The classic effect of open sourcing is to hasten the commoditization and standardization of the component, which then allows an explosion of innovation on top of that stable base.
If you look at what’s happened with Stable Diffusion, this is exactly what we see. While it’s never been a cutting edge model (until soon with SD3), there’s been an explosion of capabilities advances in image model generation from it. Controlnet, best practices for LORA training, model merging, techniques for consistent characters and animation, alll coming out of the open source community.
In LLM land, though not as drastic, we see similar things happening, in particular technqiues for merging models to get rapid capability advances, and rapid creation of new patterns for agent interactions and tool use.
So while the models themselves might not be state of the art, open sourcing the models obviously pushes the state of the art.
In LLM land, though not as drastic, we see similar things happening, in particular technqiues for merging models to get rapid capability advances, and rapid creation of new patterns for agent interactions and tool use.
The biggest effect open sourcing LLMs seems to have is improving safety techniques. Why think this differentially accelerates capabilities over safety?
You are right, but I guess the thing I do actually care about here is the magnitude of the advancement (which is relevant for determining the sign of the action). How large an effect do you think the model merging stuff has (I’m thinking the effect where if you train a bunch of models, then average their weights, they do better). It seems very likely to me its essentially zero, but I do admit there’s a small negative tail that’s greater than the positive, so the average is likely negative.
As for agent interactions, all the (useful) advances there seem things that definitely would have been made even if nobody released any LLMs, and everything was APIs.
it’s true, but I don’t think there’s anything fundamental preventing the same sort of proliferation and advances in open source LLMs that we’ve seen in stable diffusion (aside from the fact that LLMs aren’t as useful for porn). that it has been relatively tame so far doesn’t change the basic pattern of how open source effects the growth of technology
The classic effect of open sourcing is to hasten the commoditization and standardization of the component, which then allows an explosion of innovation on top of that stable base.
If you look at what’s happened with Stable Diffusion, this is exactly what we see. While it’s never been a cutting edge model (until soon with SD3), there’s been an explosion of capabilities advances in image model generation from it. Controlnet, best practices for LORA training, model merging, techniques for consistent characters and animation, alll coming out of the open source community.
In LLM land, though not as drastic, we see similar things happening, in particular technqiues for merging models to get rapid capability advances, and rapid creation of new patterns for agent interactions and tool use.
So while the models themselves might not be state of the art, open sourcing the models obviously pushes the state of the art.
The biggest effect open sourcing LLMs seems to have is improving safety techniques. Why think this differentially accelerates capabilities over safety?
it doesn’t seem like that’s the case to me—but even if it were the case, isn’t that moving the goal posts of the original post?
You are right, but I guess the thing I do actually care about here is the magnitude of the advancement (which is relevant for determining the sign of the action). How large an effect do you think the model merging stuff has (I’m thinking the effect where if you train a bunch of models, then average their weights, they do better). It seems very likely to me its essentially zero, but I do admit there’s a small negative tail that’s greater than the positive, so the average is likely negative.
As for agent interactions, all the (useful) advances there seem things that definitely would have been made even if nobody released any LLMs, and everything was APIs.
it’s true, but I don’t think there’s anything fundamental preventing the same sort of proliferation and advances in open source LLMs that we’ve seen in stable diffusion (aside from the fact that LLMs aren’t as useful for porn). that it has been relatively tame so far doesn’t change the basic pattern of how open source effects the growth of technology
I’ll believe it when I see it. The man who said it would be an open release has just
been firedstepped down as CEO.yeah, it’s much less likely now