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Open source AI: Red Hat's point-of-view
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoDisappointing that red hat is basically validating open weights as open source, and excusing it by saying this: > The majority of improvements and enhancements to AI models now taking place in the community do not involve access to or manipulation of the original training data. Rather, they are the result of modifications to model weights or a process of fine tuning which can also serve to adjust model performance. Well yes, because they have no access to anything more. With training source code and data they might do something different. If you don’t have all the things used to produce the final result, it’s not open source.
- bberenberg 2y agoDo you believe that open source can exist on top of closed hardware? I ask because you can't produce the final result without having someone give you the firmware blob. To me, this seems like an analogue to building on top of open weight models.
- jlouis 2y agoTuring completeness makes it a different problem.
- twelve40 2y agoi have very little knowledge of any of this, but i had an impression that OpenAI was trained on commodity cloud hardware that's available for purchase/rent to anyone, including off-the-shelf GPUs from Nvidia and AMD? are those what you are referring to as "the firmware blob", or was there some other, more specialized and custom-built closed hardware involved?
- PollardsRho 2y agoThe math underpinning an AI model exists independent of the hardware it's realized on. I can train a model on one GPU and someone else can replicate my results with a different GPU running different drivers, down to small numerical differences that should hopefully not have major effects. Data isn't fungible in the same way: I can't just replace one dataset with another for research where the data generation and curation is the primary novel contribution and expect to replicate the results. There's also a larger accountability picture: just like scientific papers that don't publish data are inherently harder to check for statistical errors or outright fraud, there's a lot of uncomfortable trust required for open-weight closed-data models. How much contamination is there for the major AI benchmarks? How much copyrighted data was used? How can we be sure that the training process was conducted as the authors say, whether from malfeasance or simple mistakes?
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- TZubiri 2y ago"Do you believe that open source can exist on top of closed hardware? " Yes, if Hardware is developed against standards shared by multiple manufacturers like amd64
- dralley 2y agoIt's not exactly practical to hand out the training material given the sheer quantity of data we're talking about.
- philipkglass 2y agoBut they could provide training code and let people provide their own Common Crawl (or whatever other pile of training data), couldn't they?
- stonogo 2y agoYeah, no. We can move an arbitrary amount of data around the world at breakneck speed. Netflix does this for a living. It's not practical to hand out the training material because of the massive rampant copyright violations.
- llm_trw 2y agoIf only we'd figured out a technology that let us move huge torrents of bits around. If only there was a catchy name for it. Something like bit-torrent perhaps?
- mossTechnician 2y agoIf a research group downloads material in order to train a model, is there some significant difference in copyright violation if they hand it to a second research group in order to fulfill the same purposes?
- Onawa 2y agoYes, because of a key word in a lot of copyright laws... "distribution". Using that copyrighted material themselves to train the model still gives them plausible deniability. Handing the copyrighted material to another group starts to run afoul of other laws and also removes the plausible deniability that the original group can claim regarding their training data.
- TZubiri 2y ago
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- TZubiri 2y agoI understood that it meant source code in addition to weights, as in "publishing programming language code does not suffice as open source if you do not publish weights"
- thrqka 2y ago> We believe that these concepts can have the same impact on artificial intelligence Where the concept is the exploitation of thousands of volunteers while repackaging their work. (I know that RedHat sponsors some people, sometimes to the detriment of projects, but a lot of it is not sponsored, especially when RedHat established itself.)
- dralley 2y agoSo, what, is HN against open source now?
- 7qW24A 2y agoMore accurate to say that VC and the “startup ideology” has always been at the core of HN - it just so happened that aligned with OSS ideology during the ZIRP era.
- carlwgeorge 2y agoRed Hat pays more people to work on open source than any other company I'm aware of. I am one of these people. I challenge you to find a single open source project included in a Red Hat product that doesn't contain contributions from Red Hat employees. Maybe a few exist, but the vast majority include Red Hat contributions, because we contribute all over the open source ecosystem.
- jmclnx 2y agoNo real information, just a marketing spiel.
- ysofunny 2y agoi mean... it's IBM so what did we really expect?
- globalnode 2y agoI was thinking of trying Fedora (currently using Debian) and this comment made me look up who owns red-hat. ibm now owns red-hat, and apparently vanguard owns a huge chunk of ibm. I wonder how much influence any of the sponsors have over what goes into the os and what direction it takes.
- rat87 2y agoVanguard "owns" a huge chunk of everything. Vanguard runs index funds, most peoples retirements are vanguard buying small shares of an index fund representing all the big companies on the stock exchange
- TZubiri 2y agoAlso they simultaneously hold the ownership rights as well as equivalent owenrship liabilities, so they own shit squat in net terms (excpet maybe their management fees).
- mattkrause 2y agoIt’s even weirder than that! Vanguard has an odd corporate structure where it’s owned by the funds that it manages, so it’s effectively a co-op owned by its customers.
- _yb2s 2y agoI don’t understand why customer owned co-ops aren’t ubiquitous. Vanguard is amazing- low fees, and great services- they beat all of the competition. I had to call their support line today and it was the most professional customer service I’ve ever experienced.
- nickandbro 2y agoCongrats NeuralMagic team on being acquired! I don't know if you know this, but I worked with you on discord a few times. Your team's always willing to go above and beyond with pushing out popular models in specific quant formats compatible with vLLM. And one of the few huggingface orgs that my boss can actually trust. Well deserved!
- pabs3 2y agoI prefer the ML policy of the Debian Deep Learning Team. https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy/ https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy/
- sciencesama 2y agoLook whos talking !! The whole fiasco with fedora and now they come to talk about opensource !!
