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Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by slimsag on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @11:35AM (#37676210)
Major kudos to Mistral for being the first company to Apache license a model of this class.

Meta wouldn't make LLama open source.

DeciLM wouldn't make theirs open source.

All of them wanted to claim they were open source, while putting in place restrictions and not using an open source license. So I think it's worth giving Mistral big kudos here for actually doing it and going Apache licensed.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by miloignis on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @12:47PM (#37677429)
Falcon 40B is Apache2, though they then went back to not open for their 180B.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by divbzero on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @01:45PM (#37678308)
MPT-30B is also Apache 2.0: https://huggingface.co/mosaicml/mpt-30b

There must be others as well?

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by capableweb on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:04PM (#37678630)
A lot! Go here https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/open_llm_leaderb..., check "Hub license" on the left then sort by that column in the table.

Estimating, there is more than 100 models with a apache-2.0 license.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by avereveard on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:42PM (#37679262)
a good chunk are "only the lora is apache 2 the base model is lama" or straight up llama2 model finetuned and distributed laundring their license, or use gpt generated code in the finetuning dataset against OpenAI tos. licensing is a bit up in the air and just filtering with apache 2 doesn't tell you much
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @01:40PM (#37678237)
I'm really not a fan of how these releases of model binaries are being referred to as open source. How do I make changes to this model? How do I integrate changes to this model that others have made?

The data pipeline is the source here. Just because it's not locked behind a SaaS veneer doesn't make it open source any more than Windows is.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by LoganDark on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @01:50PM (#37678376)
Windows is not open source. In order to access the source code, you need a government contract. These aren't given out lightly.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by piperswe on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @01:55PM (#37678462)
Right, that's the point they're making.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by LoganDark on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:06PM (#37678671)
Recent models may not be fully open source, but could you point me to one that's subject to the same amount of scrutiny as Windows source code access? Because I'm not sure if there is one out there.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:12PM (#37678766)
Windows source access is given out pretty freely to academics as the Windows Research Kernel (WRK).

But the point is that the data pipeline and tensorflow or what have you that trained the model is the source here. The model is the binary.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by LoganDark on Thursday September 28, 2023 @03:14PM (#37694266)
That's parts of the NT kernel, not actaul Windows source access. Governments get access to the whole thing.

Some large OEMs get access to Windows Server source code as well.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @07:55PM (#37697577)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

Microsoft has other mechanisms for sharing source and is remarkably open. The symbol servers are relatively public as well. They are at a scale where they rely more on legal strength to keep their IP rather than it not being externally accessible in the first place, at least for Windows.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by spullara on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:47PM (#37679355)
Most partners can get a copy of the Windows source code if they need it.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by squeaky-clean on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:06PM (#37678653)
You can do your own fine tuning on existing models

> How do I integrate changes to this model that others have made

Typically with a LoRA

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:09PM (#37678720)
Is that how the engineers at Mistral iterated on this model?

I can patch windows and other binaries too (I'm actually pretty decent at that; 20 or so years with IDA/ghidra). That doesn't make them open source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by spullara on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:46PM (#37679339)
You don't iterate on the model weights, you train them on billions of tokens. There was no real iteration, you set it up and wait for the GPUs to do the work. The model architecture itself is done before you start training. If you change it, you generally have to start training from scratch.

You do get the ability to further train the model using fine-tuning or LoRas.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:49PM (#37679396)
There's absolutely state space iteration in model training. Layer sizes, composition, construction.

> There was no real iteration, you set it up and wait for the GPUs to do the work. The model architecture itself is done before you start training. If you change it, you generally have to start training from scratch.

That's like saying there's no design iteration in software because you type 'make' and the executable is built.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by spullara on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:41PM (#37683089)
[delayed]
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:07PM (#37683879)
Once again, yes, the training cycle is more like a compile step.

Design iteration of the shape of the model absolutely occurs with partially trained weights however.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by brucethemoose2 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:48PM (#37679373)
They trained it from scratch, but there is nothing stopping you from doing some more training on top of it yourself. Nothing is obfuscated, no more information is required beyond the prompting syntax... they just released basically no documentation, which is unfortunately kinda standard in AI land.

