[make3]

I don't think people make the distinction like that. The open source vs non open source distinction boils down to, usually, can you use it for commercial use.

what you're saying is just that it's non reproducible, which is a completely valid but separate issue

[alpaca128]

There's already established terms and licenses for non-commercial use. Like "open weights".

Open source has the word "source" in it for a reason, and those models ain't open source and have nothing to do with it.

[ben_w]

Took me until this thread to remember that in the 90s we had "freeware".

[piperswe]

But where's the source? I just see a binary blob, what makes it open source?

[jacob019]

The weights are the source. It isn't as though something was compiled into weights. They're trained directly. But I know what you mean, it would be more open to have the training pipeline and souce dataset available.

[timschmidt]

The weights seem much more like a binary to me, the training pipeline the compiler, and the training dataset the source.

[jumski]

Come here to write this - perfect analogy!

[reedciccio]

It's very imperfect analogy though these things can't be rebuilt "from scratch" like a program, the training process doesn't seem to be replicable anyway. Nonetheless, full data disclosure is necessary, according to the result of the years-long consultation led by the Open Source Initiative https://opensource.org/ai

[timschmidt]

> the training process doesn't seem to be replicable anyway

The training process is fully deterministic. It's just an algorithm. Feed the same data in and you'll get the same weights out.

If you're speaking about the computational cost, it used to be that way for compilers too. Give it 20 years and you'll be able to train one of today's models on your phone.

[otabdeveloper4]

You can fine-tune their weights and release your own take.

E.g. see all the specialized third-party models out there based on Qwen.

"Open-source" is the wrong word here, what they mean is "you can modify and redistribute these weights".

[yetihehe]

You can also reverse engineer and modify closed source programs (see mods for games). Weights are like compiled version of source data.

[otabdeveloper4]

Finetuning isn't reverse engineering. Finetuning is a standard supported workflow for these models.

Also, the "redistribute" part is key here.

[yetihehe]

> Finetuning isn't reverse engineering

Fully agree, it isn't. Reverse engineering isn't necessary for modifying compiled program behaviour, so comparing it to finetuning is not applicable. Finetuning applied to program domain would be more like adding plugins or patching in some compiled routines. Reverse-engineering applied to models would be like extracting source documents from weights.

> Finetuning is a standard supported workflow for these models.

Yes, so is adding mods for some games, just put your files in a designated folder and game automatically picks it up and does required modifications.

> Also, the "redistribute" part is key here.

It is not. Redistributability and being open source is orthogonal. You can have a source for a program and not be able to redistribute source or program, or you can redistribute a compiled program, but not have it's source (freeware).

[macrolime]

Not legally. That's the difference.

[timschmidt]

Sure you can. It's often legally protected activity. You're just limited to distributing your modifications without the original work.

[macrolime]

For some games maybe, but software often has a clause forbidding reverse engineering

[microtonal]

There is work to try to reproduce (the original) R1: https://huggingface.co/open-r1

[1una]

I won't call it "binary blob". Safetensors is just a simple format for storing tensors safely: https://huggingface.co/docs/safetensors/index