- nine_k 2y agoTo me, the ML situation looks roughly like this. (1) Model weights are something like a bytecode blob. You can run it in a conformant interpreter, and be able to do inference. (2) Things like llama.cpp are the "bytecode interpreter" part, something that can load the weights and run inference. (3) The training setup is like a custom "compiler" which turns training data to the "bytecode" of the model weights. (4) The actual training data is like the "source code" for the model, the input of the training "compiler". Currently (2) is well-served by a number of open-source offerings. (1) is what is usually released when a new model is released. (1) + (2) give the ability to run inference independently. AFAICT, Red Hat suggests that an "open-source ML model" must include (1), (2), and (3), so that the way the model has been trained is also open and reusable. I would say that it's great for scientific / applied progress, but I don't think it's "open source" proper. You get a binary blob and a compiler that can produce it and patch it, but you can't reproduce it the way the authors did. Releasing the training set, the (4), to my mind, would be crucial for the model to be actually "open source" in the way an open-source C program is. I understand that the training set is massive, may contain a lot of data that can't be easily released publicly but that were licensed for the training purposes, and that training from scratch may cost millions, so releasing the (4) is very often infeasible. I still think than (1) + (2) + (3) should not be called "open-source", because the source is not open. We need a different term, like "open structure" or something. It's definitely more open than something that's only available via an API, or as just weights, but not completely open.
- pavelstoev 2y agoIt is really just “open use” with detailed defined by the license type (MIT, etc)
- nine_k 2y agoIt's more than just use (inference), it does open some otherwise secret sauce of the training. It looks like there's no existing word / notion to exactly pinpoint this level of openness.
- smohare 2y ago[dead]
- lutusp 2y ago> More than three decades ago, Red Hat saw the potential of how open source development and licenses can create better software to fuel IT innovation. Thirty-million lines of code later, Linux not only developed to become the most successful open source software but the most successful software to date. This seems to conflate Red Hat and Linux, as well as try to equate Red Hat with open-source. Red Hat is Linux, but Linux is not Red Hat, especially now that Red Hat has decided to restrict access to the RHEL source (https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/red-hat-decision-turns-world-of-open-source-linux-upside-down/543157 https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/red-hat-decision-turns...). And a pet grammatical peeve of mine: > ... in some respects they serve a similar function to code. I see this everywhere now -- IMHO it should be "... serve a function similar to code." Doesn't the original grate on your ear? Also this is a Turing-test bot detector -- bots don't use this weird grammatical construction, only humans do.
- mogwire 2y agoRestrict access to paying customers? Restrict access to companies violating an EULA to not redistribute packages? That fact that people continue to spread this trope is amazing. I pay for RHEL and I have a developer subscription for personal usage and the SRPMs are right there on their download portal. Just because CIQ err Rocky has to take extra steps and violate Red Hat’s EULA doesn’t mean they restricted access.
- davydm 2y agoRed Hat opining about what is and isn't open is absolutely hilarious. Sorry, my dudes, you launched that ship in the wrong direction ages ago.
- worthless-trash 2y agoWhat does redhat ship that isnt open source under the licenses my dude ?
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- lrvick 2y agoI largely agree with these points, however it is an awkward position coming from Red Hat which is the best funded Linux distribution there is, and -still- not part of the reproducible builds project or investing in full source bootstrapping which means no one can exactly reproduce their published artifacts from source or prove they were not tampered with. (Same with Fedora) Glass houses.
- dralley 2y ago> (Same with Fedora) ?? https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/reproducible-builds/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/reproducible-builds/ https://pagure.io/fedora-reproducible-builds/project/issues https://pagure.io/fedora-reproducible-builds/project/issues https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/41/ChangeSet#Reproducible_Package_Builds https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/41/ChangeSet#Reprodu...
- lrvick 2y agoFrom that first link "In the Fedora ecosystem, we cannot achieve reproducibility by the reproducible-builds.org definition" Good to see they are slowly closing some blockers every year or so, but fundamentally today they do builds and signing centrally. There is no way to readily get the same hash of a central fedora supplied rpm locally. Supply chain integrity is simply not a priority. They just trust the central build farm, or the compilers it uses, or everyone with access to it will never be compromised.
- dralley 2y agoThis is a touch dramatic. The hash of the payload and the hash of the RPM header are still reproducible and can be verified. It's just that the existence of internal signatures makes it impossible to do a simple checksum of the file.
- lrvick 2y agoAnd thus RPM was not designed with easy user reproduction and signing by multiple independent parties for high accountability in mind. Most other package managers do not have this problem. This is a flaw that should be corrected. Also, it takes a ton of work and testing and bug fixes and patches to get software reproducible. Assume most packages are not reproducible until proven otherwise. Arch, debian, nix, guix, all do that work and publish the proof, for several years, with far less resources than redhat or fedora. Stagex even has 100% (shameless plug) Easy user hash for hash reproducibility with published reproduction testing proofs is the standard baseline for years now, and even that is nowhere near good enough. Multiple independently signed reproduction proofs with full source bootstrapping is IMO a bare minimum for any distro that expects other people to be able to trust it for more than hobby use cases. Supply chain attacks are becoming very common, and no one should have to trust a single engineer somewhere with a god signing key for a major distro. Also just to spot check a popular package in Fedora, rust, I just confirmed it still downloads a non-reproducible binary rust compiler to build its own rust package, so it is certainly not reproducible from source even putting aside the rpm signing format problems. Fedora blindly trusts whoever builds the binaries on the rust team. I can only assume RHEL does the same. https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/rust/blob/8e04e725bbf4eb9213dde7af6750b8fed9fdaa01/f/rust.spec#_208 https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/rust/blob/8e04e725bbf4eb9...