alt Hacker News> The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path.
Right... and there are two problems with this:
1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the underlying assumptions about compute and scale needed are mostly on the mark. So you can release open-weight models and they will have great use cases and applications, but ultimately similar to how you don't use an open-source phone or a budget Android phone from Wal-Mart and you buy an iPhone instead, you will see that although they "do the same thing" one product is clearly superior and you just have to pay for it. For this to not be true...
2. then it incentivizes most (all?) companies, American, Chinese, or European to halt development of models because if you spend all the CAPEX and it can just be copied and turned open-source nobody will invest in that. Given that China is not halting development of proprietary models I believe the current strategy and the subsequent approach to release open-weight models is at best a stall tactic, and at worse a sign of desperation.
Open source and the support and development models around it have been great. But folks are a little too dogmatic about it. Open-source software isn't a moral good, and closed-source software isn't a moral wrong either.
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Software being open source has many strong positive externalities. It advances human knowledge and freedom. If you don't think that counts as a moral good then I'm baffled by what you think a moral good is.
Open source is in the tradition of humans sharing past knowledge, long-term we just can’t keep a secret it’s a time, honored tradition…
It's important also that open-weight isn't open source. If you can't download the training data (fully labeled), source code of the NN, and follow the README to build and train it yourself assuming oyu had the hardware then it's not open source.
tldr there's no "source" in open weight models therefore they are not open source.
Imagine there’s a school where all the kids there are being tutored by the best. Also imagine a bunch of neighboring schools drastically falling behind that would need insane amounts of money to keep up.
This becomes a problem because all the kids from the rich school will dominate the order schools. They’ll get even more money as time goes on from their kids paying it forward to the point where all other kids are bound to work for them.
Now let’s say one other school does have the money for best tutors, BUT they know they’ll run out pretty quickly. Instead of trying to compete in a losing game, they decide to give every school in the world access to their elite lesson plan. Now, for a time, everyone will be on close to a level playing field. If the other schools improve upon their own lesson plans and keep sharing them with others, one day the elite school will wake up to find they are no longer on top. The parents have started to move their kids to other schools because the rich school is no longer attractive at the high cost they charge students