this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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I think it’s important to note that these models are open-WEIGHT and not open-SOURCE. Open-source would mean we could explore the training data itself. Open-weight models are great, but please let’s not call them open-source.
Yeah, it's like an open-source distro that won't work without an accompanying opaque binary blob.
What distros are like this?
Distro was the wrong word. I should have said "package" (though there are also distros that attempt to eliminate blobs within their packages). Examples include manufacturer-issued device drivers, software that allows integration of GPUs, several parts of Android that integrate with the underlying hardware, firmware of various sorts, and I can't be arsed to remember more at the moment.
It is more a question of what hardware is like that and if you look up firmware blobs for Linux you'll find a lot, starting with graphic cards.
That's the hardware not the distro
Yeah and the hardware is what requires blobs regardless of the distro.
It wouldn't require blobs if the driver code were open-sourced.
Nemotron Ultra is a open source and already gives DeepSeek R1 performance (admittedly not that good anymore). NVIDIA has open sourced the entire training process, including raw datasets and synthetic data generation. The raw data is mostly curated web crawl data.
Perfect shouldn’t become the enemy of better. Open Weight AI isn’t Open Source AI, but it’s a huge improvement over Closed AI where you get neither the weights nor the training pipeline.
But to put it another way, what would you say to stalling tactics on the climate? What we need is “perfect” and they are only offering us bottom line-friendly “better”?
“X-1” doesn’t solve the equation “x-1(x/1000),” know what I mean?
The EU's AI Act calls them open source, so that ship has sailed.
Just because a law mislabels something doesn’t mean we need/should follow that.
"See, you can see the code in binary, it is open source" :D
Yeah, but when 99% of the complexity of an app is in its config, having the config not be open is effectively the same as the app being closed-source.
According to EU law carrot is fruit.