It's usually against the license to redistribute modified binaries. There are few pieces of software (I cannot think of any) that allow redistribution of modified binaries, but aren't open source.
As a result, in practice, the only example I can think of is cracks for pirated software.
You can hardly re-create the binary from a suitable source, just like the weights just fell from the sky. But you can change the binary (patch the machine code) just like you can adjust the weights. The comparison is quite apt.
Hotpatching binaries used to be common. It's less so in the modern age but mainly because we moved software to higher levels of abstractions, virtual machines and interpreters, and also because rebuilding even a massive project from source is achievable on commodity hardware. You can still see various hotpatching schemes being developed, for instance to allow partial recompile of the sources while developping.
If in 2080 we can retrain Opus 129.5 directly on dev machines from scratch in <2h, I doubt many will bother messing with the weights directly.
You can read and edit binary code just fine, it's much easier with AI too
Do you have examples you can point to?
For example there are more than 100k modified weights on hugging face.
It's usually against the license to redistribute modified binaries. There are few pieces of software (I cannot think of any) that allow redistribution of modified binaries, but aren't open source.
As a result, in practice, the only example I can think of is cracks for pirated software.
Easy: https://www.nexusmods.com/
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Indeed.
You can hardly re-create the binary from a suitable source, just like the weights just fell from the sky. But you can change the binary (patch the machine code) just like you can adjust the weights. The comparison is quite apt.
Yes?
The whole reverse engineering and cracking scene is built upon this premise, you know.
Calling it a "cracking scene" shows the different, though. Open weight models are intended to be used this way.
Hotpatching binaries used to be common. It's less so in the modern age but mainly because we moved software to higher levels of abstractions, virtual machines and interpreters, and also because rebuilding even a massive project from source is achievable on commodity hardware. You can still see various hotpatching schemes being developed, for instance to allow partial recompile of the sources while developping.
If in 2080 we can retrain Opus 129.5 directly on dev machines from scratch in <2h, I doubt many will bother messing with the weights directly.
don't forget game modding. it's the only way it even works
Post training is general purpose method, same process that original authors used - that's not the case with binaries.
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