Can AI even be open source? It's complicated
Can AI even be open source? It's complicated
57 comments
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It's rather hard to open source the model when you trained it off a bunch of copyrighted content that you didn't have permission to use.
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My sentiments exactly
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@cmnybo @marvelouscoyote That's.. not how it works. You wouldn't see any copyrighted works in the model. We are already pretty sure even the closed models were trained on copyrighted works, based on what they sometimes produce. But even then, the AI companies aren't denying it. They are just saying it was all "fair use", they are using a legal loophole, and they might win this. Basically the only way they could be punished on copyright is if the models produce some copyrighted content verbatim.
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BERT and early versions of GPT were trained on copyright free datasets like Wikipedia and out of copyright books. Unsure if those would be big enough for the modern ChatGPT types
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Have you read this article by Cory Doctorow yet?
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I feel like one of thr problem is LLMs hijacked the definition of AI. Like another comment said, the way they trained on copyrighted material, it's probably not possible. But imagine there was another model (not necessarily LLM) and it was trained with completely public domain material. For example maybe something trained to find genetic diseases from genetic samples of a person, or detecting asteroids from telescope images. Those could become open source. Now, I am not an expert, but do we consider those AI?
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I mean you could a still do generative AI on voices of actors in really old movies that are in the public domain
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@astroray @marvelouscoyote It seems you have the incorrect idea about what open-source means, which is quite sad here in the open-source lemmy community. Being trained on public domain material does NOT make the model open-source. It's about the license - what the recipients of the model are allowed to do with it - open-source must allow derivative works and commercial use, on top of seeing the code, but for LLM models the "code" is just a bunch of float numbers, nothing interesting to see.
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The architecture can easily be open source - as long as repo is missing just the training data. Just like there are Doom engines that are open source, even though they do not provide WAD files, which are still copyrighted. The code is there, but it is somewhat useless without the data. Analogy is not perfect, but let's assume it compiles to a single binary containing everything, maps included.
If ID Software gives you a compiled Doom with maps free to use it is freeware. If they open source the engine (they actually did), but do not release the WAD files as open source, the compiled game is not open source - it is still freeware.
It is not complicated really.
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It's that simple
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But then it's the tools to make the AI that are open source, not the model itself.
I think that we can't have a useful discussion on this if we don't distinguish between the source code of the training framework and the "source code" of the model itself, which is the training data set. E.g, Mistral Nemo can't be considered open source, because there is no Mistral Nemo without the training data set.
It's like with your Doom example - the Doom engine is open source, but Doom itself isn't. Unfortunately, here the analogy falls apart a bit, because there is no logic in the art assets of doom, whereas there is plenty of logic in the dataset for Mistral - enough that the devs said they don't want to disclose it for fear of competition.
This data set logic - incredibly valuable and important for the behavior of the AI, as confirmed by the devs - is why the model is not open source, even though the training framework might be.
Edit:
Another aspect is the spirit of open-source. One of the benefits of OSS is you can study the source code to determine whether the software is in compliance with various regulations - you can audit that software.
How can we audit Mistral Nemo? How can we confirm that it doesn't utilize copyrighted material to provide its answers?
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E.g, Mistral Nemo can't be considered open source, because there is no Mistral Nemo without the training data set.
Right here - that's your logical conflict. By downloading the model file, you can run it, thereby you can "have Mistral Nemo" even without having the training data, contradicting your statement - your statement is invalid.
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Are the petabytes of training data included in the repo? No? Then how could it ever be called open source?
At best, some of the current AI can be called freeware.
If you're just including the trained AI itself, it's more like including a binary, rather than source.
You can't really modify Llama in a significant way, can you? You can't fork it and continue improving that fork.
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@marvelouscoyote no. At least not in it's current form. Absolutely no way.
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I agree with your point from a technical perspective.
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57 comments