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“open source” LLM fans aren’t beating the charges
“uhm you’re wrong because it’s open weight and it took a lot of time to tweak those weights and uhhh there’s definitely fully open source models out there you’ve just never heard of them”
weird, every time I hear about a fully open source good boy LLM someone does basic research and finds out it’s derived from one of the proprietary ones. there’s a bunch of techniques for this, it’s kind of fascinating
@zzt for what it's worth, Apertus from École Polytechnique de Lausanne is trained on public data, with open source code:
@fediderps @zzt yes there are many toy researcher models
I note the glaring absence in their FAQ of "what did you train it on"
@fediderps @zzt ah here we are: the New Swiss "Apertus" Totally Open and Ethical LLM Trust Us Bro https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14233
3.1.1 so we scraped the web, but we obeyed robots.txt! that makes it fair game right. we also used the same huggingface data sets that nobody consented to being in,
yeah this is the same old shit
i look forward to that entire front page falling afoul of the new arXiv anti-slop rules
@zzt
The bros love their openwashing. It's only a partial recuperation - they're happy to steal the FOSS vibe of autonomy and rebellion, while leaving behind the pesky obligations to community and public benefit
@ophiocephalic @zzt every "we need to expand the meaning of open source beyond actually open source" since 1998 and counting
@davidgerard
now would be a very, very good time
like, how the fuck did we get here? is it not plainly fucking obvious that an LLM is too massive and expensive for an uwu little open source community or a research team that isn’t a billion-dollar corporation or operated directly by a nation-state to train? should that not be obvious after these pieces of shit ruined the web? do you think they did that just cause?
and I swear to fuck if any of you kids posts a PoC transformer model that’s too small to even pretend to be good for anything and accuses me of moving the goalposts when I tell you to fuck off
I would ask if we didn’t learn a thing from cryptocurrency scams almost universally being openwashed trash that nonetheless kept power and control in the hands of a few wealthy grifters but clearly no we did not
is it asking too much for computer people to not form a weird online community where the inherent awfulness of what you’re doing is masked by a thin veneer of misleading terminology for, like, once?
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