7 ms·

Meta is accused of "bullying" the open-source community

61 points by divbzero 2y ago

psunavy03 2y ago
Thank you, author, for starting your article off with a mental picture I decidedly did NOT need.
- willcipriano 2y ago
  So the open source community in this metaphor are the people screaming "That's not really nudity!" at the people having fun? Don't quit your day job journo.
echelon 2y ago
https://archive.is/wPCto https://archive.is/wPCto
Chance-Device 2y ago
Maybe by bureaucrats in the OSI. Meta through the Llama models have done more for open source LLMs than just about anyone else, which the community recognises. The perfect is the enemy of the good, as usual.
- echelon 2y ago
  Open source as it stands is insufficient to capture all parts of the pipeline. With code, you just compile and run it. Models require carefully curated training data (lots of it), training code, final weights, production inference code, etc. The danger is the world gets drunk on Meta's models, but then Meta pulls the plug. Meta is doing the world a lot of good with Llama, but we'll be left in a precarious position should they stop being so generous. The next generation of LLMs might make Llama completely pointless. Meta thinks a great deal about the strategy in this space. They license other weights and models as CC-BY-NC and other non-free licenses because they know that they have the SOTA models across several categories and that there's no other competition in the marketplace. They want to retain their advantage when it benefits them. So what happens when the LLM space shifts and Meta no longer needs to appear to be open source? What if the value switches over to diffusion models and away from LLMs, which is an area where Meta shines? Llama is a gift we can't replicate or properly repair and extend. And we need to be careful.
  - rat9988 2y ago
    We will have their latest model. Better than none.
    - ddingus 2y ago
      Maybe. The point is cultivating dependency under the color of "open source" is not generally wise. Users of the "open source" LLM do not have all the software freedoms normally associated with "open source." They cannot rebuild it and more. Important pieces are missing the "open" part. Someone says, "here, take this awesome math library, it is open." Then users find out there is a brittle binary blob needed for the whole thing to work. Nobody will want to build on or with it because that blob works, until it doesn't and when it does work, people are not sure what it does exactly. Makes the whole thing a lot more like free beer. In the scheme of things right now, particularly given both the pace of change, and up coming corruption due to feeding models their own output, anyone's latest may just not be relevant that long.
- PeterCorless 2y ago
  Other industries have seen themselves "poisoned" by vendor-specific definitions of networking protocols, programming paradigms and languages, and so on. The concern is real. You can't just say "Well, I like this product so I approve of the vendor's actions." The whole crux is to get an objective definition of what "open AI" is, and how it needs to behave. If others agree (or disagree) with the vendor that doesn't mean the vendor is permitted to make its unilateral de facto declaration a de jure consensus decision. That's not how standards work.
  - Chance-Device 2y ago
    The gist of the article, which is roundly negative towards Meta and Mark Zuckerberg personally simply because he’s an easy target and they want to score some cheap points, is that they/he are actively causing harm by not releasing the data, training methods and everything else that goes into the creation and use of the models. So, the choice is give up everything that gives you any advantage, and hence any incentive to develop anything in the first place, or you’re the bad guy. I’m not sure how they think the world works. But I agree that we should be clear about our standards. So I’d suggest that those with these expectations adopt a new brand other than “open source”. Maybe “puritan approved”.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      model available or open weights are right there. Nothing puritanical about it. the standards for calling something open source are relatively simple - you have to share the source to begin to call it open source. they have not done so, and asking them to use a different name for it when they're not sharing the source really doesn't seem like too much to ask. Except it's Mark and Meta, which are household names, and I'm some Internet rando, so my voice is smaller, hence the accusations of bullying. If someone decides for you that your new name is shithead, and everyone goes along with it because that person's bigger than you, thats bullying.
      - Chance-Device 2y ago
        Meta is telling everyone to call you a shithead? That’s really the equivalent of what’s happening here?
- koolala 2y ago
  Please call it Open Weights and not Open Source. Open Souce AI will be nothing like Open Weight AI. Open Source AI will be able to reference and share its underlying truth data. Imagine an Open Source AI trained on all GPL code or a Public Library and it could guide you directly to the middle of the source of any code / book it knows.
  - Chance-Device 2y ago
    I agree with the other poster who said something to the effect that the model is open source and the released weights are, well, open weight. But the distinction is so trivial that I think it highlights the stupidity of this whole thing.
    - koolala 2y ago
      Trivial? ."the model is open source and the released weights are, well, open weight." I'm not sure why you don't want open source model data or think open source is trivial. This sentence makes no distinction or point.
    - Onawa 2y ago
