Regarding the extremely insightful exchange between @tante and @pluralistic that unfolded yesterday, there is a bit too much of ideology in it for my taste. However, I couldn't help noticing that arguably the strongest point of Tante about the ideology of LLMs is based on an invalid argument he developed in 2024: the claim that "open-source LLMs do not really exist".

Tante makes a case that open weights is not open source, and that's a valid point. Back then it was probably difficult to see the open source (open weights, open data and more) LLMs that actually exist. Many of them are specialised, and commonly they'd perform even worse than open weights ones. Yet, they are out there and I'd claim they are inevitably going to be an important part of the future.

I've been studying particularly specialised models like MacBERTh, but there are also open autoregressive instruction-tuned (i.e. chatgpt-like) models. Now there's even the Model Openness Framework and the corresponding tool and ranking: https://mot.isitopen.ai

This might be seen as opening a conversation about whether we can separate affordances of technologies from their politics, but as I said, I have too many doubts about ideology to be willing to go down that path.

PS: I come late to the conversation and I'm a nobody in this community. Yet, if curious, I invite you to see my pinned posts to see what I'm doing around the topic.

Tante's original post: https://tante.cc/2024/10/16/does-open-source-ai-really-exist/