There is already a sizable ecosystem of people doing just that: https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified&search=7B

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:53PM (#37679454)
Just like Microsoft isn't stopping me from patching Windows.

> Nothing is obfuscated

The dataset and pipeline to rebuild these weights are not included.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by brucethemoose2 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:00PM (#37679557)
> The dataset and pipeline to rebuild these weights are not included.

This is a good point.

But its probably not deterministic and reproducible. I bet the researchers themselves couldn't remake the exact weights (or even similar weights) from scratch.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:11PM (#37679715)
I mean most binaries aren't reproducible. That takes a lot of work and isn't worth it most of the time.

However, I've heard from ML engineers at the big shops that hermetic, reproducible builds are key to making any progress at scale with ML. Apparently that goes all the way back to when Jeff Dean took over Google Brain.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by Scene_Cast2 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:24PM (#37679903)
Yep. Even if the initial seed for parameter init, the example shuffling seed, etc were constant, the distributed nature of training (and syncing the model across machines) would kill reproducibility. Not to mention resuming from checkpoints after gradient explosions, etc.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:32PM (#37680031)
I've heard from ML engineers at larger shops that reproducibility is key to working at scale. That's how you track down "this training regime went to shit because of something we changed" versus "this training regime went to shit because on of the GPUs training it is starting to fail".
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by pk-protect-ai on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:25PM (#37679919)
Have you tried the HF version which is linked on the main page? It is transformer based after all and it is converted to HF format. Just use QLoRA to fine-tune whatever you want on the top of that model. They handed you hundreds of GPU hours, without asking anything in return. You may throw it away and train the model from scratch. Be ready to throw $70k-$150k into air warming.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:30PM (#37680003)
> Have you tried the HF version which is linked on the main page? It is transformer based after all and it is converted to HF format. Just use QLoRA to fine-tune whatever you want on the top of that model.

Is that how their engineers built this model in the first place?

Just because they're giving the build artifact of there hard work away doesn't make it open source.

> Be ready to throw $70k-$150k into air warming.

Just because builds are expensive, doesn't mean releasing the build artifacts counts as open source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by pk-protect-ai on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:41PM (#37680997)
I see dozens of your posts here complaining about "not open source." You are either a paid provocateur or a troll. What exactly is missing in your opinion in this release that is making this model not open source? [feeding trolls is fun]
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:46PM (#37681074)
> I see dozens of your posts here complaining about "not open source." You are either a paid provocateur or a troll.

I can't reply in my one tree without being called a troll?

Also, accusing someone of being a paid provocateur is against HN guidelines.

> What exactly is missing in your opinion in this release that is making this model not open source?

The source the engineers at Mistral used to build it.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by HanClinto on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:55PM (#37680343)
Is "Doom" open source?

The source code to the engine is available and open, but if you want to do anything useful or recreate the original game, you have to provide your own data.

This model is open source, much in a similar way that the Doom engine is open source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:12PM (#37680595)
> Is "Doom" open source?

> The source code to the engine is available and open, but if you want to do anything useful or recreate the original game, you have to provide your own data.

The Doom executable is open source. The data is not. Explicitly, the data is under a different license than the GPL and makes no claims about being open source. There are total conversion mods that replace the closed source levels with open source ones however.

> This model is open source, much in a similar way that the Doom engine is open source.

Here's the source the engineers that created doom used to build the doom engine: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM

Where is the source used to build this model?

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by HanClinto on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:37PM (#37683045)
The source used to create the model is here: https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-src/blob/main/mistral/m...

The source used to train information into the model is elsewhere.

You have the engine. You don't have the source of the data.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:03PM (#37683845)
That's the inference source as stated in the readme

> This repository contains minimal code to run our 7B model

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by HanClinto on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:44PM (#37684147)
The code I linked is the model source -- the structural skeleton. You can create a model with this source and put whatever weights you want in it -- just like Doom.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:02PM (#37684283)
That is some source. That is not the source behind what built the 14GB model.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by HanClinto on Thursday September 28, 2023 @04:05PM (#37695045)
If you create a model with this code and save it to disk, it will indeed be 14GB. It will be random weights -- the contents won't be there -- but it will be 14GB.

