You can (and most likely should) still use a OSI-approved license if you want, such as AGPL/GPLv3, while providing the possibility of case-to-case commercial licenses.
gifski [0] for example is a successful open-source project doing that.
I just see now, there are two Gifskis, one Rust, one Swift. It's worth looking at the maintainer of the Swift one, he has 1000+ repos, many with 1000+ stars.
I feel like the license used on Llama covers that, right? Carve out an exclusion for large companies so they have to obtain a commercial license and let all the ones below that access it for free.
> Carve out an exclusion for large companies so they have to obtain a commercial license
And this is why open source means source available, look at the license. There are infinite variations between free software and classic source available.
I've heard the licenses Meta releases its AI models under described as "open access", to differentiate them from the stricter "open source" definition.
'Free' software has problems with its name too. The ones muddying the waters are people and companies releasing source code with a proprietary licence while trying to latch onto the open source branding.
>as open source really does only mean source available
The definition and history of the term as a licence is unambiguous in that the only restriction on redistribution is that it contains the source code under the same licence. There are senior engineers alive today that weren't even born when this was the commonly understood meaning of the term, it's not a new concept.
The term and usage is being co-opted these days but that's bound to happen when it's not a legally protected definition. Give it another 10-20 years and I'm sure we'll be having the same argument over whatever term ends up replacing 'open source'.
In this case, the evolved version of open source fails to convey a shared concept in comparison to the prior term, “free and open source software” or FOSS for a shorthand adjective
Here, people with knowledge of the lexicon are using it accurately, and people without knowledge of the lexicon or its etymology are complaining when they should be pushing for FOSS instead of getting surprised everytime
The open source[0] is the only reason anyone has time to make most of the valuable free software.
We can't all be like Donald Knuth or Simon Tatham making TeX and PuTTY as personal projects.
[0] specifically the freedom to fork, to develop further, and to make new releases that others can also build upon, which means I aver that many of the public AI models are sufficiently open that they're de facto open source even if the licensing isn't there.
Even if it's a de jure violation of the copyright to make a derivative, I'm not sure you could prove that had happened when all the weights are floating point numbers you can randomise slightly as a first step — if training just happens to move them back to the original values, well, that's just evidence the optimiser was working.
The F, free software. opensource® isn't needed but it became a bigger brand than free software and everything with source available is called open source nowadays
You have free software. Free software is pretty rigidly defined. You also have open source software, which people also seem to think is defined. I'm my opinion, the concept of open source software is vague enough that its definition is open to interpretation. Look at the people claiming that source available software is open source. Source available software is, in fact, open source software, even if it's not compatible with copyleft. Free software is not open to interpretation. Open source software can be free software, but some software can rightfully be called open source software even if it isn't free software. So, if we are using the terms interchangeably because they are the same thing, then open source is a redundant term. If open source software and free software are not the same, which might be the case sometimes, then I want free software. I'm not a programmer. I don't care to make money from software and, frankly, I don't care about the money making aspect of software. Open source stuff, to me, reeks of corporate capture. I don't want telemetry, or to be bled financially to use a product. I don't believe that software is or can ever be a product. Algorithms shouldn't be copyrighted even if they are wrapped in a programming language. I don't care about implementation. I think this is a case of A is B and B is sometimes A. It's the sometimes case that really bothers me. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
I mean that software, in it's written form, is the documentation of knowledge from software development, a service. I view sciencing as another service that produces knowledge. Knowledge has zero cost of duplication and, as such, cannot be considered a product. Artifacts that are produced by the application of knowledge are products because they have a non-zero cost of duplication. Computer hardware is an example of a product. I don't view intellectual property as property either. Software, in my opinion, isn't a product. Software is knowledge. I don't claim to be correct. I'm attempting to share my point of view. Anything with zero cost of duplication isn't a product in my mind because these things are infinitely copyable once created. Once a mathematician discovers a math they don't retain rights to it. Charging money for software is, in my view, no different than trying to make people pay for secret knowledge. You might be able to keep the secret locked down for a while, but it will get out eventually. Knowledge is the closest thing we have to magic, and if we choose to view it through the zero sum lens of capitalism, I think that does society a disservice in the long run. If I were a wizard I would share the magic, not try to charge money to teach people a spell or two. It might be the case that all products are knowledge given form, but keep in mind that knowledge exists before and after discovery and its fruits/artifacts must be created with work.
