magic_lobster_party

The market is not rational. It’s mostly based on vibes and feelings. React first, think later.

Good thing DeepSeek is open

There’s usually randomness involved with the initial weights and the order the data is processed.

Ok I understand now why people are upset. There’s a disagreement with terminology.

The source code for the model is open source. It’s defined in PyTorch. The source code for it is available with the MIT license. Anyone can download it and do whatever they want with it.

The weights for the model are open, but it’s not open source, as it’s not source code (or an executable binary for that matter). No one is arguing that the model weights are open source, but there seem to be an argument against that the model is open source.

And even if they provided the source code for the training script (and all its data), it’s unlikely anyone would reproduce the same model weights due to randomness involved. Training model weights is not like compiling an executable, because you’ll get different results every time.

The model is as far as I know open, even for commercial use. This is in stark contrast with Meta’s models, which have (or had?) a bespoke community license restricting commercial use.

Or is there anything that can’t be done with the DeepSeek model that I’m unaware of?

It’s afraid

If the installer is open source, then that part is open source. It’s maybe not as useful, because it relies on proprietary software to work. On the other hand, so does emulators like Dolphin.

Windows is not open source just because it’s possible to change dll files. Minecraft is not open source just because it’s possible to modify its textures.

Model weights isn’t the equivalent to a proprietary DLL or GameCube ROM. Anyone is free to modify and distribute the model weights however they like - and people are already doing it. Soon enough we will see variations of the model without the Chinese censor for example.

I agree the bad part is that they didn’t provide the script to train the model from scratch.

Yeah, it's about as open source as binary blobs.

This is a great starting point for further improvements of the model. Most AI research is done with pretrained weights used as basis. Few are training models completely from scratch. The model is built with Torch, so anyone should be able to fine tune the model on custom data sets.

I think a more appropriate analogy is if you make an open source game. With the game you have made textures, because what is a game without textured surfaces? You include the binary jpeg images along with the source code.

You’ve made the textures with photoshop, which is a closed source application. The textures also features elements of stock photos. You don’t provide the original stock photos.

Anyone playing the game is free to replace the textures with their own. The game will have a different feel, but it’s still a playable game. Anyone is also free to modify the existing textures.

Would you consider this game closed source?

They published the source code needed run the model. It’s open source in the way that anyone can download the model, run it locally, and further build on it.

Training from scratch costs millions.

The greatest irony would be if OpenAI was killed by an open AI

I believe this will ultimately be good news for Nvidia, terrible news for OpenAI.

Better access to software is good for hardware companies. Nvidia is still the world leader when it comes to delivering computing power for AI. That hasn’t changed (yet). All this means is that more value can be made from Nvidia gpus.

For OpenAI, their entire business model is based on the moat they’ve built around ChatGPT. They made a $1B bet on this idea - which they now have lost. All their competitive edge is suddenly gone. They have no moat anymore!