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How many proper open-source LLMs are there? (palaver.p3x.de)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/localllama@sh.itjust.works
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Sometimes I get into arguments about AI and people comment weird stuff here on Lemmy. Like we have ethical AI models (meaning they're not made up of unethically sourced training material). Or we got plenty "libre" or "free and open-source" AI models.

Am I missing something? Or is this just a bunch of people trying to bullshit me? Is anyone here aware of such large language models and would be so kind as to educate me? I mean we do have a ton of open-weights models. But proper open-source or ethical??? I've been following the news for quite a while and I'm aware of a very select few I'd call LLMs with training datasets available. I'm aware of:

  • Pythia by EleutherAI (up to 12B, from 2023) and Dolly 2 by Databricks (12B, also from 2023)
  • BLOOM by BigScience (176B, from 2022)
  • GPT-2 by OpenAI (1.5B, from 2019)
  • The recreation of LLaMA by the RedPajama-Project
  • Apertus by the ETH Zürich

Edit: In the comments we got:

  • LLM360 with K2-65B, Crystal-7b, Amber-7B
  • the Soofi-Project
  • OLMoE

That list needs a lot of footnotes, though. Some of them come with restrictions, terms and conditions... And none of them can do modern tasks like AI-assisted coding. The only one getting close is the Swiss model. Sadly the earlier version I tried didn't perform well. Seems they released an updated v1.5 version this summer, I wonder if that's better and anybody uses it for real-world applications.

So... Back to my initial question: Are there models out there with datasets available? I mean except the exactly one somewhat usable one I already found?

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[–] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I was trying to reply to this, bringing up the controversy that erupted when image generators were able to use prompts with artist names to simulate their style, and how that shows how blurry the copyright line is. As I wrote it, I realized how complicated the issue really is, and how little I understand current copyright laws. Some may argue there isn't any vagueness, an artist's work in any format is theirs and shouldn't be copied for other use, training or otherwise. But we all use other people's work in our own, don't we? There is no solid line where one is ethical and one isn't. Plagiarism without proper attribution has always been wrong, but if you take the same content and tweak it a bit, it's not. LLMs can and do that, through statistical randomness, while using someone else's material, just like human brains would.

The compensation issue is definitely a problem and where the ethics come into play. Even if many people freely read a book in a library, it has been bought at some point. But how do you determine who was unfairly "stolen" from? Isn't it basically everyone at this point?

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    I know I'm way too nitpicky... But I feel I should point out there's some confusion hidden here...

    There's stuff which is moral to do. And stuff which is legal to do. Those aren't the same! When talking about who can mention what, what copyright law demands people to do and those blurry lines, we're concerned with legality. That doesn't have anything to do with ethics. (At least not directly.)

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