The code is licensed [1] under the "Apple MIT" license [2], which is considered open-source. The weights are under a different, more restrictive license. This is mentioned at the bottom of the README.
It effectively prevents the community from using Apple's solution, but gives the Chinese everything they need to duplicate the results and push their own version.
I expect a Hunyuan-branded version of this model in six months. Probably with lots of improvements.
I'm all for Chinese model takeover if this is how US tech giants treat AI. You can't horde the flames forever, US hyperscalers.
The DoD ought to be advocating for a strong domestic open source stance to ensure our ecosystem doesn't get washed away. AI czar David Sacks has this view, but I suppose it's been falling on deaf ears when the hyperscalers crowd out the conversation.
This bugs the hell out of me, somehow these companies argue that training on all sort of content without is fine because reasons and then have the audacity to attach a new proprietary licence to it.
Meta’s campaign to corrupt the meaning of Open Source was unfortunately very successful and now most people associate releasing the weights with open source.
Actually it is more like all big corps campaigns that have successfully moved away from anything GPL as much as possible, while pushing for business friendly licenses.
Linux kernel and GCC are probably the only thing left they tolerate, and even then, it is less relevant in the cloud, with containers powered by type 1 hypervisors.
It's gratifying. I used to tilt at windmills on HN about this and people would be telling me with absolute condescension how the ship had sailed regarding the definition of Open Source, relegating my own life's work to anachronism.
People slowly waking up to how daft and hypecycle misusing a term was all along has been amazing.
so it wasn't a new campaign, it is at best re-appropriating the term open source in the software community in a way communities outside of software have always been using it, in a way that predates software at all, exists in parallel to the software community, and continues to exist now
In 30 years in tech, I have never once heard anyone use the term "Open Source" to refer to anything other than FOSS.
I have also never once heard anyone use the term FOSS outside of the written form.
So the opposite of what you said, I guess.
You also seem to be saying that the term "open source" existed before software did, so I feel compelled to ask: what do you think "source" stands for in "open source"?
people need to re-evaluate their relationship with open source instead of as a synonym for FOSS, because it clearly doesn't mean that regardless of the colloquialism
and FOSS has an adjective and noun for a reason, its older than the colloquialism
The OSI definition and "open source purity" is designed by big tech to erode any value layer open source companies could use to threaten them.
New movements like "fair source", which is a form of source available + free use + expiring copyright is the ideal license. It's effectively unlimited use for customers and users, but has a baked in "non-compete" preventing low effort third parties from coming in and eating the market of managed services established by the authors.
We need to kill open source purity. Especially if we want to erode the hyperscalers that aren't even giving away the magic parts or valuable parts of their kingdoms.
Open source purity is a socialist dream while we're still living under the Empire. And it prevents the formation of a salient that can punch through. It's a very low suboptima.
I don't see any reason why you would want fair source authors to go "OSI" open other than taking their revenue stream as your own. The license bakes in contingencies in case the authors go out of business to open the license up for community ownership. That's good enough.
If these businesses were OSI open, the businessss become unsustainable and impossible to scale into something formidable that could chip away at entirely closed hyperscalers.
How is it not progress? You have full access to the code, you can use it yourself however you'd like, and the copyrights expire.
They just ask you not to compete with them for a few years.
How is that any way comparable to AWS?
Perfect truly is the enemy of good.
In this case, perfect murders good and locks you in the dungeon of eternal bad so you can think endlessly about perfect. It also stabs any good that comes along while crying about perfect.
There's no reason to believe that weights are copyrightable. The only reason to pay attention to this "license" is because it's enforced by Apple, in that sense they can write whatever they want in it, "this model requires giving ownership of your first born son to Apple", etc. The content is irrelevant.
> The only reason to pay attention to this "license" is because it's enforced by Apple
Yes, but the most important reason to pay attention to ANY license for most people is because it is a signal for under what conditions the licensor is likely to sue you (especially in the US, which does not have a general “loser pays” rule for lawsuits), not because of the actual legality, because a lawsuit is a cost most people don’t want to bear while it is ongoing or cover the unrecoverable costs of once it is done, irrespective of winning and losing, and, on the other hand, few people care about being technically legal with their use of copyright protected material if there is no perceived risk of enforcement.
But even if that wasn’t true, and being sued was of no financial or other costs until the case is finally resolved, and only then if you lose, I wouldn't bet much, in the US, in the court system ultimately applying precedent in the most obvious way instead of twisting things in a way which serves the interest of the particular powerful corporate interests involved here.
> There's no reason to believe that weights are copyrightable.
I know this is a long, nuanced, ongoing discussion. I'm very interested in it, but haven't read up on it for years. Could you elaborate a bit on the latest?
I was always in the camp that opined that "weights" are too broad a term for any sensible discussions about conclusions like "are (not) copyrightable". Clearly a weight that's the average of its training data is not copyrightable. But also, surely, weights that are capable of verbatim reproduction of non-trivial copyrightable training data are, because they're just a strange storage medium for the copyright data.
> This. Tables of numbers are explicitly not subject to copyright; that’s a copyright 101 fact.
Ok, but there's clearly more nuance there. Otherwise I could claim that any mp3 file I wanted to distribute is just a table of 8-bit integers and therefore not subject to copyright.
I wanted to reply in this direction. Ultimately, literally everything and anything in SW is a sequence of numbers, that anybody could easily put in some kind of table form.
I don’t know where the catch is, but that sentence can not be true in general.
A table of numbers is copyrightable if it represents some creative expression by a human being. For example, a BMP representing a sketch is a table of numbers and clearly copyrightable.