      The distinction in this case is decidedly not trivial. Open weights are great, we can fine tune them and mold them to our needs. But we don't have the training code, training data, etc, to be able to reproduce or tweak things at a more fundamental level. "But not everyone is going to spend the money or time to train their own models from scratch!" I hear you say. And there's some truth to that. But if we had truly open source LLMs, then AuroraGPT development would be fast tracked and we would have a fully government funded scientific frontier model instead of only fine-tuning models.
      - spunker540 2y ago
        I believe the training and inference code is open sourced as well, just not the training data itself, and I think we all agree, data != source.
- gtsop 2y ago
  I don't care for the "bureaucrats in the OSI" nor the definition of open source, but your argument is complete nonsense. The fact that llama is not open source does not make it less useful or less appreciated. Nor should anything be considered open source because it is useful or appreciated
ponty_rick 2y ago
"Which raises the tantalising question: will Zuck ever have the pluck to bare it all?" This last sentence gave me a headache. He does not need to publish a bunch of possibly proprietary data owned by Meta, so no he won't bare it all. Data isn't free.
- red_trumpet 2y ago
  Yeah sure, just don't claim it's open source if the actual source is not open.
mrbluecoat 2y ago
Just can't take an article seriously when it starts with "Meta, the social-media giant controlled by a mankini-clad Mark Zuckerberg."
darksaints 2y ago
I find this obsession with distinguishing between open weight and open source foolish and counterproductive. The model architecture and infrastructure are open source. That is what matters. The fact that you get really good weights that result from millions of dollars of GPU time on extremely expensive-to-procure proprietary datasets is amazing, but even that shouldn't be a requirement to call this open source. That is literally just an output of the open source model trained on non-open source inputs. I find it absurd that if I create a model architecture, publish my source code, and slap an open source license on it, I can call that open source…but the moment I publish some weights that are the result of running the program on some proprietary dataset, all of a sudden I can’t call it open source anymore.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  > I find it absurd that if I create a model architecture, publish my source code, and slap an open source license on it, I can call that open source…but the moment I publish some weights that are the result of running the program on some proprietary dataset, all of a sudden I can’t call it open source anymore. Then you don't understand open source. You would be distributing something that could not be reproduced because its source was not provided. The source to the product would not be open. It's that simple. The same principle has always applied to images, audio and video. There's no reason for you to be granted a free pass just becauase it's a new medium.
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    I'm not sure how that relates to AI models. Freely distributing compiled binaries, but not the source code, means modification is extremely difficult. Effectively impossible without reverse-engineering expertise. But I've definitely seen modifications to Llama3.1 floating around. Correctly me if I'm wrong, but open-weight models can be modified fairly easily.
  - darksaints 2y ago
    Let me spell it out for you: 1. I publish the source code to a program that inputs a list of numbers and outputs the sum into a text file. License is open source. Result according to you: this is an open source program. 2. Now, using that open source program, I also publish an output result text file after feeding it a long list of input numbers generated from a proprietary dataset. I even decide to publish this result and give it an open source license. Result according to you: this is NO LONGER AN OPEN SOURCE PROGRAM!!?!! How does that make any fucking sense? You have the model and can use it any way you want. The model can be trained any way you want. You can plug in random weights and random text input if you want to. That is an open source model. The act of additionally publishing a bunch of weights that you can choose to use if you want to should not make that model closed source.
kdhanx 2y ago
Nice that the Economist picks this up. In addition to the article, which is 100% correct, Meta sucks the air out of the room with PyTorch, which stifles other true open source efforts. Instagram has way too much influence on Python, where a couple of companies have wrestled away control over the org from dozens of independent developers and push their pet projects of questionable quality. All of this needs to stop.
roflchoppa 2y ago
Love the Hawaii reference in the opener. Cheeky :)
animitronix 2y ago
Lol, did they break someone's "code of conduct"?
Manuel_D 2y ago
What are the consequences as far as releasing the weights but not the training data? From what I understand, Llama and other open-weight models can be freely used and modified. What can people not do presently, but could do with an open-data model?
- Chance-Device 2y ago
  You can’t reproduce it from scratch. That’s about all. The fact that this is effectively impossible anyway without tens of millions in funding to pay for compute apparently doesn’t factor into it. I don’t think this is an issue about open source, or pragmatism or utility or even ideology very much. There’s one big tech company that makes open source models available. Instead of rewarding this behaviour, some people think that attacking them for it instead is the best response. I think this is a primarily social phenomenon which really just boils down to “meta bad” with various post hoc justifications tacked on.
impure 2y ago
I'm a little confused what the opening paragraph has to do with the rest of the article. The OSI's definition is still new. In fact it's still in draft form so this debate is a bit premature. I suspect that companies will begin releasing the code to train the model once it is finalized (they will never tell you the training data due to legal reasons and forcing them to is a losing battle).

