OpenFatigue™ – Open is the new closed | Hacker News Reader

OpenFatigue™ – Open is the new closed

openfatigue.ai

242 pointsajcp51 comments

Just today I have thought about how in the olden days "Open" meant "we have a SDK you can buy for exorbitant amount of money to talk with our closed device or software".

You also had to sacrifice half your blood, first and second newborn to be able to sign that NDA required to buy a couple of zip archives, which contained a Frankestein assembly of files, folders and a README.TXT file.

I understand the sticklers who are annoyed at people using open weight and open source interchangeably, but it misses some nuance. A common refrain I see is "it's like saying a shareware app is open source!" - that's just wrong.

Open source means you can modify, rebuild, and re-distribute the code and the resulting app. Open weights you can do two of those things - you can modify and re-distributed. They can't be re-built, since you're missing the original training data - but they are a form of open that exists somewhere between open source and closed source. Derivative works are allowed, but the source material isn't available.

I don't see people complaining about creative commons licensed images or audio being "not real open source", and open weight models seem about the same as that to me.

I disagree. Open source is when the source is open. Free software is when you are free to make modifications and redistribute.

Edit: as bayindirh noted, according to OSI's definition, I am completely incorrect about redistribution of modifications.

The definition of Open Source [0] is freer than what you portray, but Open Weights is not open by this definition. As I said in the thread, it's more like "weights available, with some freedoms attached".

Current state is detrimental to both Free/Open Software and AI ecosystems at the same time.

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd

I stand corrected.

My point was never that open weights = open source, so it’s not surprising that they fail the OSI definition of open source.

My point is that open weights exists somewhere on the spectrum between closed source and open source, and imo much closer to open source than closed.

As evidence, see the thousands of open-weight model derived models on hugging face.

you're still correct.

"open source" is ambiguous (in cases this is deliberate)

OSI has its own definition of open source, but there's no reason someone can't say their code is "open source" because you can see the source code.

This is akin to saying 10tb hard disk... very few people quantify this with tera or tebi or Ti or whatever unless there is some legal fineprint required. and there is no hard legal definition for calling something "open source".

In any case, stallman has a take on the difference in philosophy of the OSI version:

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

If you couldnt tell I am very much on the Stallman side of things, but I almost wish they had been "libre" from the start so you don't have to constantly make the free beer/speech distinction when talking about it.

> I don't see people complaining about creative commons licensed images or audio being "not real open source", and open weight models seem about the same as that to me.

Creative Commons licenses are a spectrum from CC BY to CC BY-NC-ND. All six licenses offer different freedoms and requirements about the work licensed.

As I said in another comment, Open meant that you can buy an interface to the thing you are interested in. Nothing like Open Source or Free Software of today, and Open Weights lean to the former than the latter, this is what rubs the people the wrong way (incl. me).

A better term would be weights-available. Do not create false assumptions about so-called openness of a model, and is akin to sharing an object file which you can compile into something but its source is not available to start from scratch.

Nuances matter, that's true, but the packaging of the facts also matter. A good example is, again, XKCD's comic titled Free [0]. Open weights are open as the open of 2000s commercial software, maybe with a free SDK, but the labeling is deceiving on purpose.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/641/

> Open weights are open as the open of 2000s commercial software, maybe with a free SDK

This just isn’t true. 2000s commercial software you buy under a restrictive license, and then extend using an sdk. You can’t modify or distribute the code only your plugin or extension. Open weight models you freely download and modify and extend using open source tools, and create derivative works. The licenses tend to be very permissive (e.g. Apache 2.0 https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B/blob/main/LICENSE)

Perhaps you are not aware of the thousands of derivative models that have been created based on open weight models? Ones tuned for this or that task, expanded, hacked apart.

> akin to sharing an object file which you can compile into something

I see what you are getting at, but modifying object files isn’t practical or simple or commonly done. A model that’s been post trained isn’t the old model with a lump of new code attached to it. The weights have been irreversibly altered and it’s a new thing now. A derivative work.

