Notices by ⍨ (chaz@burn.capital)

Mo'nads?!? Two ain't enough??

Turns out the only ones "cargo culting" are the people still using the idiom despite it not really being an apt metaphor

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675025

You don't have to take my word for it, here's Schneier himself saying this open source AI definition is "terrible":

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/11/ai-industry-is-trying-to-subvert-the-definition-of-open-source-ai.html

They posit you can still modify (tune) the distributed models without the training source. You can also modify a binary executable without its source code. Frankly that's unacceptable if we actually care about the human beings using the software.

A key pillar of freedom as it relates to software is reproducibility. The ability to build a tool from scratch, in your own environment, with your own parameters, is absolutely indispensable to both learning how the tool works and changing the tool to better serve your needs, especially if your needs fall on the outskirts of the bell curve.

There's also the issue of auditability. If you can't run the full build process yourself, producing your own results from scratch in a trusted environment to compare with what's distributed, it becomes exponentially harder to verify any claims about how a tool supposedly works.

Without the training data, this all becomes impossible for AI models. The OSI knows this. They're choosing to ignore it for the sake of expediency for the companies paying their bills, who want to claim "open" because it sounds good while actually hiding the (largely stolen and fraudulently or non-consentually acquired) source material of their current models.

Do we want a new definition of "open source" that actively thwarts analysis and tinkering, two fundamental requirements of software that respects human beings today? Reject this nonsense.

#OpenSource #OpenSourceAI #OSI #OpenSourceInitiative #FreeSoftware #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

As the OSI prepares to make official its "open source AI" definition with a glaring lack of requirement that the actual source (training data) is made available, it's worth noting that their work is funded by google, meta, microsoft, salesforce, etc. What does open source even mean here if the literal source of the model isn't open? These companies are invested in making you think they're on your side while they boil the oceans to avoid paying human beings for labor.

The idea behind open source, as it grew out of the free software movement, has always been to water down software freedoms, to create something more palatable to corporate interests that *sounds* good but means very little. This continues that work for the current "gen AI" bubble. It's time to ditch open source as an ideal, and the OSI especially.

https://opensource.org/ai/drafts/the-open-source-ai-definition-1-0-rc2

#OpenSource #OpenSourceAI #OSI #OpenSourceInitiative #FreeSoftware #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI