alt Hacker NewsAndroid and Chrome need on-device AI capabilities. Google can't lock down those weights like it can with server-side ML.
So it's easier to just release those models as open source and make it official, since someone would inevitably hack the weights out anyway.
Replies
panarky • today at 5:53 PM
> can't lock down those weights
They could lock them down legally which would prevent commercial use, but they choose not to, and they boast about how many tens of millions of times Gemma models have been downloaded by developers.
So there must be more to the rationale than just local model weights getting hacked out of devices.
Could say the same for camera processing in the Pixel Camera app or any other binary someone wants to re-use that comes included in a software distribution (seemingly for 'free'). They can't lock the instructions up on the server so they might as well make the binary be freely distributable?
Companies don't commonly give away executable binaries "just because", why'd they start now for these binary blobs that are the models?
Not that I'm unhappy about it! Yay for open data any day, I'm just not understanding why, at least beyond PR in nerd circles