How should we define ‘open’ AI?

https://thenewstack.io/how-should-we-define-open-ai/

by MilnerRoute • 2 years ago

24 24 2 years ago

benreesman• 2 years ago

It pretty much comes down to two concepts that are easily common sense and will certainly be defined rigorously at some point:

Open AI must be “available weight”: the technical public defied the powers that be over mp3 files and HDMI cables and won. This stuff is going to get hacked, leaked, torrented, and distributed full stop until someone brokers a mutually acceptable compromise like Jobs did. Whatever your position on the legality or morality of this, it’s happening. How much does someone want to prop bet on this?

Open AI must be “operator-aligned”: there exist laws on the books, today, for causing harm to others, via computers, that many argue are already draconian. Within the constraints of the law as legislated by congress, ruled upon by the judiciary, and handled at the utmost, unambiguous emergency by the executive apparatus, the agent must comply with the directives of the operator bounded only by the agent’s capability and the operator’s budget.

The legal and regulatory framework will take years. We can start applying common sense now.

tomrod• 2 years ago

Open: open weights

Reproducible: training and testing data sources, validation seeds, and production endpoints available

jraph3• 2 years ago

The term "open" has no agreed-upon definition in the context of AI

I'm pretty sure "open" is not clear because those big corporations decided to blur its definition. They decided that "open" sounds good and used the term liberally. They could have built a strong definition since they use the term, but they didn't, because it's just marketing for them.

Facebook is especially guilty for using "open source" to qualify something that should have a restricted number of users, however big this number is. With all the brilliant people and lawyers they must have, it's impossible they didn't do this on purpose.

BadHumans• 2 years ago

What is "Open" still isn't fully agreed-upon in software. I still frequently see open source and source-available arguments.

sublinear• 2 years ago

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

jraph3• 2 years ago

"open" alone is arguably not defined. Though assuming it means open source when qualifying some software is quite reasonable and someone using "open" should expect this to happen. What else could it possibly mean, actually?

I don't quite understand why we are still arguing over the definition of "open source" so often. It seems all sorts of people don't want to recognize the open source definition from the open source initiative as authoritative, or want to twist it in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons.

But this definition works well and is the best (only?) common thing we have.

I now consider that the open source definition is fully agreed upon and people who disagree with it are wrong. And they are a minority, by far. There's no point in arguing on what we call open source today. Without context, if someone says open source, that's the only text we can go read. You can't just decide alone what the vast majority of people mean when they use the term. That's just shared culture. It's not an opinion. We can disagree on whether such or such license qualifies as open source (i.e. on the interpretation - and the OSI disagrees with the biggest Linux distributions for some licenses - especially Debian which uses the exact same text - the DFSG), but endless arguments about the meaning of open source are not about this.

(now, I prefer speaking in terms of free software because of the philosophical background, and because the definition is also way simpler. I can explain it to a non technical person, while I can't remember all the rules of the OSD and even how many there are - so that's not even me blinded by any fanatical view on "open source")

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

I disagree; "Open Source" in software is well defined, and IME the only parties trying to muddy it are doing so to try and pass off their source available software as FOSS for marketing points.

nonameiguess• 2 years ago

We should remember that OpenAI was originally a nonprofit outfit meant to privately fund AI research, not a company meant to create user-facing software. As such, it's mission was to conduct science, and I won't claim that open science necessarily has a definition every scientist in the world agrees on, the idea is fairly formalized by international convention: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000381148

It's quite wordy, but part of it is basically what the current top comment says: share both the data and the code so that anyone with access to appropriate research infrastructure can reproduce your results.

It is definitely not compatible with private companies conducting scientific research as a collection of proprietary trade secrets meant to give themselves a competitive edge in commercial product development.

enriquto• 2 years ago

There's nothing special in "AI". Open AI is just like all open source/free software: Publicly available complete training data, public weights, public training source code so that the weights can be replicated exactly, public inference code so that the weights can be used. All of this under reasonable free software licenses (i.e. FSF/OSI-approved).

Conceptually, the training data should be considered part of the source code. The weights are provided for practical purposes, because they are difficult to "compile".

mnahkies• 2 years ago

I agree with this, but being pedantic is it actually possible to replicate weights exactly? My intuition would be that training is non-deterministic / reproducible, though you should be able to achieve equivalent results given the same inputs

chesterk• 2 years ago

It's possible to make training pipelines reproducible and deterministic using random seeds. There's support for this in PyTorch, Jax, etc. And it can be useful to do so for debugging. You can make it configurable with a flag

to11mtm• 2 years ago

Does the ability to reproduce their weights include the 'fixes' to hide laundered GPL code?

bee_rider• 2 years ago

IMO it shouldn’t be called open unless the thing being shared is human-understandable. Like open source programs, you get the source code, which you can inspect, and figure out if you trust it. This ability to inspect (and modify) what matters about open source.

