[bberenberg]

Do 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.

[PollardsRho]

The 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?

[twelve40]

i 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?

[jlouis]

Turing completeness makes it a different problem.

[TZubiri]

"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