Hacker News Reader

Comment by trisfromgoogle | Hacker News Reader

It would be great to understand what you mean by this -- we have a deep love for open source and the open developer ecosystem. Our open source team also released a blog today describing the rationale and approach for open models and continuing AI releases in the open ecosystem:

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2024/02/building-open-mode...

Thoughts and feedback welcome, as always.

View on HN

If you truly love Open Source, you should update the the language you use to describe your models so it doesn't mislead people into thinking it has something to do with Open Source.

Despite being called "Open", the Gemma weights are released under a license that is incompatible with the Open Source Definition. It has more in common with Source-Available Software, and as such it should be called a "Weights-Available Model".

Open source is not defined as strictly as what you are suggesting it is. If you wish to have a stricter definition, a new term should probably be used. I believe I've heard it referred to as libre software in the past

"Open Source Software" always refers to software that meets the Open Source Definition. "Libre Software" always refers to software that meets the Free Software Definition. In practice the two are often identical, hence the abbreviations "FOSS" (Free and Open Source Software) and "FLOSS" (Free/Libre and Open Source Software).

Although I don't know Google's motivation for using "Open" to describe proprietary model weights, the practical result is increasing confusion about Open Source Software. It's behavior that benefits any organization wanting to enjoy the good image of the Open Source Software community while not actually caring about that community at all.

The statement on you not being able to use LLaMA 2 to benchmark is also false and highly misleading see https://x.com/BlancheMinerva/status/1760302091166241163?s=20

    If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users [...] is greater than 700 million monthly active users [...] you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement

I would guess this is Google being careful to not be burned by this lame clause in the Llama 2 license.

It's aimed directly at them (and OpenAI and Microsoft) so they have to honor it if they don't want a legal battle. But there's nothing stopping others from doing benchmarking.

For the reference of people seeing this now: The tweet that person linked has now been deleted and the scientist who tweeted it has acknowledged they were wrong and retracted their claim, as all good scientists should.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com