I mentioned this in the town hall and I’d like to repeat it here: the co-design process was not supposed to be democratic. It’s designed to be inclusive and representative of a wide variety of interests (global and multistakeholder.)
As @zack noticed already in March and repeated in his comments here, the results of the Analysis phase are not representing a consensus, in both of the scenarios.
I said in the town hall and adding it for the records: the results of the Analysis phase, the split position on the hard requirement of the component “Training dataset” simply gave us a working hypothesis to solve what Redmonk called the AI conundrums. These are the tension among large dataset maintainers like CommonCrawl and LAION, AI developers and the global legal/commercial systems.
The hypothesis was:
Which AI systems would be Open Source AI if we require all the details about the data and we require training code and data preprocessing code? Will we get bad results casting this net?
The purpose of the test was discover a way to give Open Source builders the potential to build powerful AI systems in all possible domains, including medical. In other words, we’re aiming to level the playing field, put Open Source AI on the same grounds as the large corporations who already have all the data they want, and the means to get more, something that the Open Source/Free Software movement have always tried to achieve.
The hypothesis was confirmed in the Validation phase, although it was small, and revealed an interesting pattern: The builders who release training code and data processing code are also the ones who release their datasets.
So one can ask: why don’t you mandate the release of the datasets then? That’s the intention of the draft definition! Except that the Definition needs to take into account the fact that there are 4 different kinds of data (more on an updated FAQ.) The evolution of the draft from 0.0.8 to 0.0.9 and what’s coming next all go in this direction: clarify that the datasets, when legally possible, should be made available.
So to summarize the concerns raised:
Process: The co-design process as conducted was not democratic and ultimately unfair, voting was the wrong method, the selection of the volunteers was biased, the results didn’t show any consensus and many other issues.
Is that fair?