# Open Weights or Open Source AI?

**URL:** <https://discuss.opensource.org/t/open-weights-or-open-source-ai/601>\
**Category:** Open Source AI\
**Created:** [September 26, 2024, 9:06am UTC](https://discuss.opensource.org/t/open-weights-or-open-source-ai/601 "2024-09-26T09:06:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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**Author:** ![Shamar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/94ad74/32.png) [@Shamar](https://discuss.opensource.org/u/Shamar)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2024, 11:37am UTC](https://discuss.opensource.org/t/open-weights-or-open-source-ai/601/2 "2024-09-26T11:37:23Z")

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While I haven’t sold my soul to Apple’s gadgets yet (🤪), I’ve found your analysis quite good.

However I have to suggest a correction… to the title. 🙂

> [@anon18632855](#):
>
> And in the third, Meta’s Llama, you can access the weights in that you can download and run the models in whatever context you like […] but that’s about it.
> 
> If they would just brand their licensing as the self-describing “Open Weights” then there wouldn’t be another word said about it,

Fine, Llama’s weights are… “weights”.

But how they are “open”?

Maybe you meant “Freeware weights”?  
Because you can download and use them for free, but even ignoring the license, they are literally black boxes.

* * *

PS:

> [@anon18632855](#):
>
> distribution of training data is fraught with copyright concerns despite being “public”.

Actually, the public training data used by Meta are not only subject to copyright law, but also to personal data protection law such as the GDPR.

Yet assuming that you have the right to use such data for training a LLM, but not to redistribute them, nothing prevent you from distributing a dataset with [URL, timestamps and sha512sum of each public record you used](https://discuss.opensource.org/t/on-the-current-definition-of-open-source-ai-and-the-state-of-the-data-commons/559/11).

So there is no real constraint, neither legal nor technical, that prevents Meta to grant the right to study and to modify Llama models.

Except, of course, Zuckerberg will. 😉

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