Office space meme:
“If y’all could stop calling an LLM “open source” just because they published the weights… that would be great.”
It’s a lie. The preferred format is the (pre-)trained weights. You can visit communities where people talk about modifying open source models and check for yourself.
That seems kind of like pointing to reverse engineering communities and saying that binaries are the preferred format because of how much they can do. Sure you can modify finished models a lot, but what you can do with just pre trained weights vs being able to replicate the final training or changing training parameters is just an entirely different beast.
There’s a reason why the OSI stipulates that code and parameters used to train is considered part of the “source” that should be released in order to count as an open source model.
You’re free to disagree with me and the OSI though, it’s not like there’s 1 true authority on what open source means. If a game that is highly modifiable and moddable despite the source code not being available counts as open source to you because there are entire communities successfully modding it, then all the more power to you.