If you use only what is open-source about Doom, you will have an unplayable game.

If you use only what is open-source about Mistral, you will have an ineffective model.

It's not nothing.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @07:53PM (#37697563)
The claim is that the complete model, including the weights, is open source. Doom explicitly doesn't cover it's assets as open source.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by artursapek on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @11:01PM (#37684679)
Can you recommend a good resource(s) to learn how to fine-tune one of these on local hardware?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by brucethemoose2 on Thursday September 28, 2023 @01:33AM (#37685609)
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by artursapek on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:38AM (#37688768)
Thanks
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:27PM (#37679009)
> these releases of model binaries

Are they binaries? I haven't seen a binary in awhile tbh. Usually they're releasing both the raw architecture (i.e. code) and the weights of the models (i.e. what numbers go into what parts of the architecture). The latter is in a readable format that you can generally edit by hand if you wanted to. But even if it was a binary as long as you have the architecture you can always load into the model and decide if you want to probe it (extract values) or modify it by tuning (many methods to do this).

As far as I'm concerned, realistically the only issue here is the standard issue around the open source definition. Does it mean the source is open as available or open as "do what the fuck you want"? I mean it's not like OpenAI is claiming that GPT is open sourced. It's just that Meta did and their source is definitely visible. Fwiw, they are the only major company to do so. Google doesn't open source: they, like OpenAI, use private datasets and private models. I'm more upset at __Open__AI and Google than I am about Meta. To me people are barking up the wrong tree here. (It also feels weird that Meta is the "good guy" here... relatively at least)

Edit: I downloaded their checkpoint. It is the standard "pth" file. This is perfectly readable, it is just a pickle file. I like to use graftr to view checkpoints, but other tools exist (https://github.com/lmnt-com/graftr)

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:45PM (#37679327)
First off tokenizer.model in their release is absolutely a binary by any definition.

Secondly, is hand editing the pickle file the way Mistral's engineers constructed this pickle file? Why not? The automation that constructed that file (and tokenizer.model) is the source. Binaries in this context can certainly be an ASCII encoded file.

Just because other vendors are worse doesn't make this open source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by syntaxing on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:10PM (#37679706)
Not OP but I don’t get it though, you can modify the tokenizer all you want and fine tune the weights all you want. There’s nothing inherently hidden behind a binary
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:14PM (#37679769)
I can edit binaries too.

The question is am I provided the build source that constructed these files. Mistral did not hand edit these files to construct them, there's source out there that built them.

Like, come on, a 14GB of a dump of mainly numbers that were constructed algorithmically are not "source".

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by syntaxing on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:19PM (#37679837)
If I’m understanding you correctly, what you mean is that’s it’s only truly open source if they provide the data they used to train it as well?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:26PM (#37679944)
If that's what's needed to work at the level their engineers work on the model.

Which is true of traditional software as well. You don't get to call your binary open source just because you have licensed materials in there you can't release.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by lawlessone on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:59PM (#37681221)
Is a database software only open source if they release with data?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:21PM (#37681491)
Is the data what the database engineers edit and add to their build pipeline in order to build the database software?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by cafxx on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:20PM (#37682836)
Not to be the devil's advocate here, but almost certainly it can be the case that data was used to define heuristics (potentially using automated statistical methods) that a engineer then formalized as code. Without that data that specific heuristic wouldn't exist, at least very likely not in that form. Yet that data does not have to be included in any open source release. And obviously you as a recipient of the release can modify the heuristic (or at least, you can modify the version that was codified), but you can not reconstruct it from the original data.

I know my example is not exactly what is happening here, but the two sound pretty affine to me and there seem to be a fairly blurry line dividing the two... so I would argue that where "this must be included in a open source release" ends and "this does not need to be included in a open source release" starts is not always so cut and dry.

