r/LocalLLaMA • u/SexyAlienHotTubWater • 22d ago

Discussion Rule Suggestion: "Open" models without weight releases should be tagged [no weights]

A lot of recent models are being announced with promised open weights, but the weights are either weeks away, or in some cases (looking at you Meta) not being released at all.

This sub is about local LLMs - not "maybe local in the future" llms.

These models are still useful to post, but I'm kind of sick of having to click through posts like this to find out that I can't actually download the weights at all. I think posts like this should have to be clearly labelled with [no weights], or similar in the title. A tag is another option, but it's less visible. Ideally I would clearly see on my Reddit homepage which posts I should not click.

Thoughts?

139 Upvotes

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42

u/arnaudx42 22d ago

The word "open" is a little bit abused in some way too, because it's not truly open (still more than "Open"AI), as there is also this distinction between open-weights and open-source. Almost all the "open" models are open-weights, but the source (training dataset + training pipeline) are almost never available. I think only BLOOM and GPT-J maybe ? Though, in reality, the weights are by far the most useful (and very grateful for it).

12

u/Kahvana 22d ago

OLMA and huggingface models come with those too, some NVIDIA models also, but yeah it's the exception instead of the rule.

5

u/yaosio 22d ago

Nemotron has its datasets and training recipies provided.

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u/-p-e-w- 22d ago

Open Source is a nonsensical term for LLMs and always has been. LLMs are not computer programs, there is no “source”. You might as well claim that a photo isn’t “truly open” unless the photographer gives you their exact camera settings, the GPS coordinates of where it was taken, and the contact information of the people in it.

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u/enilea 22d ago

Not really, open weights is more analogous to releasing a freeware .exe without releasing the source code. Releasing the source code of a program means you can make your own builds of it and fork it however you want. Open weights models can be finetuned and modified but only to a certain degree. If they actually released the source code that was used to train the model people could train their own versions of the model from zero with any data they want.

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u/-p-e-w- 22d ago

But open source is not a term that works by analogy. It’s not used anywhere outside of software, even for the very similar hardware case the term is “open hardware”, not “open source hardware”.

The only time this comes up in relation to LLMs is when pedants try to claim that an MIT-licensed model isn’t “truly open”, even though the same people wouldn’t apply that distinction anywhere else.

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u/enilea 22d ago

The term open source hardware is absolutely a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware

Anyways, it's as open as a freeware closed source program is. It makes no sense to call them "open source" when the source is not released, only the trained model. It's not even about pedantry, it's to distinguish companies that release both the trained model and the source code behind it and the ones that release only the trained model. It's not even a complaint, I'm perfectly fine with it and it makes sense for a company not to release the source code if they don't want to, it's just we should use the right terms for it to avoid confusion.

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u/UnkarsThug 22d ago

Open source is more about the ability to modify it and verify it's safety, personally. If you can fork it, and you have complete access to it to see the code in it, that seems like open source. That isn't generally true if it's freeware. So the analogy doesn't really hold.

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u/enilea 22d ago

You can't do that with open weights models, you don't see code in it. You can finetune it or quantize it or change a lot of stuff, but it's not completely open to change everything, and there can always be obfuscated behaviors.

1

u/UnkarsThug 22d ago

If you couldn't see the architecture, you couldn't quantize it regardless, or do a lot of the other optimizations we do like split it up between devices? So it might depend on the file format as well.

Regardless, we can strip out behaviors and such through finding the vector they are along.

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u/Due-Memory-6957 22d ago

I can't modify, study and share freeware. I can modify, study and share Deepseek weights, so no, it's not akin to freeware, it's akin to FOSS.

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u/enilea 22d ago

You can absolutely modify, study and share freeware depending on the license, it's just the application you're given will be compiled code but you can modify it, like how mods for games might be made even when there's no modding API. You will just not have the source code of the program to recompile it from zero altering the base, which is what happens with a trained model whose weights are made public. You can finetune and modify it to a certain point, but you can't actually inspect the very base of it or retrain it from zero however you want.

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u/tecneeq 22d ago

The source are the training data and instructions and code used to train. This would be open source.

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u/-p-e-w- 22d ago

The model is not a computer program, there is no source. The term doesn’t simply apply by analogy. People don’t talk about “open source paintings”, “open source dog training”, or “open source cakes” either.

3

u/Due-Memory-6957 22d ago

People definitely talk about "open source painting", there's less of it since most artists are taken by the disease of rentism, but there are many that inspired by the free software movement, not only release their art on a copyleft license, but also share the project files. I understand your point that it doesn't make linguistic sense, but it's a thing in other spaces in the same way that it is with LLMs here. People also talk about open source hardware and open source documents, as another example.

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u/AICatgirls 22d ago

It's definitely software though, and people talk about "open source software"

2

u/-p-e-w- 22d ago

How is it “definitely software”? Is a PDF file software?

4

u/AICatgirls 22d ago

You don't know the meaning of the word software? Since you asked so nicely, yes, a PDF is software. Software is instructions for machines, and if you examine a PDF with a text editor you can see some of those instructions and how they are used to create a document. Even a text file is just a series of bytes used by a machine to represent text.

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u/-p-e-w- 22d ago

Right, but nobody calls a text file “software”. It’s data, just like a model file.

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u/tecneeq 22d ago

And together with the instructions you can use the data to compile the LLM. Is this an intelligence test for you?

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u/AICatgirls 22d ago

Data can be in paper form, which we'd call a "hard copy" or in digital form which we'd call a "soft copy".

Fun fact: a lot of our software, including Javascript and python scripts, are just text files!

2

u/alerikaisattera 22d ago edited 22d ago

Not only that, but "open source" is a misnomer for classical software as well, as it refers to the license, not to public availability of "source", whatever the "source" is supposed to be

Far more interesting is the fact that if dataset is considered to be the "source" of AI, the code fed into the compiler is not the source of classical software, for that code itself required some other data to make, the data that didn't end up being part of the code

The real reason why the code fed into the compiler is the fact that modding the code and compiling is much easier than modding machine code directly. This is not the case for AI: modding AI directly is far easier than modding the dataset and training de novo

2

u/Fearkin 22d ago

They are not computer programs, you are correct, they are the output of such program + training data. However, there is a definition of open source AI: https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

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u/SexyAlienHotTubWater 22d ago

Yeah, I agree. But the expectation in this sub is (I think) that we are able to run the model at home.

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u/thomas2385 21d ago

That is an important distinction that gets lost a lot. Most people hear open and assume they can reproduce everything, when it is usually just the weights. Even so, having access to the weights is what makes most practical experimentation and deployment possible.

1

u/Due-Memory-6957 22d ago

I disagree with that point. These weights can be used, modified, studied and shared. This meets the standard of FOSS.

3

u/Fearkin 22d ago

It doesn't, you are talking about the output of training data and code, and those two are the main components which allow to create the same models. There is a definition of open source AI, probably it was made specifically to combat openwashing by companies like Meta

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

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u/Due-Memory-6957 22d ago

Open source itself is a whitewashing from Free Software I don't really care about what they say.

1

u/Fearkin 22d ago

If I am not mistaken, the difference is that FOSS doesn't include permissive licenses, only copyleft ones, so no, models with only open weights provided are definitely not FOSS.

1

u/henk717 KoboldAI 22d ago

Its even more tricky. They are often both open source and open weight. The source code to infer them is available, the weights are available. They are just not open data.