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Comment by diggan

4 months ago

I don't know if it's you and I (and some others) who are just uptight sticklers or something, but it bothers me a ton too. Same thing happening with "open source" in connection to LLMs, where suddenly some companies have decided to try to redefine the meaning, people lack the care to make the distinction.

In a dream world, each new terminology goes through an RFC to figure out a meaning we all (some of us) can agree to, so at least we can link to an angry RFC when people continue to misuse the term anyways.

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diggan

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simonw  4 months ago

Yeah that "open source" thing is SO frustrating. We have a very well established definition for what "open source" means: https://opensource.org/osd

I have a suspicion that Facebook insist on calling their open weights models "open source" because the EU AI act says "This Regulation does not apply to AI systems released under free and open-source licences" but doesn't do a good job of defining what "open-source" means! Bottom of this page: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/2/

Correction: the closest it gets to defining open source is in https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/102/

> The licence should be considered to be free and open-source also when it allows users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software and data, including models under the condition that the original provider of the model is credited, the identical or comparable terms of distribution are respected.

(I found that by piping the entire EU AI act through Gemini 2.5 Flash - https://gist.github.com/simonw/f2e341a2e8ea9ca75c6426fa85bc2...)

  • fragmede  4 months ago

    In this wonderful future where we can leave responses longer than a tweet and have conversations longer than 30-second sound bytes, that people can understand, well at least get them understanding your point of view, even if they don't join the team. Having a succinct explanation for the sticklierness is still key though. For not letting Mark Zuckerberg co-opt the term Open Source, it's that it's not open source if I can't see why the LLM won't tell me how to make cocaine. Need to workshop that a lot so it fits on a t-shirt, but that is the gist of it.