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by otabdeveloper4 389 days ago
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".
1 comments
yetihehe 389 days ago
You can also reverse engineer and modify closed source programs (see mods for games). Weights are like compiled version of source data.
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otabdeveloper4 389 days ago
Finetuning isn't reverse engineering. Finetuning is a standard supported workflow for these models.

Also, the "redistribute" part is key here.

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yetihehe 389 days ago
> 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).

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macrolime 389 days ago
Not legally. That's the difference.
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timschmidt 389 days ago
Sure you can. It's often legally protected activity. You're just limited to distributing your modifications without the original work.
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macrolime 388 days ago
For some games maybe, but software often has a clause forbidding reverse engineering
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timschmidt 388 days ago
ChatGPT says that such clauses are typically void in the EU, though they may apply in some cases in the US. Even in the US, the triennial DMCA rule-making has granted broader exemptions for good-faith security research every cycle since 2016.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6838c070-705c-8005-9a88-83c9a5550a...

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