You have a point that intensive and costly training process plays a factor in the usefulness of a truly open source gigantic model. I'll assume here that you're referring to the likes of Llama3.1's heavy variant or a similarly large LLM. Note that I wasn't referring to gigantic LLMs specifically when referring to "models". It is a very broad category.

However, that doesn't change the definition of open source.

If I have an SDK to interact with a binary and "use it as [I] please" does that mean the binary is then open source because I can interact with it and integrate it into other systems and publish those if I wish? :)

[–] chebra@mstdn.io -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@sunstoned Please don't assume anything, it's not healthy.

To answer your question - it depends on the license of that binary. You can't just automatically consider something open-source. Look at the license. Meta, Microsoft and Google routinely misrepresents their licenses, calling them "open-source" even when they aren't.

But the main point is that you can put closed source license on a model trained from open-source data. Unfortunately. You are barking under the wrong tree.

[–] sunstoned@lemmus.org 2 points 4 months ago

Please don't assume anything, it's not healthy.

Explicitly stating assumptions is necessary for good communication. That's why we do it in research. :)

it depends on the license of that binary

It doesn't, actually. A binary alone, by definition, is not open source as the binary is the product of the source, much like a model is the product of training and refinement processes.

You can't just automatically consider something open source

On this we agree :) which is why saying a model is open source or slapping a license on it doesn't make it open source.

the main point is that you can put closed source license on a model trained from open source data

Actually the ability to legally produce closed source material depends heavily on how the data is licensed in that case
This is not the main point, at all. This discussion is regarding models that are released under an open source license. My argument is that they cannot be truly open source on their own.