Because I’m considering this an exploratory research. This process was designed after we spent months going around in circles discussing vaguely about licenses, models, datasets, data, privacy, copyright, dependencies… That conversation didn’t lead to much. So we designed this process:
- Analyze a sample of “AI systems” to identify precisely the required components
- For each component of these systems, check their availability and the conditions for use/distribution (the legal documents)
- Generalize the findings and complete a checklist for OSI license committee to evaluate legal documents for AI systems (OSAID “feature complete”)
- Get endorsements from major stakeholders (RC1)
- Keep refining the OSAID, as it gains support from more stakeholders (v. 1.0)
- DONE
We’re finishing stage 1. I wanted to make sure we learned about dependencies from a variety of ML systems. The working hypothesis is that by mixing systems of heterogeneous nature we’d have a better understanding of the challenges of practitioners to use, study, modify and share systems of any kind.
The objective of the working groups was to identify the required components to exercise the 4 freedoms. At that stage the licenses are irrelevant. In fact, if you look at the distribution of votes across the 4 systems analyzed, they all have very similar results. That’s why I’m reluctant to analyze more systems: it’s a lot of work that I don’t think will give teach us anything radically new.
Now we have the list of components and now we can start looking at their licenses. We’re moving into step 2.
Please join the town hall this Friday and we can discuss this in more depth.