Weights are numbers that come from an optimization process. To the extent that weights encode any creativity, they encode the creativity of the training data. But any company using AI models (including Apple) does not want that interpretation because they are using AI models that were trained on other people's copyrighted works. If weights could be copyrighted, we all of us would own them.
That is simply not true. The details might vary by jurisdiction and the protection might not be under the exact name of “copyright” but there most certainly are comparable legal protections for the contents of databases (“tables of numbers”). See for example: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/intel...
Disney would like you have a word with you. Why would their pile of numbers that represent Avatar3.m4a be any more subject to copyright than Apple_2D_3D.bin. Or GPT52.mlx or Opus45.gguf?
It's probably just Apple layers avoiding getting involved in any copyright lawsuit over the copyrightability of weights, by avoiding licensing it except under what's clearly fair use anyway, making copyrightability moot.
Yes this seems more about protecting them from a lawsuit. I don’t think they actually give a shit about the weights or they wouldn’t release them at all. I suspect they just know they’re training dataset isn’t perfectly “clean” and don’t want to accept any more liability than they already have.
Not sure I've met one of those people in... a decade or so? Loving apple products has been an uphill road for a long time (and increasingly more so post-Jobs)
> Not sure I've met one of those people in... a decade or so? Loving apple products has been an uphill road for a long time (and increasingly more so post-Jobs)
You either a deliberately misrepresenting the facts or been livoning under a rock. I mean read any discussion about M laptops and you see apple fanboys noncritucally declaring them a revolution in computing.
> I mean read any discussion about M laptops and you see apple fanboys noncritucally declaring them a revolution in computing.
I see a lot of people extolling the battery life, displays, and trackpads. And probably an equal amount of complaining about the increasingly locked-down and un-customisable nature of macOS. We all like the hardware, and fight the software more by the day.
The blind zealots of the "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" era just aren't very common anymore.
Pretty sure this is a joke, but the actual license is written by lawyers who know what they are doing:
> “Research Purposes” means non-commercial scientific research and
academic development activities, such as experimentation, analysis, testing
conducted by You with the sole intent to advance scientific knowledge and
research. “Research Purposes” does not include any commercial exploitation,
product development or use in any commercial product or service.
Does sole intent to advance scientific knowledge even exist as a category anymore? I was given modern research is all pay to play where the grant sponsor decided the topic and what can be done with the results.
It kind of is, though. You use some input material to produce the weights via some process, even if the weights might not become exactly the same every time you reproduce the process; the production of the weights isn't done by working with the weights, but with the training material and the process to convert them into weights. The analogy to source code and the resulting binaries is there.
Training data and the weights produced are not source code, just as access to the resulting binaries are not a requirement for open source.
Open source does not require full working implementations. There's no requirement that a code snippet that I release be fully working and identical to a complete solution.
So we are on agreement that "weights" are not source code. Training data might not also be actual "code", but it is source. After all, the model trained using that data tries to estimate its training data. It is the ground truth for the model.
About the access of binaries or providing working implementations, where did those come from? I don't think this thread was discussing those at all.
Indeed I would be willing to call something an "open source model" if it came without weights, but did come with the training data and with a documented process (preferably executable); and a release with just the training data could be called "open dataset" while the software to run the training would be just plain old open source software.
And, of course, a model with only the model data distributed with an open license is relatively commonly called "open weights", this being pretty self-explanatory term.
Making 3D worlds like that is impressive. I used to build some VR worlds (hobby) and content generation is a huge time sink. I wonder if this tech will become accessible for that soon.
This is all going to become super accessible to everyone. And it'll become fast and eventually free.
Everyone will be able to flex their muscles as a creative. Everyone will be able to become an artist (expressing themselves though their unique lens) without putting points into a mechanical skill that is dimensionally orthogonal to idea expression and communication.
This is the "bicycle of the mind" that Steve Jobs talked about 40 some years ago. We've all had keyboards with which to express ourselves and communicate, but soon everyone will be able to visually articulate themselves and their thoughts. It's going to be so uplifting for society.
In fifty years we'll even be able to render our direct thoughts and mold them like clay. Share them directly with one another. Co-think.
Your daily reminder that neural network weights aren't creative work and as such aren't subject to copyright protection in the first place. The “license” is purely cosmetic (or rather, it has an internal purpose: it's being put there by the ML scientists who want to share their work and have to deal with the corporate reluctance to do so).
If all these AI models were trained on copyrighted materials for which the trainers had no right to, is it wrong to steal their models and use them however we want? Morally I'd say absolutely not, but I"m sure these AI bros would vigorously defend their own IP, even if it was built on stolen IP created by humans.
> If all these AI models were trained on copyrighted materials for which the trainers had no right to, is it wrong to steal their models and use them however we want?
If (which the courts seem to be pretty consistently finding) training models on copyright-protected works generally is fair use, though using models to produce works which would violate copyright if made by other means with reference to the source material is still a copyright violation, then training has no bearing on the legality of copying the models. (Even if it wasn't, then copying and using the models at all would violate the copyright of the original owners of the training material again and be illegal irrespective of the “license” offered by the model trainer.)
Morally? Well, pretty much the same dichotomy applies; if training the model isn't a violation of the source material's creators' rights, then the fact it was trained without permission has no bearing on the morality of using the model without the trainers permission, if it is a violation of the source material's creators' rights, then so is using the model irrespective of the trainer's “license”, as the trainer has no right to permit further use of the material they had no right to create.
The idea that the model is an intrusion on the rights of the creators of the materials used in training and that this makes use of the model more rather than less permissibly, legally or morally, takes some bizarre mental gymnastics.
One of the criteria for being open source is no discrimination against fields of endeavor. This license clearly discriminates against any field of endeavor other than (non-commercial) research.
The only reference seems to be in the acknowledgement, saying that this builds ontop of open source software