My contention is that model weights are a form of source code. They the software AND a modifiable thing, closer to minified js than a binary blob. Less flexible than the full training data would be, in some ways, but more useful in others (unless you have a large data center at your disposal). Would you consider something closed source if it had a bunch of generated code, but didn’t include the code used to generate the generated code? I would.

I am glad people still take the time to put stuff like this up on the internet.

You mean prompt their AI to build it for them?

Have you put anything up on the internet using an AI prompt to build it? Would love to see it. Especially if it is clever or tongue in cheek.

Yes, it takes effort to do something clever with an LLM because LLMs can do only one type of "humor". And it's precisely the kind of humor I see everywhere on this website. Tell me that you sincerely laughed at this:

> “I bought a house through an app called Open-something and now I don't know if I own a home or a model checkpoint.”

I don't even know what this means. No human has read this and thought to themselves "this is a funny joke, let's keep it". Or how about this:

> “I tried to make a restaurant reservation and accidentally fine-tuned a language model. OpenFatigue finally made me feel seen.”

...or this:

> “My open-source project got forked into a closed product called OpenMyProject. Now I just lie on the floor.”

This is another example of "Claude make me a joke website for HN points", with zero effort behind it. There's so much real, human work in the /new queue, and we upvote this...

Hmm. I sense your dismay and while I understand the underlying argument, I would like you to offer you a nugget of wisdom bestowed to me by level 9 monk of the Tibetan variety.

As I have reached the high doors of the oft-closed monastery and sought wisdom of the doorkeeper I was gently ushered in to a courtyard, where a line was already forming to meet the enlightened one.

Patiently I have waited for the other fools to utter their nonsense at the poor master and, eventually, my time has come.

I have asked:

Lord, how do I know it is funny?

You know what he said?

'People laugh.'

Such a ripoff.

I laughed out loud at the testimonials, yes. This site being created with AI is kind of the cherry on top, no?

Given the cost of .ai domains, this is a pretty expensive joke.

> Given the cost of .ai domains, this is a pretty expensive joke.

In the age of ~AI~ SI, "expensive" is a state of mind.

STS Paper: 50 Shades of Open (2016) https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Fifty_Shades_of_Open

Excellent. Love that the Github link in the footer goes to a private (or non-existent) repo.

OpenFatigue is a game changer. It's truly Open and Elon agrees, so its true.

I'm surprised about the lack of Elon's approval on the site. Maybe because it's spanking new and he's just too busy running 20 companies at the same time?

I showed OpenFatigue to my manager who has an MBA from Harvard. She fed the website into Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok immediately before the last of the letter "e" could even leave by mouth. The three bots concured: This is a game changer - the ultimate solution we have been waiting for. The missing link.

Three bots concurring isn't a mistake, it's a guarantee. Human review is suboptimal at that level of agreement. The probability that all three bots were making the same mistake was astronomically low.

In a flash of inspiration, she then asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok to write quick, precise emails in a technical format and Slack, Teams messages to blast to her superiors to bring this crucial discovery to their immediate attention. Within a minute of those messages, their agents responded, concurring that yes, indeed, this was worth paying attention to. Worth setting up an in person meeting in the big meeting room reserved for tactical management brainstorming sessions.

Within five minutes, the Big Tactical meeting room was reserved, swamped with all the high-level executives typing furiously into their keyboards, to their AI agents, asking for what they should do next, how to react and integrate this fascinating discovery into the company's ~AI~ SI fuelled workflows.

I eavesdropped, hoping to pass off as an IT technician dropping by to ensure the ~AI~ SI powered cameras were at peak performance, worthy of the meeting of minds about to take place.

My manager looked at me and I froze. She might blow my cover - after all, I had been her direct report for 3 years now, ever since she joined the company fresh off her MBA to manage all the software engineers. 5 years ago, my employer used to hire 1 maanger with an MBA per 10 engineers. In the age of ~AI~ SI though, all you need is 1 ~AI~ SI powered manager with an MBA to manage 100 engineers. Her GrokBot creates 150 tickets on JIRA a day, every workday and another GrokBot personally follows up on every engineer to figure out why didn't they close atleast 10 tickets. Are there blockers?

