors.) The mechanical process of producing model weights loses some information too; in some models, you can even produce models that are less suitable for fine-tuning (by pruning them and removing meta information that is useful for training). A closer analogy here would be closed source with or without symbols.