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🤖 ICYMI: Yesterday, Hugging Face and OpenAI partnered to bring open source GPT to the public. This is a Big Deal in "AI world".
0. Common ground setting: OpenAI is the ChatGPT people. An “open source” model is one whose weights are available — that means the model can be “yours”.
1. You don’t have to interact with the company directly, nor give them your interactions, to use the system. The company can't "surveil" you.
2. You can evaluate the unique contributions of their SOTA model much more rigorously than you can when there are collections of models+code behind a closed API. You can find out specifically what the model can and can't do.
3. And you can directly customize it for whatever you'd like. Fine-tuning, wherein you give the model data that's tailored to your use cases and train it some more on that data, is trivial* when you have the model weights.
*Provided you have the compute.
4. You can directly benchmark whatever you'd like. Biases? Energy usage? Strengths/weaknesses? Go for it. You wants it you gots it--this transparency helps people understand SOTA *in general*, not just for this model, but points to, e.g., what's going on with closed Google models as well.
5. One of the most powerful things about "openness" that I've learned is that it cultivates ecosystems of collaborators building on top of one another's brilliance to make systems that are significantly better than they would be if created in isolation.
But, caveat wrt my own philosophy...
6. I do not take it as a given that advancing LLMs is good, and have a lot more to say wrt where I think innovation should focus more. For example, a focus on *data* -- curation, measurement, consent, credit, compensation, safety -- would deeply improve technology for everyone.
7. The transparency this release provides is massive for people who want to *learn* about LLMs. For the next generation of technologists to advance over the current, they MUST be able to learn about what's happening now. (cont...)
0. Common ground setting: OpenAI is the ChatGPT people. An “open source” model is one whose weights are available — that means the model can be “yours”.
1. You don’t have to interact with the company directly, nor give them your interactions, to use the system. The company can't "surveil" you.
2. You can evaluate the unique contributions of their SOTA model much more rigorously than you can when there are collections of models+code behind a closed API. You can find out specifically what the model can and can't do.
3. And you can directly customize it for whatever you'd like. Fine-tuning, wherein you give the model data that's tailored to your use cases and train it some more on that data, is trivial* when you have the model weights.
*Provided you have the compute.
4. You can directly benchmark whatever you'd like. Biases? Energy usage? Strengths/weaknesses? Go for it. You wants it you gots it--this transparency helps people understand SOTA *in general*, not just for this model, but points to, e.g., what's going on with closed Google models as well.
5. One of the most powerful things about "openness" that I've learned is that it cultivates ecosystems of collaborators building on top of one another's brilliance to make systems that are significantly better than they would be if created in isolation.
But, caveat wrt my own philosophy...
6. I do not take it as a given that advancing LLMs is good, and have a lot more to say wrt where I think innovation should focus more. For example, a focus on *data* -- curation, measurement, consent, credit, compensation, safety -- would deeply improve technology for everyone.
7. The transparency this release provides is massive for people who want to *learn* about LLMs. For the next generation of technologists to advance over the current, they MUST be able to learn about what's happening now. (cont...)
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