Office space meme:
“If y’all could stop calling an LLM “open source” just because they published the weights… that would be great.”
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.
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?
I’m going to take your point to the extreme.
It’s only open source if the camera that took the picture that is used in the stock image that was used to create the texture is open source.
You used a fully mechanical camera and chemical flash powder? Better publish that design patent and include the chemistry of the flash powder!
Would an open-source Windows installer make it open-source? After all, you can replace its .dll files and modify the registry. I guess PrismLauncher also makes Minecraft open-source, you can replace the textures there as well.
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.
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.
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?
The model is open, it’s not open source!
How is it so hard to understand? The complete source of the model is not open. It’s not a hard concept.
Sorry if I’m coming of as rude but I’m getting increasingly frustrated at having to explain a simple combination of two words that is pretty self explanatory.
