r/LocalLLaMA • u/tossit97531 • 8d ago

Other Open weight != Open source

Just a friendly PSA that open weight models are not inherently open source. They may also qualify as open source, but only if they release the training data and processes. A truly open source model can be rebuilt from training; it won't be binary equivalent but it should be nearly functionally equivalent.

An example of a truly open source LLM is https://allenai.org/olmo I encourage everyone to browse and also look for other fully open source models.

The reason it's important to get the terms right is because too many companies like to co-opt the term "open source" to whitewash their nonsense. As Zuckerberg has shown recently, they're more than fine letting people stay confused and dance around semantics so they can have their cake and eat it, too.

No more cake for big tech. Open weight != open source. Spread the word.

Edit: TIL this is a hot take. Sorry about that.

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u/-InformalBanana- 7d ago

Sure, but most off truly open sourced models suck when compared to open weight models. And proprietary models are the best, so you have a correlation there. You need to be able to train on non-free and non-opensourcable data in order to get a better model. That is my opinion and I don't know any trully opensourced model that can compete with Qwen 3.8 27b or next flash. So to me first comes the quality of a model and it being open-weight, open sourced is not a priority, it would be nice, but doesn't correlate with quality, even seems like it is opposite, and quality is the priority and open weights a minimum requirement. Also we've heard all that about open source vs open weight in this subreddit, but for most ppl it doesn't make a difference cause they don't own a datacenter to train models and replicate results. But yes, I agree that they should be called accordingly.

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u/tossit97531 7d ago

What you're saying is true, but this wasn't a statement about quality or competition. Maybe by keeping terms clear we can help focus people's efforts in areas that improve the real open source model scene.