If I vibe-coded an app prompting, say, Claude, and released it along with the generated code, would you have the same objections to me calling it “open source,”
No, because I don’t think this misleads people. Granted, the term “open source” is fuzzy at the boundaries. Should we use the term? I don’t know, but if we do, it only makes sense if it means something different from “closed source”.
wrong in suggesting they prefer to work with the model by editing the training data and “recompiling” instead of starting with the weights
One doesn’t exclude the other. If you’re creating v2 of your model, you’d likely: take the training code and data for v1; make some changes / add new things; run the new training code on the new data. For minor changes you may prefer to do fine-tuning on the weights.
There’s a clear and obvious difference between models like Qwen, DeepSeek, and Llama; and models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini; and the well-established and widely-understood phrase for this difference is “open source”, contrasted with “proprietary” or “closed source,” used in things like hardware, fonts,[1] and military intelligence. If you like, think of it as a kind of fossilization of the phrase, where the “source” part has ceased to be more than an etymological curiosity; you can certainly dislike this phenomenon, but – and I say this with regret since I’m far more prescriptivist than the next guy – trying to change it is probably pissing upwind.
The restrictions on usage are a better argument: among the models with weights available, some are clearly more “open source”[2] than others, and I’d even agree that Llama’s 700-million-user restriction means that, while for most practical purposes it’s open source, it’s technically only “source-available.”
It’s not obvious to what extent fonts count as programs, and their “source code” is usually nothing more than the glyphs, which can be read out from proprietary fonts trivially. Maybe there’s a bit of obfuscation one could perform on the feature file?
The usage I’m objecting to started, as far as I can tell, about 2 years ago with Llama 2. The term “open weights”, which is often used interchangably, is a much better fit.
No, because I don’t think this misleads people. Granted, the term “open source” is fuzzy at the boundaries. Should we use the term? I don’t know, but if we do, it only makes sense if it means something different from “closed source”.
One doesn’t exclude the other. If you’re creating v2 of your model, you’d likely: take the training code and data for v1; make some changes / add new things; run the new training code on the new data. For minor changes you may prefer to do fine-tuning on the weights.
There’s a clear and obvious difference between models like Qwen, DeepSeek, and Llama; and models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini; and the well-established and widely-understood phrase for this difference is “open source”, contrasted with “proprietary” or “closed source,” used in things like hardware, fonts,[1] and military intelligence. If you like, think of it as a kind of fossilization of the phrase, where the “source” part has ceased to be more than an etymological curiosity; you can certainly dislike this phenomenon, but – and I say this with regret since I’m far more prescriptivist than the next guy – trying to change it is probably pissing upwind.
The restrictions on usage are a better argument: among the models with weights available, some are clearly more “open source”[2] than others, and I’d even agree that Llama’s 700-million-user restriction means that, while for most practical purposes it’s open source, it’s technically only “source-available.”
It’s not obvious to what extent fonts count as programs, and their “source code” is usually nothing more than the glyphs, which can be read out from proprietary fonts trivially. Maybe there’s a bit of obfuscation one could perform on the feature file?
I agree it’s useful vocabulary, and reducing it to a binary makes it less so.
The usage I’m objecting to started, as far as I can tell, about 2 years ago with Llama 2. The term “open weights”, which is often used interchangably, is a much better fit.