| Technically, once a model is initialised, that's it. That is a model. If released, that would be, even for the most pedantic absolutists, undoubtably open source.

That is true. But it is not the same model as the LLM created by combining the released weights with the released architecture. The thing that is the "binary blob" is the weights. It is pretty much exactly akin to a Linux driver that depends on linux-firmware. It is wonderful that it exists! But it is only partly open.

| Now, what licensing does, and the only thing that licensing can do is to give you rights to inspect, modify and release that model. That's it. A license will never give you (it cannot) the right to have the internal IP, knowledge, know-how or the "why's" on how the model was edited. That's on you. You have the right to modify, but you can't get the right to know how others have modified it, from a license file. Never had, never will.

| In practice, we do have fully open (open data, open training code, open source models) models. Apertus, from Switzerland and Olmo from the US. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely great that we have these models, they are very important for the community, and they do help inform everyone about what works, what doesn't, and so on.

You seem to contradict yourself here. That said: I appreciate the correction of my perception that there aren't truly open large language models.