61 points by divbzero 2y ago

psunavy03 2y ago

Thank you, author, for starting your article off with a mental picture I decidedly did NOT need.

willcipriano 2y ago
So the open source community in this metaphor are the people screaming "That's not really nudity!" at the people having fun? Don't quit your day job journo.

echelon 2y ago

https://archive.is/wPCto https://archive.is/wPCto

Chance-Device 2y ago

Maybe by bureaucrats in the OSI. Meta through the Llama models have done more for open source LLMs than just about anyone else, which the community recognises. The perfect is the enemy of the good, as usual.

echelon 2y ago
Open source as it stands is insufficient to capture all parts of the pipeline. With code, you just compile and run it. Models require carefully curated training data (lots of it), training code, final weights, production inference code, etc. The danger is the world gets drunk on Meta's models, but then Meta pulls the plug. Meta is doing the world a lot of good with Llama, but we'll be left in a precarious position should they stop being so generous. The next generation of LLMs might make Llama completely pointless. Meta thinks a great deal about the strategy in this space. They license other weights and models as CC-BY-NC and other non-free licenses because they know that they have the SOTA models across several categories and that there's no other competition in the marketplace. They want to retain their advantage when it benefits them. So what happens when the LLM space shifts and Meta no longer needs to appear to be open source? What if the value switches over to diffusion models and away from LLMs, which is an area where Meta shines? Llama is a gift we can't replicate or properly repair and extend. And we need to be careful.
- rat9988 2y ago
  We will have their latest model. Better than none.
  - ddingus 2y ago
    Maybe. The point is cultivating dependency under the color of "open source" is not generally wise. Users of the "open source" LLM do not have all the software freedoms normally associated with "open source." They cannot rebuild it and more. Important pieces are missing the "open" part. Someone says, "here, take this awesome math library, it is open." Then users find out there is a brittle binary blob needed for the whole thing to work. Nobody will want to build on or with it because that blob works, until it doesn't and when it does work, people are not sure what it does exactly. Makes the whole thing a lot more like free beer. In the scheme of things right now, particularly given both the pace of change, and up coming corruption due to feeding models their own output, anyone's latest may just not be relevant that long.
PeterCorless 2y ago
Other industries have seen themselves "poisoned" by vendor-specific definitions of networking protocols, programming paradigms and languages, and so on. The concern is real. You can't just say "Well, I like this product so I approve of the vendor's actions." The whole crux is to get an objective definition of what "open AI" is, and how it needs to behave. If others agree (or disagree) with the vendor that doesn't mean the vendor is permitted to make its unilateral de facto declaration a de jure consensus decision. That's not how standards work.
- Chance-Device 2y ago
  The gist of the article, which is roundly negative towards Meta and Mark Zuckerberg personally simply because he’s an easy target and they want to score some cheap points, is that they/he are actively causing harm by not releasing the data, training methods and everything else that goes into the creation and use of the models. So, the choice is give up everything that gives you any advantage, and hence any incentive to develop anything in the first place, or you’re the bad guy. I’m not sure how they think the world works. But I agree that we should be clear about our standards. So I’d suggest that those with these expectations adopt a new brand other than “open source”. Maybe “puritan approved”.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    model available or open weights are right there. Nothing puritanical about it. the standards for calling something open source are relatively simple - you have to share the source to begin to call it open source. they have not done so, and asking them to use a different name for it when they're not sharing the source really doesn't seem like too much to ask. Except it's Mark and Meta, which are household names, and I'm some Internet rando, so my voice is smaller, hence the accusations of bullying. If someone decides for you that your new name is shithead, and everyone goes along with it because that person's bigger than you, thats bullying.
    - Chance-Device 2y ago
      Meta is telling everyone to call you a shithead? That’s really the equivalent of what’s happening here?
koolala 2y ago
Please call it Open Weights and not Open Source. Open Souce AI will be nothing like Open Weight AI. Open Source AI will be able to reference and share its underlying truth data. Imagine an Open Source AI trained on all GPL code or a Public Library and it could guide you directly to the middle of the source of any code / book it knows.
- Chance-Device 2y ago
  I agree with the other poster who said something to the effect that the model is open source and the released weights are, well, open weight. But the distinction is so trivial that I think it highlights the stupidity of this whole thing.
  - koolala 2y ago
    Trivial? ."the model is open source and the released weights are, well, open weight." I'm not sure why you don't want open source model data or think open source is trivial. This sentence makes no distinction or point.
  - Onawa 2y ago
    The distinction in this case is decidedly not trivial. Open weights are great, we can fine tune them and mold them to our needs. But we don't have the training code, training data, etc, to be able to reproduce or tweak things at a more fundamental level. "But not everyone is going to spend the money or time to train their own models from scratch!" I hear you say. And there's some truth to that. But if we had truly open source LLMs, then AuroraGPT development would be fast tracked and we would have a fully government funded scientific frontier model instead of only fine-tuning models.
    - spunker540 2y ago
      I believe the training and inference code is open sourced as well, just not the training data itself, and I think we all agree, data != source.
gtsop 2y ago
I don't care for the "bureaucrats in the OSI" nor the definition of open source, but your argument is complete nonsense. The fact that llama is not open source does not make it less useful or less appreciated. Nor should anything be considered open source because it is useful or appreciated

