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by zamalek 499 days ago
Binaries can do arbitrary things, like report home to a central server. Weights cannot.
2 comments

Why is that relevant regarding the FOSS aspects of weights / binaries? If I run a binary within a VM and only consider its output and prevent any side-effect host, just like I could just consider the output of an LLM, my binary is still not any closer to being FOSS, is it?
Depending on format, they might.
Virtually all models are now distributed as Safetensors/gguf/etc. (which are just metadata + data), not pickled Python classes. Many libraries also don't even load pickled checkpoints anymore unless you add an argument explicitly stating that you want to load an unsafe checkpoint.