Comment by caseyy

Comment by caseyy a day ago

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I understand I was supposed to say “no” and question the open-source label. We’ve heard many arguments that if something can’t be reproduced from scratch, it’s not true open-source.

To me, they sound a bit like “no true Scotsman”. Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights. Even if it could be more open source.

That’s why I looked at it in a broader sense — what could happen in an open-source world to improve or replace Llama. Much could happen, thanks to Llama’s open nature, actually.

diggan a day ago

> Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights

Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around.

Sorry, but that's a really bad argument, "open source" is not a relative metric you use to compare different things, it's a label that is applied to something depend on what license that thing has. No matter what licenses others use, the license you use is still the license use.

Especially when there are actually open source models out there, so it isn't possible. Maybe Meta feels like it's impossible because of X, Y and Z, but that doesn't make it true just because they don't feel like they could earn enough money on it, or whatever their reasoning is.

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  • caseyy a day ago

    > Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around.

    I didn't mean it's on a continuum, as you assumed. Apologies for phrasing it unclearly. I meant that the weights are public. They are open; there is no debate to be had about it. Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.

    And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.

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    • diggan a day ago

      > Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.

      No, just because something is public doesn't mean it's open source, those are two very different things. If I upload code on my website without any license, that code is not now suddenly open source just because it's public. Just like Llama isn't suddenly "open source" because Meta's marketing department says so, their own legal department still call Llama proprietary, don't you wonder why that is?

      > And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.

      You, and some others (including Meta) are using a definition Meta came up with themselves, probably in order to try to skirt EU AI regulations as it's different for "open source" models vs others. I'm not sure why you as an individual would fall for it though, unless I'm missing something you have nothing to gain by spreading PR from Meta, do you?

      The existing definition of open source (before Meta's bastardization) is not a "idealized" definition, is the one we built an enormous ecosystem on top of, who taught a whole generation of programmers how to program and connected people together, without putting profits first.

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