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“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 inte

“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.
- jncfhnb 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. well first of all, 1+1 does actually equal 2 Secondly, contradictions to your supposed hard rules absolutely means you don’t have hard rules. If you want to play the semantic game of saying words can mean whatever you want them to mean then sure. But then that’s pointless and you’re just saying you just want to be stubborn. > 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. Yes you can. Do you actually have any experience with what you’re talking about? This is a huge red flag that you do not. Your Minecraft example is a straw man. I did not claim that the existence of fine tuning meant models are source code. I claimed that because fine tuning models is the preferred form of modifying models means that it meets the definitional requirement of being called open source. Minecraft can be modified, but it is not the preferred form to do so, so it is not open source. You are still failing to address helloworldmaker vs hello world. Helloworldmaker is explicitly not the source code of hello world. Model maker is not the source code of model. Appealing to your own lack of capabilities to understand something doesn’t make it not source code.
  - jchw 2y ago
    > well first of all, 1+1 does actually equal 2 Sigh. That's a typo. I almost feel like it's not important to fix it considering that it's pretty obvious what I meant, but alas. > Secondly, contradictions to your supposed hard rules absolutely means you don’t have hard rules. If you want to play the semantic game of saying words can mean whatever you want them to mean then sure. But then that’s pointless and you’re just saying you just want to be stubborn. The "semantics game" I'm using is the long-understood definition of the term 'source code'. American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition: > source code, noun > 1. Code written by a programmer in a high-level language and readable by people but not computers. Source code must be converted to object code or machine language before a computer can read or execute the program. > 2. Human-readable instructions in a programming language, to be transformed into machine instructions by a compiler, assembler or other translator, or to be carried out directly by an interpreter. > 3. Program instructions written as an ASCII text file; must be translated by a compiler or interpreter or assembler into the object code for a particular computer before execution. Oxford Languages via Google: > source code /ˈsôrs ˌkōd/ > noun: source code; plural noun: source codes; noun: sourcecode; plural noun: sourcecodes > a text listing of commands to be compiled or assembled into an executable computer program. Merriam-Webster: > source code, noun > : a computer program in its original programming language (such as FORTRAN or C) before translation into object code usually by a compiler Wikipedia: > In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. So every source pretty much agrees. Merriam-Webster falls short of actually specifying that it must be "human readable", but all of them specify in enough detail that you can say with certainty that ML model weights simply don't come anywhere near the definition of source code. It's just not even close. > Yes you can. Do you actually have any experience with what you’re talking about? This is a huge red flag that you do not. I'm trying to be patient but having to explain things in such verbosity that you actually understand what I'm trying to say is so tiring that it should be a violation of the Hacker News guidelines. YES, I am aware that tools which can input model weights and visualize them exist. NO, that doesn't mean that what you see is useful the way that a visual programming language is. You can not "see" the logic of model weights. This is the cornerstone of an entire huge problem with AI models in the first place: they're inherently opaque. (P.S.: I will grant you that escalating my tone here is not productive, but this arguing goes nowhere if you're just going to take the weakest interpretation of everything I say and run with it. I have sincerely not been doing the same for you. I accepted early on that one could argue that model weights could be considered "code" even though I disagree with it, because there's absolutely zero ambiguity as to whether or not it's "source code", and yet here we are, several more comments deep and the point nowhere to be found.) > Your Minecraft example is a straw man. I did not claim that the existence of fine tuning meant models are source code. I claimed that because fine tuning models is the preferred form of modifying models means that it meets the definitional requirement of being called open source. First of all, to be called "open source", it first needs to meet the definition of being "source code". That's what the "source" part of "open source" means. Secondly, to be called "open source", it also needs to meet the definition of being "open". That's the "open" part of open source. Open-weight models that have actual open source licenses attached to them do meet the criteria for "open", but many models, like Meta's recent releases, do not. They have non-commercial licenses that don't even come close to meeting the requirements. > Minecraft can be modified, but it is not the preferred form to do so, so it is not open source. Whether or not source code is the preferred form to modify something is entirely beside the point. I'm not sure where you got this, but it's simply wrong. Please stop spreading blatant misinformation. > You are still failing to address helloworldmaker vs hello world. Helloworldmaker is explicitly not the source code of hello world. Model maker is not the source code of model. I'm not addressing it because it's not 100% agreed upon. If you read my above definitions, you will see that in some of them, the results of "Helloworldmaker" will qualify as source code, and in some of them, it wouldn't. Likewise, you can compile any Wasm blob down to C code, and I'd strongly argue that the resulting C code is not human readable source code, it's just in a programming language. This definition, though, has a degree of fallibility to it. Unfortunately, a rigid set of logic can not determine what should be considered source code. That's OK though, because it actually has nothing to do with whether or not model weights are source code. They don't even come remotely close to anything resembling source code in this entire debate. Model training doesn't produce human-readable source code, it produces model weights, a bunch of data that is, on its own, not even particularly useful, less readable. > Appealing to your own lack of capabilities to understand something doesn’t make it not source code. With all due respect, I am not concerned about your judgement of my capabilities. (And it has nothing to do with this anyways. This is a pretty weak jab.)

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.

jncfhnb 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. well first of all, 1+1 does actually equal 2 Secondly, contradictions to your supposed hard rules absolutely means you don’t have hard rules. If you want to play the semantic game of saying words can mean whatever you want them to mean then sure. But then that’s pointless and you’re just saying you just want to be stubborn. > 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. Yes you can. Do you actually have any experience with what you’re talking about? This is a huge red flag that you do not. Your Minecraft example is a straw man. I did not claim that the existence of fine tuning meant models are source code. I claimed that because fine tuning models is the preferred form of modifying models means that it meets the definitional requirement of being called open source. Minecraft can be modified, but it is not the preferred form to do so, so it is not open source. You are still failing to address helloworldmaker vs hello world. Helloworldmaker is explicitly not the source code of hello world. Model maker is not the source code of model. Appealing to your own lack of capabilities to understand something doesn’t make it not source code.
- jchw 2y ago
  > well first of all, 1+1 does actually equal 2 Sigh. That's a typo. I almost feel like it's not important to fix it considering that it's pretty obvious what I meant, but alas. > Secondly, contradictions to your supposed hard rules absolutely means you don’t have hard rules. If you want to play the semantic game of saying words can mean whatever you want them to mean then sure. But then that’s pointless and you’re just saying you just want to be stubborn. The "semantics game" I'm using is the long-understood definition of the term 'source code'. American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition: > source code, noun > 1. Code written by a programmer in a high-level language and readable by people but not computers. Source code must be converted to object code or machine language before a computer can read or execute the program. > 2. Human-readable instructions in a programming language, to be transformed into machine instructions by a compiler, assembler or other translator, or to be carried out directly by an interpreter. > 3. Program instructions written as an ASCII text file; must be translated by a compiler or interpreter or assembler into the object code for a particular computer before execution. Oxford Languages via Google: > source code /ˈsôrs ˌkōd/ > noun: source code; plural noun: source codes; noun: sourcecode; plural noun: sourcecodes > a text listing of commands to be compiled or assembled into an executable computer program. Merriam-Webster: > source code, noun > : a computer program in its original programming language (such as FORTRAN or C) before translation into object code usually by a compiler Wikipedia: > In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. So every source pretty much agrees. Merriam-Webster falls short of actually specifying that it must be "human readable", but all of them specify in enough detail that you can say with certainty that ML model weights simply don't come anywhere near the definition of source code. It's just not even close. > Yes you can. Do you actually have any experience with what you’re talking about? This is a huge red flag that you do not. I'm trying to be patient but having to explain things in such verbosity that you actually understand what I'm trying to say is so tiring that it should be a violation of the Hacker News guidelines. YES, I am aware that tools which can input model weights and visualize them exist. NO, that doesn't mean that what you see is useful the way that a visual programming language is. You can not "see" the logic of model weights. This is the cornerstone of an entire huge problem with AI models in the first place: they're inherently opaque. (P.S.: I will grant you that escalating my tone here is not productive, but this arguing goes nowhere if you're just going to take the weakest interpretation of everything I say and run with it. I have sincerely not been doing the same for you. I accepted early on that one could argue that model weights could be considered "code" even though I disagree with it, because there's absolutely zero ambiguity as to whether or not it's "source code", and yet here we are, several more comments deep and the point nowhere to be found.) > Your Minecraft example is a straw man. I did not claim that the existence of fine tuning meant models are source code. I claimed that because fine tuning models is the preferred form of modifying models means that it meets the definitional requirement of being called open source. First of all, to be called "open source", it first needs to meet the definition of being "source code". That's what the "source" part of "open source" means. Secondly, to be called "open source", it also needs to meet the definition of being "open". That's the "open" part of open source. Open-weight models that have actual open source licenses attached to them do meet the criteria for "open", but many models, like Meta's recent releases, do not. They have non-commercial licenses that don't even come close to meeting the requirements. > Minecraft can be modified, but it is not the preferred form to do so, so it is not open source. Whether or not source code is the preferred form to modify something is entirely beside the point. I'm not sure where you got this, but it's simply wrong. Please stop spreading blatant misinformation. > You are still failing to address helloworldmaker vs hello world. Helloworldmaker is explicitly not the source code of hello world. Model maker is not the source code of model. I'm not addressing it because it's not 100% agreed upon. If you read my above definitions, you will see that in some of them, the results of "Helloworldmaker" will qualify as source code, and in some of them, it wouldn't. Likewise, you can compile any Wasm blob down to C code, and I'd strongly argue that the resulting C code is not human readable source code, it's just in a programming language. This definition, though, has a degree of fallibility to it. Unfortunately, a rigid set of logic can not determine what should be considered source code. That's OK though, because it actually has nothing to do with whether or not model weights are source code. They don't even come remotely close to anything resembling source code in this entire debate. Model training doesn't produce human-readable source code, it produces model weights, a bunch of data that is, on its own, not even particularly useful, less readable. > Appealing to your own lack of capabilities to understand something doesn’t make it not source code. With all due respect, I am not concerned about your judgement of my capabilities. (And it has nothing to do with this anyways. This is a pretty weak jab.)