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Comment by zoobab | Hacker News Reader

There is no definition of what an "open source AI model" is.

Too bad the AI Act was rushed, without waiting for a proper definition and consensus around what it means.

An open source AI model should be "if I run what you give me, for the amount of cycles you told me, on the data you give me, I get byte-for-byte your weights".

Byte for byte reproducibility is an extremely high bar. We don't even have that for most open source software. The reproducibility standard that is practice is perform within -+ epsilon on the test sets. That would be sufficient, and more practical, in my opinion.

We don't have that for software because compiler introduce a lot of randomness. Maybe training introduces randomness as well, I don't know (floating point errors accumulating?). If it does, your metric sounds good, if not, why not go for byte-for-byte...

When does a compiler produce randomness? I think non reproducible builds are usually due to environmental inputs (for example: build a date macro) or an undeespecified build process (such as: what compiler version, what build optimizations are used, etc). All of that can be constrained / defined, it's just work that people often don't do.

Reproducible Builds are quite common now, there is even a movement about them:

https://reproducible-builds.org/

I would go a step further than that.

A true open source AI model provides:

- Training source code

- Inferencing source code

- Weights

- Full training data set

#4 makes #3 possibly redundant (if you have the HW and time), but it is also problematic due to copyright, etc.

I would go even further and say that any data set must be available with the original raw data and a fully transparent log of everything filtered out, with reasoning. AI2’s Olmo is the most open LLM but relies on a dataset that they’ve editorialized without transparency.

Another consideration is licenses. Everything (code, data) must be released under an OSI approved license, not some made up proprietary one.

OSI is in the stage of gathering opinions to find an appropriate definition:

https://thenewstack.io/open-source-ai-osi-wrestles-with-a-de...

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