(A variant of this, that happens fairly frequently, is when you find a commit that says something along the lines of "this change was made because it made an internal, non-public workload X% faster"; if the data that measurement is based upon did not exist, or if the workload itself didn't exist, that change wouldn't have been made, or maybe it would have been made differently... so again you end up with logic due to data that is not in the open source release)

If we want to go one step further, we could even ask: what about static assets (e.g. images, photographs, other datasets, etc.) included in a open-source release... maybe I'm dead wrong here, but I have never heard that such assets must themselves be "reproducible from source" (what even is, in this context, the "source" of a photograph?).

That being said, I sure wish the training data used for all of these models was available to everyone...

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by ben_w on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:54PM (#37680330)
> Like, come on, a 14GB of a dump of mainly numbers that were constructed algorithmically are not "source".

So if I take a photo of a pretty sunset, release it under MIT license, you'd say it's "not open source" unless I give you the sun and the atmosphere themselves?

These models are perfectly valid things in their own right; the can be fine-tuned or used as parts of other things.

For most of these LLMs (not sure about this one in particular yet) the energy cost in particular of recreation is more than most individuals earn in a lifetime, and the enormous data volume is such that the only people who seriously need this should be copyright lawyers and they should be asking for it to be delivered by station wagon.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:04PM (#37680501)
I said "constructed algorithmically". Ie. I expect source to be at the level the engineers who built it generally worked at.

It's very nice that they released their build artifacts. It's great that you can take that and make small modifications to it. That doesn't make it open source.

> For most of these LLMs (not sure about this one in particular yet) the energy cost in particular of recreation is more than most individuals earn in a lifetime, and the enormous data volume is such that the only people who seriously need this should be copyright lawyers and they should be asking for it to be delivered by station wagon.

All of that just sounds like reasons why it's not practical to open source it, not reasons why this release was open source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by ben_w on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:10PM (#37680576)
> I said "constructed algorithmically". Ie. I expect source to be at the level the engineers who built it generally worked at.

I could either point out that JPEG is an algorithm, or ask if you can recreate a sunset.

> All of that just sounds like reasons why it's not practical to open source it

No, they're reasons why the stuff you want doesn't matter.

If you can actually afford to create a model of your own, you don't need to ask: the entire internet is right there. Some of it even has explicitly friendly licensing terms.

An LLM with a friendly license is something you can freely integrate into other things which need friendly licensing. That's valuable all by itself.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:14PM (#37680620)
Just because a license is 'friendly' and you don't see the point of an open release, doesn't make it open source.

There's been all sorts of closed source libraries that you can freely integrate for whatever reason. They're not open source either.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by zamalek on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:05PM (#37684307)
You could train it from scratch on The Pile dataset[1] with a few hundred thousand bucks worth of GPU quota. It's not rocket science - the architecture is, and that's open source by your definition.

[1]: https://huggingface.co/datasets/EleutherAI/pile

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:11PM (#37684342)
The graph of layers and ops isn't open source by my definition. It can be extracted from the model, but so can control graphs out of any binary. That's how higher end disassemblers work like IDA and ghidra.

Once again, this pickle file is not what's sitting in Mistral's engineer's editors as they go about their day.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Thursday September 28, 2023 @12:12AM (#37685154)
Well the checkpoint __is__ the computational graph. The graph is also all the code. But if you want it in python... that's here[0].

Please be clear, we keep asking. What are you asking for? Datasets? Training algo? What?

Comparing it to software artifacts isn't a good comparison when any program with open source code (visible or free to use) is equivalent to what's being given. You have everything you need to use, edit, and fuck around with. You don't have the exact scheme, but I'll put it this way, if you gave me the hardware I could produce a LLM of high quality from scratch using their architecture.

[0] https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-src/blob/main/mistral/m...

