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Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the few places I would actually prefer the GPL. If someone contributes to this repository with it's current license a company can simply get the weights for free and sell them. You've just made it easier to create another OpenAI, not keep the weights open and auditable.

To me, the openness and auditability of weights is the most important. Right now we're heading quickly towards a world where CyberDyne dominates the AI landscape and you're either going to be with them or not involved. In that case, forcing a potential user to contribute weights back will create a more robust ecosystem for so-called personal AI. There is no better license for that then some version of GPL.

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Yes I agree - I actually wrote something about this the other day. There's a need to think about how and when GPL style licensing can be applied to weights, and what terms make sense to accomplish the "software freedom" goals of the license while still keeping it usable. I'm not a lawyer, I've only considered it from the developer angle: http://marble.onl/posts/motivations_for_open_source.html

> a company can simply get the weights for free and sell them.

This is the flaw in your logic. If the weights are freely available, they can not be sold for much value. That will in turn mean there is no "another OpenAI", because the core product, AI, will basically be freely available.

If that's the case then we might as well short the stock of all the public cloud companies who repackage and sell Open Source software. Why use RDS when PostreSQL is open source?

Well, I am arguing basically that basically AI APIs would be much more prone to commodification. There would still be companies, of course, but probably not with value on FAANG scale etc...

Certainty it would be easier to set up an API for a given model than providing what RDS does, to borrow from your example.

Because RDS comes with infra to support the software. This is what many want from their ai weights too. For it to come with infra to support the deployment of apps that use the weights.

Having the weights on their own doesn't mean anyone can have their own OpenAI any more than having a core Google index snapshot would mean anyone can spin their own Google.

The timescale difference between the need for weights taking account of recent events and Google searches is huge.

A short while ago I wrote an AGPL-like license for model weights: https://freedevproject.org/faipl-1.0

I'm still suspecting that model weights aren't copyrightable, though.

Interesting question: To what degree does additional training obscure lineage of a set of weights?

> a company can simply get the weights for free and sell them

This is unironically best scenario for me. Multiple competing companies build infra that I can pay to use, instead of me building my infra that is powerful enough to run giant models.

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