[HN Gopher] How should we define 'open' AI?
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How should we define 'open' AI?
Author : MilnerRoute
Score : 17 points
Date : 2024-04-04 18:47 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thenewstack.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (thenewstack.io)
| benreesman wrote:
| It pretty much comes down to two concepts that are easily common
| sense and will certainly be defined rigorously at some point:
|
| Open AI must be "available weight": the technical public defied
| the powers that be over mp3 files and HDMI cables and won. This
| stuff is going to get hacked, leaked, torrented, and distributed
| full stop until someone brokers a mutually acceptable compromise
| like Jobs did. Whatever your position on the legality or morality
| of this, it's happening. How much does someone want to prop bet
| on this?
|
| Open AI must be "operator-aligned": there exist laws on the
| books, today, for causing harm to others, via computers, that
| many argue are already draconian. Within the constraints of the
| law as legislated by congress, ruled upon by the judiciary, and
| handled at the utmost, unambiguous emergency by the executive
| apparatus, the agent must comply with the directives of the
| operator bounded only by the agent's capability and the
| operator's budget.
|
| The legal and regulatory framework will take years. We can start
| applying common sense now.
| tomrod wrote:
| Open: open weights
|
| Reproducible: training and testing data sources, validation
| seeds, and production endpoints available
| jraph wrote:
| > The term "open" has no agreed-upon definition in the context of
| AI
|
| I'm pretty sure "open" is not clear because those big
| corporations decided to blur its definition. They decided that
| "open" sounds good and used the term liberally. They could have
| built a strong definition since they use the term, but they
| didn't, because it's just marketing for them.
|
| Facebook is especially guilty for using "open source" to qualify
| something that should have a restricted number of users, however
| big this number is. With all the brilliant people and lawyers
| they must have, it's impossible they didn't do this on purpose.
| BadHumans wrote:
| What is "Open" still isn't fully agreed-upon in software. I
| still frequently see open source and source-available
| arguments.
| sublinear wrote:
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
| point....
| jraph wrote:
| "open" alone is arguably not defined. Though assuming it
| means open source when qualifying some software is quite
| reasonable and someone using "open" should expect this to
| happen. What else could it possibly mean, actually?
|
| I don't quite understand why we are still arguing over the
| definition of "open source" so often. It seems all sorts of
| people don't want to recognize the open source definition
| from the open source initiative as authoritative, or want to
| twist it in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons.
|
| But this definition works well and is the best (only?) common
| thing we have.
|
| I now consider that the open source definition is fully
| agreed upon and people who disagree with it are wrong. And
| they are a minority, by far. There's no point in arguing on
| what we call open source today. Without context, if someone
| says open source, that's the only text we can go read. You
| can't just decide alone what the vast majority of people mean
| when they use the term. That's just shared culture. It's not
| an opinion. We _can_ disagree on whether such or such license
| qualifies as open source (i.e. on the interpretation - and
| the OSI disagrees with the biggest Linux distributions for
| some licenses - especially Debian which uses the exact same
| text - the DFSG), but endless arguments about the meaning of
| open source are not about this.
|
| (now, I prefer speaking in terms of free software because of
| the philosophical background, and because the definition is
| also way simpler. I can explain it to a non technical person,
| while I can't remember all the rules of the OSD and even how
| many there are - so that's not even me blinded by any
| fanatical view on "open source")
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I disagree; "Open Source" in software is well defined, and
| IME the only parties trying to muddy it are doing so to try
| and pass off their source available software as FOSS for
| marketing points.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| We should remember that OpenAI was originally a nonprofit
| outfit meant to privately fund AI research, not a company
| meant to create user-facing software. As such, it's mission
| was to conduct science, and I won't claim that open science
| necessarily has a definition every scientist in the world
| agrees on, the idea is fairly formalized by international
| convention:
| https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000381148
|
| It's quite wordy, but part of it is basically what the
| current top comment says: share both the data and the code so
| that anyone with access to appropriate research
| infrastructure can reproduce your results.
|
| It is definitely not compatible with private companies
| conducting scientific research as a collection of proprietary
| trade secrets meant to give themselves a competitive edge in
| commercial product development.