She asked me if she knew me, and I said unlikely, because I just had an MBA from University of Phoenix. She smirked dismissively, and asked me to be the scribe for the meeting in case the ~AI~ SI agent hallucinated again. I nodded. I couldn't risk her bot opening another JIRA ticket and asking for my name to put as the assignee. There couldn't be an audit trail documenting my transgressions.

The first slide was whether to reallocate token spend from all the engineers to OpenFatigue instead. My heart stopped ...

The recency bias here is thick! Let's rewind a bit to the 80s and 90s to extend the scope of the fatigue:

OpenLook (closed-source 1980s Unix desktop)

The Open Group (oligarchy of Unix vendors organized around a proprietary standard)

X/Open, Open Software Foundation (OSF) (Groups that merged to form The Open Group)

OpenStep (Proprietary software covered by a commercial EULA from NeXT)

OpenGL, OpenMAX, ...

You've inherited OpenFatigue from your dad!

In the Lisp world, Open Genera.

OpenDOC, OpenVMS, OpenType, ...

See also: any country with the word "democratic" or "republic" in its name

Sri Lanka?

South Korea?

Well, that website has successfully made "Open" feel like a fake, made up word to me. It is quite... something how a word that once meant "this project is FOSS" now just means "we like this word"

Some of us still trying to use it the proper way.

Oh I know, but its a bit of an uphill battle

"OpenOpen announces it will become ClosedOpen for safety reasons" :-D

But can I also get an app that replaces "Open" with "Butt"?

OpenCloud --> ButtButt

Funny story: I worked at a company where someone had the Chrome extension that replaced "cloud" with "butt". They were editing one of the company's docs pages, and when they hit "save" it swapped "cloud" to "butt" everywhere in the page.

They didn't notice right away, because the "butt" translation didn't run on WYSIWYG preview, so everything looked fine.

Yup...I had updated a few parts of a Drupal page and not realized that the extension ran on form and input elements. When I hit "Save", it persisted the butt-ified version of the page for all to see. I was later promoted, presumably for my invaluable contributions to our butt systems.

Unfortunately, the original extension is no longer available, and the page it happened on has gone through several iterations of content marking replacements over the years. https://wakamoleguy.com/p/clouds-and-butts

(Hi Dylan, hope you're well!)

haha hey! this was your story

why not just OpenButt?

my lord .... like ... just, why not?

The funniest (or most depressing, it depends) I've seen yet is for sure OpenFortune : https://www.openfortune.com

While I totally agree, there is precedent. HP OpenView came out in 1987, which was 11 years before the term "Open Source" became a thing.

If it doesn't know it hallucinates the result:

Verdict for “Dhvhj3d”:

Open Weights™

Openness score: 22%

Weights downloadable after 3 forms No training data Acceptable Use Policy longer than the model card

There are valid reasons to choose it, but in what sense is GPL more "open" than MIT?

The "Raise a seed round in one click" part got a nice chuckle out of me.

Well played.

was going to make a joke with open sesame and found out there's a real thing using it https://www.opensesame.com/

Open Pro is the "Most Open". I love it!

don't forget: https://openreceive.org/

Maybe we should start talking about open-washing (like green-washing is to ecological statements).

If you read open that much it looks even weirder. What will be the next fashion tech word?

I don't get the point. Running it on itself:

    Verdict for “https://openfatigue.ai/”:

    Formerly Open
    Openness score: 9%

    Was open until it got popular
    License changed on a Friday at 5pm
    Community forked it and called it OpenFormerly

Is this a joke site? First Pricing card

    Open

    $0/mo*

    Read the README
    Star the repo (required)
    Join the Discord (read-only)
    ~~Run the software~~ [strikeout]

    [Get Open]

Brilliant. Laughed out loud

my new cologne, based on a mix of spices imported from Sri Lanka in the late 1930 was not recognised. I'm appalled that 'Ceylon Musk' was not considered more open, a mere 12%...

Bottom Github link doesn't work, just as a heads up

That’s the point. ;) Site is Open(!).

haha. funny. i clicked the github link and its 404.

according to this, claude is open weights

I like that you spent $120 on this domain just to shitpost

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