[halflings]

Training code is only useful to people in academia, and the closest thing to "code you can modify" are open weights.

People are framing this as if it was an open-source hierarchy, with "actual" open-source requiring all training code to be shared. This is not obvious to me, as I'm not asking people that share open-source libraries to also share the tools they used to develop them. I'm also not asking them to share all the design documents/architecture discussion behind this software. It's sufficient that I can take the end result and reshape it in any way I desire.

This is coming from an LLM practitioner that finetunes models for a living; and this constant debate about open-source vs open-weights seems like a huge distraction vs the impact open-sourcing something like Llama has... this is truly a Linux-like moment. (at a much smaller scale of course, for now at least)

[kemiller]

I dunno — if an open source project required, say, a proprietary compiler, that would diminish its open source-ness. But I agree it's not totally comparable, since the weights are not particularly analogous to machine code. We probably need a new term. Open Weights.

[0-_-0]

There are many "compilers", you can download The Pile yourself.