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This is a strange take because this is consistent with what Google has been doing for a decade with AI. AlphaGo never had the weights released. Nor has any succ

by wrsh07 1y ago

This is a strange take because this is consistent with what Google has been doing for a decade with AI. AlphaGo never had the weights released. Nor has any successor (not muzero, the StarCraft one, the protein folding alphafold, nor any other that could reasonably be claimed to be in the series afaik) You can state as a philosophical ideal that you prefer open source or open weights, but that's not something deepmind has prioritized ever. I think it's worth discussing: * What are the advantages or disadvantages of bestowing a select few with access? * What about having an API that can be called by anyone (although they may ban you)? * Vs finally releasing the weights But I think "behind locked down API where they can monitor usage" makes sense from many perspectives. It gives them more insight into how people use it (are there things people want to do that it fails at?), and it potentially gives them additional training data

Onawa 1y ago
I think that from a research/academic view of the landscape, building off a mutable API is much less preferred than building of a set of open weights. It would be even better if we had the training data, along with all code and open weights. However, I would take open weights over almost anything else in the current landscape.
- wrsh07 1y ago
  If it came to light that somebody found a way to use this API in a way that is harmful to society would you be happy that Google could revoke access? Or unhappy? This is a real tradeoff of freedom vs _. I agree that I'm not always a fan of Google being the one in control, but I'm much happier that they are even releasing an API. That's not something they did for go! (Of course there was a book written so someone got access)
  - roughly 1y ago
    If it came to light that somebody found a way to use this API in a way that is beneficial to society, would you be happy that Google could revoke access? Or unhappy?
    - wrsh07 1y ago
      This is a bit of a false dichotomy. If it's useful, it's good that it was created. We should be happy about the progress. If it's harmful, we should be happy about guardrails. Friction is a useful tool, I don't begrudge people or companies from employing it
  - nimchimpsky 1y ago
    [dead]
LarsDu88 1y ago
The predecessor to this model Enformer, which was developed in collaboration with Calico had a weight release and a source release. The precedent I'm going with is specifically in the gene regulatory realm. Furthermore, a weight release would allow others to finetune the model on different datasets and/or organisms.
diggan 1y ago
All of what you said makes sense from the perspective of a product manager working for a for-profit company trying to maximize profit either today or eventually. But the submission blog post writes: > To advance scientific research, we’re making AlphaGenome available in preview via our AlphaGenome API for non-commercial research, and planning to release the model in the future. We believe AlphaGenome can be a valuable resource for the scientific community, helping scientists better understand genome function, disease biology, and ultimately, drive new biological discoveries and the development of new treatments. And at that point, they're painting this release as something they did in order to "advance scientific research" and because they believe "AlphaGenome can be a valuable resource". So now they're at a cross-point, is this release actually for advancing scientific research and if so, why aren't they doing it in a way so it actually maximizes advancing scientific research, which I think is the point parent's comment. Even the most basic principle for doing research, being able to reproduce something, goes out the window when you put it behind an API, so personally I doubt their ultimate goal here is to serve the scientific community. Edit: Reading further comments it seems like they've at least claimed they want to do a model+weights release of this though (from the paper: "The model source code and weights will also be provided upon final publication.") so remains to be seen if they'll go through with it or not.
- wrsh07 1y ago
  To be clear: I agree that opening up model + weights makes it possible for third parties to distill or fine tune If you look at the frenzy of activity that happened after midjourney became accessible, that was awesome for everyone. Midjourney probably got help running their model efficiently and a ton of progress was quickly made. I'm pretty sympathetic to a company doing a windowing strategy: prepare the API as a sort of beta release timed with the announcement. Spend some time cleaning up the code for public release (at Google this means ripping out internal dependencies that aren't open source), and then release a reference inference implementation along with the weights. That's pretty reasonable. I wanted to push back on this idea that "the reason Google isn't dropping model + weights is because the corporate screws are coming down hard" Google isn't waiting to release the weights so that they can profit from this. It's essentially the first step in the process, and serving via API gives them valuable usage data they they might not get if/when it's open sourced

by wrsh07 1y ago

Onawa 1y ago

I think that from a research/academic view of the landscape, building off a mutable API is much less preferred than building of a set of open weights. It would be even better if we had the training data, along with all code and open weights. However, I would take open weights over almost anything else in the current landscape.

wrsh07 1y ago
If it came to light that somebody found a way to use this API in a way that is harmful to society would you be happy that Google could revoke access? Or unhappy? This is a real tradeoff of freedom vs _. I agree that I'm not always a fan of Google being the one in control, but I'm much happier that they are even releasing an API. That's not something they did for go! (Of course there was a book written so someone got access)
- roughly 1y ago
  If it came to light that somebody found a way to use this API in a way that is beneficial to society, would you be happy that Google could revoke access? Or unhappy?
  - wrsh07 1y ago
    This is a bit of a false dichotomy. If it's useful, it's good that it was created. We should be happy about the progress. If it's harmful, we should be happy about guardrails. Friction is a useful tool, I don't begrudge people or companies from employing it
- nimchimpsky 1y ago
  [dead]

LarsDu88 1y ago

The predecessor to this model Enformer, which was developed in collaboration with Calico had a weight release and a source release. The precedent I'm going with is specifically in the gene regulatory realm. Furthermore, a weight release would allow others to finetune the model on different datasets and/or organisms.

diggan 1y ago

All of what you said makes sense from the perspective of a product manager working for a for-profit company trying to maximize profit either today or eventually. But the submission blog post writes: > To advance scientific research, we’re making AlphaGenome available in preview via our AlphaGenome API for non-commercial research, and planning to release the model in the future. We believe AlphaGenome can be a valuable resource for the scientific community, helping scientists better understand genome function, disease biology, and ultimately, drive new biological discoveries and the development of new treatments. And at that point, they're painting this release as something they did in order to "advance scientific research" and because they believe "AlphaGenome can be a valuable resource". So now they're at a cross-point, is this release actually for advancing scientific research and if so, why aren't they doing it in a way so it actually maximizes advancing scientific research, which I think is the point parent's comment. Even the most basic principle for doing research, being able to reproduce something, goes out the window when you put it behind an API, so personally I doubt their ultimate goal here is to serve the scientific community. Edit: Reading further comments it seems like they've at least claimed they want to do a model+weights release of this though (from the paper: "The model source code and weights will also be provided upon final publication.") so remains to be seen if they'll go through with it or not.

wrsh07 1y ago
To be clear: I agree that opening up model + weights makes it possible for third parties to distill or fine tune If you look at the frenzy of activity that happened after midjourney became accessible, that was awesome for everyone. Midjourney probably got help running their model efficiently and a ton of progress was quickly made. I'm pretty sympathetic to a company doing a windowing strategy: prepare the API as a sort of beta release timed with the announcement. Spend some time cleaning up the code for public release (at Google this means ripping out internal dependencies that aren't open source), and then release a reference inference implementation along with the weights. That's pretty reasonable. I wanted to push back on this idea that "the reason Google isn't dropping model + weights is because the corporate screws are coming down hard" Google isn't waiting to release the weights so that they can profit from this. It's essentially the first step in the process, and serving via API gives them valuable usage data they they might not get if/when it's open sourced