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Catloafdev • yesterday at 8:14 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

> Paid models have an incentive not to do that because if the market discovers it there is a huge economy penalty, but the free open source models don't have that disincentive.

This just fundamentally isn't true. They run on the same economic model, but they have to release the weights to gain credibility, unlike the American labs.

> Do you ever worry whether these open source models have been trained to embed backdoors or leak secrets in very specific circumstances at some point in the future?

Open weight models are extensively analyzed. It is extremely unlikely there is an intentional 'backdoor when X' concept added to any of them. Not impossible, but unlikely for the same economic incentives you see in the other labs, and given that no evidence of anything along those lines has surfaced yet.


Replies

ericmay • yesterday at 9:48 PM

We've seen many open source software libraries, frameworks, and hosting platforms with vulnerabilities, backdoors, or leaks.

In my opinion, to suggest open-weight models are extensively analyzed while being net new and continuously released and the model itself being unintelligible to humans seems a bit premature.

It's possible that closed-weight models end up following the pattern of being arguably less secure since there are fewer eyes on them analogous to open source software but I don't think there's a perfect match here.