I mean I’m happy with just the weights if that’s all they can do. If it’s actually useful then you should be able to use it to build something important, not just make middlemen “shovels during goldrush” saas apps
They've clearly said they are truly making this open source, the hope you're replying to is not about data vs. weights it's about licensing. Having all the weights and training data isn't really useful if the license prevents you from using it. In fact it's a problem since you might open yourself up to trouble just by reading it.
Lots of neural nets are pretty standard, and work by multiplying lots of numbers by other ones. The key is to figure out which numbers to use. Those are the weights of each connection between the artificial neurons in the model.
I would want an open source company which has clear one time pricing for commercial uses. I think if a company could release state of the art open source model, 1000 compnaies could definitely pay $5000, making it much more sustainable.
If there was a black box of ChatGPT that doesn't need to connect to the Internet companies would gladly pay $50k/yearly to use it. There's huge demand but privacy concerns keep a lot of corporations away.
Maybe at today cost. But this is a lab about AI not just LLM. Also given that French research is underfunded since decades, our researchers are accustomed to producing good results at a budget cost.
“French research is underfunded since decades” is a French-ism,
just so you know. Normally native English speakers would say “French research has been underfunded for decades”.
I've noticed a lot of comments on Hacker News that use this construction. I don't point it out because often people dislike unsolicited advice about their English.
Spanish speakers also make this mistake. I haven't met German speakers, but they also say the equivalent of "is (adjective) since (time)" in German. It makes me wonder if English is just unusually strict about this distinction compared to other European languages.
I am also not a huge fan of unsolicited grammatical advice, because I feel like it's both low effort and derails the conversation. If the grammar error is more syntactical in nature and doesn't obscure the meaning of the thoughts intended to be conveyed, then let's just all move on.
This is an international forum, we're well accustomed to being able to parse meaning despite a few inconsequential grammatical issues.
I pointed it out because when I lived in France, I personally appreciated people pointing out grammatical mistakes I made in French. If the OP doesn’t care about sounding more like a native English speaker, that’s perfectly fine and he can just ignore my comment.
People can just not engage in conversations they don’t like. This forum has a branching structure, it is easy to hide a topic that you don’t like.
If someone was to be really odious and hateful, the presence of that sort of thing could be harmful, but this seems like a polite correction of a common problem. And it is an international forum, there are plenty of people who might get something from language-chat.
As someone learning a language that's not my native one, people who correct my Chinese kindly are the absolute gold standard. People who correct it rudely are rare but still more helpful than people who say nothing and just move on. This is very common in language learning communities. My default assumption is that other people who are learning a language that I know natively probably feel similar, and would appreciate kind, contextual corrections. I am happy to adjust if someone lets me know they don't want that or if it's against the rules of a specific forum.
I think most European languages lack the distinction between “he did X” and “he has done X”. Actually, a lot of languages (including Spanish, German and French) have a distinction like this syntactically but it doesn’t really mean the same thing as it does in English.
Huh, I just had a fairly long and fruitless conversation with ChatGPT 4 trying to understand whether this was true. ChatGPT kept insisting that romance languages distinguish between the preterite ("he did," simple past tense) and the present perfect ("he has done"), but every time I asked it to give me specific examples it would start translating them, find that they were the same, and then say "well, in Italian [or French] it's actually more about context..."
Finally it was able to give me the Spanish "Él hizo esto" vs "Él ha hecho esto," but admitted that whether one used one vs the other was quite regional.
In French, they only use the equivalent of the simple past tense in books, but in speech they usually only ever say the equivalent of "has done" in speech no matter the context. I don't speak French (not as a second language nor as my native language), but this is something I've read about secondhand in textbooks and online.