| enriquto wrote:
| There's nothing special in "AI". Open AI is just like all open
| source/free software: Publicly available complete training data,
| public weights, public training source code so that the weights
| can be replicated exactly, public inference code so that the
| weights can be used. All of this under reasonable free software
| licenses (i.e. FSF/OSI-approved).
|
| Conceptually, the training data should be considered part of the
| source code. The weights are provided for practical purposes,
| because they are difficult to "compile".
| mnahkies wrote:
| I agree with this, but being pedantic is it actually possible
| to replicate weights exactly? My intuition would be that
| training is non-deterministic / reproducible, though you should
| be able to achieve equivalent results given the same inputs
| chesterk wrote:
| It's possible to make training pipelines reproducible and
| deterministic using random seeds. There's support for this in
| PyTorch, Jax, etc. And it can be useful to do so for
| debugging. You can make it configurable with a flag
| bee_rider wrote:
| IMO it shouldn't be called open unless the thing being shared is
| human-understandable. Like open source programs, you get the
| source code, which you can inspect, and figure out if you trust
| it. This ability to inspect (and modify) what matters about open
| source.
|
| When I look at ML weights, I don't understand them, they just
| look like some random matrix to me. I think we need to have
| access to the training set and a description of the steps in
| training process (like a makefile).
|
| If you want to share inscrutable weights after processing, call
| it what it is: Shareware. Shareware was great! But it isn't open.
| ByQuyzzy wrote:
| Well, it's not open source, it's not open to the public, they're
| not open with what they're doing or what their goals are. It's
| just a word like wuzzle or fibblefobble. Or google.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| The purity of good ideas always get co-opted by cynical actors
| wearing the clothes of the ideals without having the ideals
| themselves. At the core, all these good ideas have in them a
| spirit of cooperation and trust. The trust is eroded over time to
| exploit the cooperation inherit in it while not incurring the
| cost of participation.
|
| At that point, the words lose their meaning. You can see this
| worldwide with "democratic republic of" or, in our industry,
| "agile". Whatever meaning they once had is gone and will not
| return.
|
| In order to avoid this problem, you need to either use the entire
| expanded definition to be precise or create a new word that is
| associated only with your community.
|
| Expanding the definition of a shorthand, like "open", you never
| really achieve much because culture lives in the shorthand. Only
| true believer types like Stallman will insist on it for any
| length of time.
|
| Therefore, whatever comes next in the non-cynical world of
| software would have to come from a new movement with a new
| vocabulary. The new values always rhyme with the old but are
| expressed differently to more directly disarm the new cynical
| malignancies that have killed the old good ideas.
|
| The struggle is a forever arms race against parasitic
| participants in the global iterative prisoner's dilemma we're all
| playing.
|
| It's not about what is called "open". New words with new
| community values need to replace it.
|
| Open is dead.
| stale2002 wrote:
| IMO this debate about what "open" means itself obfuscates the
| issue significantly.
|
| This is because if you just say "Well technically LLama 2 doesn't
| fit the traditional definition of open source!", it implies that
| there is some sort of significant caveot or difference that makes
| it significantly more restrictive than other open source
| projects.
|
| This, of course, isn't true. Almost everyone can use LLama 2 for
| almost whatever they want. Yes, there are some restrictions, but
| the restrictions are so small that making a big deal over them
| incorrectly implies that there is some huge restriction, when
| there isn't.
| asadotzler wrote:
| there is a significant caveat, I cannot fork the repo, training
| data and all, and compete with the original. if i cannot do
| that, it's just not open source.
| Eager wrote:
| Open weights is one thing, but we don't even have that with
| OpenAI at least.
|
| Even then, open weights is like me checking in a .exe and acting
| surprised if people look at me funny.
|
| I'm definitely in the camp where all the artefacts are provided
| along with fully reproducible build and test environment for
| anyone who wants to retrace the steps.
|
| Whatever 'open' means, I don't think it is eight shell companies,
| not even weights provided and closely guarded secrets around how
| RLHF, alignment and safety testing is carried out.
|
| In fact, you would think that being 'open' about at least
| alignment and safety testing procedures would be the least one
| could expect.
|
| I do understand that revealing these things may disclose zero day
| exploits for bad actors, but on the other hand, being open for
| inspection is how things get fixed, and I've never been a fan of
| security through obscurity.
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