I actually would support that statement. An AI model is a software artifact generated as part of a complex "build" process. Without having access to the details of the process that generated the artifact, including the training data, it's no more open-source than a compiled binary.
I'd argue that it goes against the intent of open source very much.
The idea behind OSS is that you're able to modify it yourself and then use it again from that point. With software, we enable this by making the source code public, and include instructions for how to build/run the project. Then I can achieve this.
But with these "OSS" models, I cannot do this. I don't have the training data and I don't have the training workflow/setup they used for training the model. All they give me is the model itself.
Similar to how "You can't see the source but here is a binary" wouldn't be called OSS, it feels slightly unfair to call LLM models being distributed this way OSS.
Whilst not wrong, understand that having the weights be released explicitly under Apache is a hell of a lot better than the weights being released under a non open source license and commercially friendly license. At least people can legally use this for their solutions.
Being or not being open source has exactly jack shit to do with that.
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