In Spanish, they do make a distinction in neutral speech, but it's not uncommon for someone to only ever use one or the other depending on the region they're from. The auxiliary verb form ("haber hecho" / "to have done") is more common in Spain than Latin America. Though, I don't know how much we should go into this; I feel like we've kind of derailed from the original topic.
That can be used with either a duration (“depuis des décennies”) or a point in time (“depuis 1995”). English “since” can only be used with a point in time.
EU is starting a program where AI startups will get access to their supercomputers and also get a chance to win prizes.
16 November 2023: Commission opens access to EU supercomputers to speed up artificial intelligence development [0]
- Launch of the Large AI grand challenge: This competition – launched today, is a collaboration led by the EU funded project AI-BOOST, with access to the European Supercomputers being facilitated by the EuroHPC JU. It encourages the wide participation from European start-ups with experience in large-scale AI models. The winners are expected to release the developed models under an open-source license for non-commercial use, or through publishing their research findings. The challenge will select up to four promising European AI start-ups that will be given access to EuroHPC supercomputing facilities to foster the development of large-scale AI models in Europe and a €1 million prize will be distributed among the winners.
- Opening up European supercomputer capacity: Access will be established for ethical and responsible AI start-ups, enabling them to efficiently train their models using European supercomputers.
- Enhanced activities and services: the EuroHPC JU will advance activities and services powered by High-Performance Computing to foster trustworthy AI in Europe. These efforts will aim to facilitate increased accessibility for AI communities and promote the optimal and efficient use of HPC technologies for scientific and industrial innovation.
Starting and scaling a business in Europe is harder than in America. This is true for fundamental reasons, like language and national borders. It’s also true due to regulation and the culture of work and towards commerce in general.
Some of those come with reasonable tradeoffs, e.g. in respect of employee protections. Many do not, particularly when it comes to licensing, bureaucracy and the peculiar way most European tax law and regulation tries to compensate for its licensing and bureaucracy by adding more bureaucracy in front of a balancing subsidy.
Opinion of a german here: Build & break things (without caring for laws or implications) is what the US and their companies do. Often it works, and sometimes breaking the law makes a new law pop up to legalize it, but that's not a good thing.
Yes, it's a big annoying to start a company in some EU countries. No, it's not as bad as HN claims.
During the conference where it was announced, they indicated they have a partnership with Scaleway to access their Nabu 2023 supercomputer[0]. I expect it will be similar to the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft Azure, with free credits as part of their investment in exchange for being at the forefront of AI datacenter design. Indeed, Xavier Niel is one of three investors in Kyutai, and founded Scaleway.
"But to put things into perspective, GPT-3 175B model required 3.14E23 FLOPS of computing for training. Even at theoretical 28 TFLOPS for V100 and lowest 3 year reserved cloud pricing we could find, this will take 355 GPU-years and cost $4.6M for a single training run."
Mistral is genuinely groundbreaking, for a fast, locally-hosted model without content filtering at the base layer. You can try it online here: https://labs.perplexity.ai/ (switch to Mistral)
It's very fast, but it doesn't seem very good. It doesn't take instruction well (acknowledges and spits back the same wrong stuff) and doesn't seem to have much of a corpus or it's dropping most of it on the floor because it successfully answers zero of my three basic smoke-test questions.
what do you mean by 'corpus'? It is only 13GB so questions that require recalling specific facts aren't going to work well with so little room for 'compression', but asking mistral to write emails or perform style revisions works quite well for me
There's some compute also, which may not be counted in the 330M
"Co-founded by the Iliad group...To do this, the laboratory will use the computing power made available to it by Scaleway, an iliad Group subsidiary. Scaleway’s supercomputer has the highest-performance computing power for AI applications deployed to date in Europe."
That money will go fast with trying to poach out of industry , buying nvidia hardware, and no clear direction. Hopefully it is just the fault of the author and not actually another case hoping a bunch of phds will come up with something given time and money.