ponty_rick 2y ago

"Which raises the tantalising question: will Zuck ever have the pluck to bare it all?" This last sentence gave me a headache. He does not need to publish a bunch of possibly proprietary data owned by Meta, so no he won't bare it all. Data isn't free.

red_trumpet 2y ago
Yeah sure, just don't claim it's open source if the actual source is not open.

mrbluecoat 2y ago

Just can't take an article seriously when it starts with "Meta, the social-media giant controlled by a mankini-clad Mark Zuckerberg."

darksaints 2y ago

I find this obsession with distinguishing between open weight and open source foolish and counterproductive. The model architecture and infrastructure are open source. That is what matters. The fact that you get really good weights that result from millions of dollars of GPU time on extremely expensive-to-procure proprietary datasets is amazing, but even that shouldn't be a requirement to call this open source. That is literally just an output of the open source model trained on non-open source inputs. I find it absurd that if I create a model architecture, publish my source code, and slap an open source license on it, I can call that open source…but the moment I publish some weights that are the result of running the program on some proprietary dataset, all of a sudden I can’t call it open source anymore.

guerrilla 2y ago
> I find it absurd that if I create a model architecture, publish my source code, and slap an open source license on it, I can call that open source…but the moment I publish some weights that are the result of running the program on some proprietary dataset, all of a sudden I can’t call it open source anymore. Then you don't understand open source. You would be distributing something that could not be reproduced because its source was not provided. The source to the product would not be open. It's that simple. The same principle has always applied to images, audio and video. There's no reason for you to be granted a free pass just becauase it's a new medium.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  I'm not sure how that relates to AI models. Freely distributing compiled binaries, but not the source code, means modification is extremely difficult. Effectively impossible without reverse-engineering expertise. But I've definitely seen modifications to Llama3.1 floating around. Correctly me if I'm wrong, but open-weight models can be modified fairly easily.
- darksaints 2y ago
  Let me spell it out for you: 1. I publish the source code to a program that inputs a list of numbers and outputs the sum into a text file. License is open source. Result according to you: this is an open source program. 2. Now, using that open source program, I also publish an output result text file after feeding it a long list of input numbers generated from a proprietary dataset. I even decide to publish this result and give it an open source license. Result according to you: this is NO LONGER AN OPEN SOURCE PROGRAM!!?!! How does that make any fucking sense? You have the model and can use it any way you want. The model can be trained any way you want. You can plug in random weights and random text input if you want to. That is an open source model. The act of additionally publishing a bunch of weights that you can choose to use if you want to should not make that model closed source.

kdhanx 2y ago

Nice that the Economist picks this up. In addition to the article, which is 100% correct, Meta sucks the air out of the room with PyTorch, which stifles other true open source efforts. Instagram has way too much influence on Python, where a couple of companies have wrestled away control over the org from dozens of independent developers and push their pet projects of questionable quality. All of this needs to stop.

roflchoppa 2y ago

Love the Hawaii reference in the opener. Cheeky :)

animitronix 2y ago

Lol, did they break someone's "code of conduct"?

Manuel_D 2y ago

What are the consequences as far as releasing the weights but not the training data? From what I understand, Llama and other open-weight models can be freely used and modified. What can people not do presently, but could do with an open-data model?

Chance-Device 2y ago
You can’t reproduce it from scratch. That’s about all. The fact that this is effectively impossible anyway without tens of millions in funding to pay for compute apparently doesn’t factor into it. I don’t think this is an issue about open source, or pragmatism or utility or even ideology very much. There’s one big tech company that makes open source models available. Instead of rewarding this behaviour, some people think that attacking them for it instead is the best response. I think this is a primarily social phenomenon which really just boils down to “meta bad” with various post hoc justifications tacked on.

impure 2y ago

I'm a little confused what the opening paragraph has to do with the rest of the article. The OSI's definition is still new. In fact it's still in draft form so this debate is a bit premature. I suspect that companies will begin releasing the code to train the model once it is finalized (they will never tell you the training data due to legal reasons and forcing them to is a losing battle).