Office space meme:
“If y’all could stop calling an LLM “open source” just because they published the weights… that would be great.”
Open source means you can recreate the binaries yourself. Neiter Facebook. Nor the devs of deepseek published which training data they used, nor their training algorithm.
They published the source code needed run the model. It’s open source in the way that anyone can download the model, run it locally, and further build on it.
Training from scratch costs millions.
Open source isn’t really applicable to LLM models IMO.
There is open weights (the model), and available training data, and other nuances.
They actually went a step further and provided a very thorough breakdown of the training process, which does mean others could similarly train models from scratch with their own training data. HuggingFace seems to be doing just that as well. https://huggingface.co/blog/open-r1
Edit: see the comment below by BakedCatboy for a more indepth explanation and correction of a misconception I’ve made
It’s worth noting that OpenR1 have themselves said that DeepSeek didn’t release any code for training the models, nor any of the crucial hyperparameters used. So even if you did have suitable training data, you wouldn’t be able to replicate it without re-discovering what they did.
OSI specifically makes a carve-out that allows models to be considered “open source” under their open source AI definition without providing the training data, so when it comes to AI, open source is really about providing the code that kicks off training, checkpoints if used, and details about training data curation so that a comparable dataset can be compiled for replicating the results.
They published the source code needed run the model.
Yeah, but not to train it
anyone can download the model, run it locally, and further build on it.
Yeah, it’s about as open source as binary blobs.
Training from scratch costs millions.
So what? You still can gleam something if you know the dataset on which the model has been trained.
If software is hard to compile, can you keep the source code closed and still call software “open source”?
I agree the bad part is that they didn’t provide the script to train the model from scratch.
Yeah, it’s about as open source as binary blobs.
This is a great starting point for further improvements of the model. Most AI research is done with pretrained weights used as basis. Few are training models completely from scratch. The model is built with Torch, so anyone should be able to fine tune the model on custom data sets.
The runner is open source, the model is not
The service uses both so calling their service open source gives a false impression to 99,99% of users that don’t know better.
The model is as far as I know open, even for commercial use. This is in stark contrast with Meta’s models, which have (or had?) a bespoke community license restricting commercial use.
Or is there anything that can’t be done with the DeepSeek model that I’m unaware of?
A software analogy:
Someone designs a compiler, makes it open source. Make an open runtime for it. ‘Obtain’ some source code with unclear license. Compiles it with the compiler and releases the compiled byte code that can run with the runtime on free OS. Do you call the program open source? Definitely it is more open than something that requires proprietary inside use only compiler and closed runtine and sometimes you can’t access even the binary; it runs on their servers. It depends on perspective.
ps: the compiler takes ages and costs mils in hardware.
edit: typo
I think a more appropriate analogy is if you make an open source game. With the game you have made textures, because what is a game without textured surfaces? You include the binary jpeg images along with the source code.
You’ve made the textures with photoshop, which is a closed source application. The textures also features elements of stock photos. You don’t provide the original stock photos.
Anyone playing the game is free to replace the textures with their own. The game will have a different feel, but it’s still a playable game. Anyone is also free to modify the existing textures.
Would you consider this game closed source?
Eh, it seems like it fits to me. We casually refer to all manner of data as “open source” even if we lack the ability to specifically recreate it. It might be technically more accurate to say “open data” but we usually don’t, so I can’t be too mad at these folks for also not.
There’s huge deaths of USGS data that’s shared as open data that I absolutely cannot ever replicate.
If we’re specifically saying that open source means you can recreate the binaries, then data is fundamentally not able to be open source, since it distinctly lacks any form of executable content.
If we’re specifically saying that open source means you can recreate the binaries, then data is fundamentally not able to be open source
lol, are you claiming data isn’t reproducable? XD
… Did you not read the litteral next phrase in the sentence?
since it distinctly lacks any form of executable content.
Your definition of open source specified reproducible binaries. From context it’s clear that I took issue with your definition, not with the the notion of reproducing data.