> That's why we had huge backlash w

Training a frontier model is prohibitively expensive, so it’s understandable that open weights aren’t truly open source. In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive[1] once the current AI cycle cools down. An even bigger issue is that as long as model development remains this capital intensive, a genuinely open-source community around frontier AI is virtually impossible. That will have massive implications for our careers. The more capital concentrates at the top, the less leverage we’ll have in the job market.

[1] Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand. That said, I'm not sure how sustainable and sufficient that incentive can be.

This is the new OSI Open source definition for AI models:

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

Mistral Large 4 is definitely not open given the "use for any purpose without having to ask for permission" requirement.

We are now at the mercy of labs to provide frontier models as open-weight. Now that even some Chinese labs are releasing their models as weight-available, what stops them from prohibiting certain internal uses of new models? What about public chatbots?

Open models we have now will become obsolete within a few years. Imagine a world where our last open models were from the GPT-2 era.

I believe we need truly sovereign models, not in the Western sense, but from a community perspective. We need a model line that stays open-source across generations.

Isn't it basically settled that model weights can't be copyrighted as they don't pass the threshold of originality?

    must not be linked, or must be capable of separation without losing their informative content;
    must be organised according to specific criteria, which means that only planned collections are covered;
    must be individually accessible – mere storage of data is not covered by the term database."

How is this enforceable? Models are not copyrightable are they? There’s no legal mechanism to prevent anyone from doing whatever they want with it.

> If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, the Licensee must enter into a separate

Put a JEV on the output to filter out responses that might show its Mistral

Theft is the AI way

Releasing weights even with permissive license, doesn't technically make it "open-source", unless all the method, data and technical inner working to do it is also released. Otherwise, it's just a binary floating in the wild, even if it's under MIT.

Yep and it's the same for Meta's "open" models which you omitted from the list.

Is there actually a competitive proper actually open model?

The weights are open, meaning publicly accessible, but you can't have a business profit off of them without paying for a license. That sounds fair and accurate.

HashiCorp has the same business model for their products: you are free to use them even in a business, except if your business is a competitor of their own cloud solutions.

If all these labs are doing it, it shows that they don't care about any high-minded concepts like being "open source"

Many Qwen model weights are licensed with Apache 2.0 (though unfortunately not the latest releases). Unfortunately open-weight is generally the term being used for weights-available, so the battle tends to be on whether the models are "open source", i.e. whether they release training code and data alongside the weights.

So this is "Commons Clause" effectively?

https://commonsclause.com

Well go sue them in internet court.

I'm tired of people trying to approach every legal/contractual issue as a binary, and treating flexible terminology like the magic words of a spell. They're up front about needing a license to exploit it commercially, but meantime you can use it without restrictions for personal/ experimental/ scientific/ educational/ development purposes, which is a lot. It's not 100% open by your pious definition, but it's clearly much more open than frontier labs who never release weights to the public at all.

If you're running a business, buy a license and be happy. All businesses have expenses, if you're not willing to ever pay for anything you're a freeloader and your business model is probably shit. Complain about whether the license is good value or not if you like. If you're not running a business on top of it, use the model and be happy.

I don't recall their being a huge backlash to elasticsearch ELv2. Mostly people seemed receptive to blocking the major cloud providers from mooching off the project, and the need to protect their revenue.

People need to make money.

This provider exclusion licenses though.. In a world were someone can point an LLM at your software to launder it.. Not sure what's going to happen.

> Calling this "open weight" is misleading.

It looks extremely clear on this page: https://docs.mistral.ai/models

Training, producing open weights, can be done by the government.

Inference can be a commoditized business.

Unless, i am missing something they haven't claimed open source anywhere. none of them have claimed open source. open weights has never meant the same thing as open source.

To the people who demanded completely open source licensed software, or that complained about "they shove Wayland/systemd down our throats", I've said many times that this is a supply/demand problem. Open source licensed software exists because there is a lot of excess software production capacity, e.g. there are many volunteers. Non-systemd distros are rare because such production capacity is low, e.g., there are few volunteers willing to do this work. To those people I've said: stop complaining about others not doing it for you, if you so want your non-systemd distro or FOSS-licensed whatever, you gotta do it yourself and contribute to the community, or fund an effort.

I got super angry reactions.

Now, the same thing is happening with open weights models, but in on a much more extreme scale. They exist because of excess capacity for whatever reason, and they will cease to exist when this excess capacity reduces. There is no use complaining about something not being open weights. What is productive is funding an effort.

Unfortunately, most complainers want others to do things for them, for free.

Open weight and open source are different things. It's important not to mix that up.

I think open weights is a fair term, much like open source but for weights.

Open source never implied that commercial applications were authorized.

I feel like the community is splitting hairs when the Anthropic/OpenAI are just locking everybody in way further than Mistral.

I'm gonna train an LLM on these weights so the copyright magically goes away and it will be fine

If they want to be open source, they also need to, y'know, open the source.

Weights are more like an executable binary. The source is the training data etc

Why don’t you train your own model and release it as AGPL? What are you waiting for, just do it man.

No, it's open-weights, as in you can inspect them. This is not Free Software.

So, it’s shareware? :)

Open weight is still the correct term because it's not a licensing thing, it's an availability thing. OpenAI/Anthropic are Closed weight because you can't download them at all. Open Source is different because its original use had to do with licensing requirements. Not every phrase with "Open" in it is going to have the same requirements.

When it comes to words, popular usage defines (and redefines) the meaning.

we see the same thing with mongo licensing, or even GPL

permissionless vs permissioned licenses

many of us in open source ascribe to the permissionless ethos, but there is a spectrum or venn

Ha! you can't try to enforce the definition of a new phrase, language evolves naturally. At least with "open source" there was the dubious claim that OSI had gotten their first and had trademarked it. But now you have nothing except wanting free things with no strings attached.