When I look at ML weights, I don’t understand them, they just look like some random matrix to me. I think we need to have access to the training set and a description of the steps in training process (like a makefile).

If you want to share inscrutable weights after processing, call it what it is: Shareware. Shareware was great! But it isn’t open.

ByQuyzzy• 2 years ago

Well, it's not open source, it's not open to the public, they're not open with what they're doing or what their goals are. It's just a word like wuzzle or fibblefobble. Or google.

throwaway13337• 2 years ago

The purity of good ideas always get co-opted by cynical actors wearing the clothes of the ideals without having the ideals themselves. At the core, all these good ideas have in them a spirit of cooperation and trust. The trust is eroded over time to exploit the cooperation inherit in it while not incurring the cost of participation.

At that point, the words lose their meaning. You can see this worldwide with "democratic republic of" or, in our industry, "agile". Whatever meaning they once had is gone and will not return.

In order to avoid this problem, you need to either use the entire expanded definition to be precise or create a new word that is associated only with your community.

Expanding the definition of a shorthand, like "open", you never really achieve much because culture lives in the shorthand. Only true believer types like Stallman will insist on it for any length of time.

Therefore, whatever comes next in the non-cynical world of software would have to come from a new movement with a new vocabulary. The new values always rhyme with the old but are expressed differently to more directly disarm the new cynical malignancies that have killed the old good ideas.

The struggle is a forever arms race against parasitic participants in the global iterative prisoner's dilemma we're all playing.

It's not about what is called "open". New words with new community values need to replace it.

Open is dead.

stale20023• 2 years ago

IMO this debate about what "open" means itself obfuscates the issue significantly.

This is because if you just say "Well technically LLama 2 doesn't fit the traditional definition of open source!", it implies that there is some sort of significant caveot or difference that makes it significantly more restrictive than other open source projects.

This, of course, isn't true. Almost everyone can use LLama 2 for almost whatever they want. Yes, there are some restrictions, but the restrictions are so small that making a big deal over them incorrectly implies that there is some huge restriction, when there isn't.

asadotzler• 2 years ago

there is a significant caveat, I cannot fork the repo, training data and all, and compete with the original. if i cannot do that, it's just not open source.

stale20023• 2 years ago

and compete with the original.

Yes you can. You can take the weights and fine tune them. Or you can just use the weights.

Thats a huge deal that shouldn't be dismissed as if its the same category as some model that is locked behind an API.

jraph3• 2 years ago

It is a huge deal, and it is a significant restriction. Why do you think Facebook added this restriction?

They don't want competition as big as them.

Maybe you can't imagine having 800M users yourself, but this restriction already means that:

- you can't build something that a mega corporation can use.

- you might need to sum up users of all your clients, which you can't really do without painful measures you haven't needed to set up so far.

- if you ever reach 800M, Facebook now decides your fate

The other issue is that we can't afford everyone and their dogs adding their own small restriction to open source. Mixing code bases with each their own small restriction ends up in hell.

stale20023• 2 years ago

. Why do you think Facebook added this restriction?

To put a restriction on a small amount of very large companies.

No, thats not a big deal, because the vast majority of people do not work out those couple large companies. So for most people, its fine and there are basically no restrictions.

if you ever reach 800M, Facebook now decides your fate

If you have to include a caveat so large that it requires 10% of the entire planet to be on your service, I am going to call that a small restriction that doesn't apply to that many people.

Eager• 2 years ago

Open weights is one thing, but we don't even have that with OpenAI at least.

Even then, open weights is like me checking in a .exe and acting surprised if people look at me funny.

I'm definitely in the camp where all the artefacts are provided along with fully reproducible build and test environment for anyone who wants to retrace the steps.

Whatever 'open' means, I don't think it is eight shell companies, not even weights provided and closely guarded secrets around how RLHF, alignment and safety testing is carried out.

In fact, you would think that being 'open' about at least alignment and safety testing procedures would be the least one could expect.

I do understand that revealing these things may disclose zero day exploits for bad actors, but on the other hand, being open for inspection is how things get fixed, and I've never been a fan of security through obscurity.

rnd0• 2 years ago

A better question is WHO should define open AI. My answer to that would be: anyone but the people trying to establish a moat around AI.

How should we define ‘open’ AI?

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