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:40PM (#37697907)
That doesn't conflict with anything I've said. Yes, the checkpoint is a

It's not what Mistral's engineers edit to create this release. Just like an ELF file is necessarily contains the code flow graph, in a way extractable by experts, but isn't open source because... it's not source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by zamalek on Friday September 29, 2023 @12:15PM (#37706358)
In that analogy the source of the ELF would be hand-written assembly. There aren't many layers of abstraction above the graph when it comes to ML.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by dartos on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:55PM (#37681894)
The permissiveness of the license with regards to use isn’t the crux of the argument.

The open source family of licenses are about freedom. If I’m not given the tools to recreate a model, then I’m not afforded the freedoms normally associated with these open licenses. Really there’s little difference between Apache and CC-BY here.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by lmm on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:42PM (#37682425)
> So if I take a photo of a pretty sunset, release it under MIT license, you'd say it's "not open source" unless I give you the sun and the atmosphere themselves?

You've gotta give me the stuff you used to make it, the stuff you'd want to have if you wanted to recreate a slightly different version of the photo ("in the preferred form for making modifications", as the GPL says). If you just snapped a photo of whatever you saw with whatever camera was in your pocket, then there's nothing else to publish. But if you figured out a timetable of when you should stand where with what kind of lens, then making your photo open-source would mean publishing that timetable.

> These models are perfectly valid things in their own right; the can be fine-tuned or used as parts of other things.

If the original creator can edit them, and you can't, then that's not open-source; fine-tuning is a help but someone who can only fine-tune is still a second-class user compared to the original developer. The whole point of open source is to put you on an equal footing with the original developer (in particular, to make sure that you can fix bugs by yourself and are never stuck waiting for them to release an update that you need).

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by haberman on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:03PM (#37682678)
I don't think photographs are generally advertised as "open source", because there is not generally a source code form of a photograph.

The MIT license doesn't distinguish between binaries and source, but the GPL does. The GPL defines source code as:

> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.

What is the preferred form of an LLM for making modifications to it?

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by dragonwriter on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:26PM (#37682909)
> So if I take a photo of a pretty sunset, release it under MIT license, you'd say it's "not open source" unless I give you the sun and the atmosphere themselves?

Phorographs are not source code, are not computer code at all, and do not have a close analog to source code. Calling them “open source” is, at best, a poor and distant metaphor in any case, and so they aren't a useful model for discussing what open source means for software.

There's a very reasonable argument that model weights are an IL or object-code like artifact with training data and training source code together as the source code.

That doesn't change that the MIT license is an open source license, but when what you release under that license isn’t the whole source aoplicable to the model, but just inference and maybe training code but not the data needed to produce the weights, and final weights, then it is fair to question whether as a whole the model is open source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by tbrownaw on Thursday September 28, 2023 @12:09AM (#37685134)
> So if I take a photo of a pretty sunset, release it under MIT license, you'd say it's "not open source" unless I give you the sun and the atmosphere themselves?

Open source as a concept doesn't really apply to quite a lot of things. Your MIT-licensed photograph is "not open source" in the same way that `{} * {}` is "not a number" (it technically isn't, but that's not quite what NaN is supposed to mean).

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by spywaregorilla on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:59PM (#37680410)
The whole point of machine learning is deriving an algorithm from data. This is the algorithm they derived. It's open source. You can use it or change it. Having the data that was used to derive it is not relevant.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:06PM (#37680518)
> It's open source.

How did the engineers who built it do so? Is there more source to create this build artifact?

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by syntaxing on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:11PM (#37680589)
But the source to train your own LLM equivalent is also released though (minus the data). Hence why there are so many variants of LLaMa. You also can’t fine tune it without the original model structure. The weights give the community a starting point so they don’t need literally millions of dollar worth of compute power to get to the same step.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:18PM (#37680681)
Would Mistral's engineers be satisfied with the release if they had to rebuild from scratch?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by syntaxing on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:13PM (#37681407)
But they built a llama equivalent + some enhancements that gives better performance…I’m not sure if this would be possible at all without Meta releasing all the required code and paper for LLaMa to begin with.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:43PM (#37681768)
Meta didn't release all of the required code to build LLaMa, just enough run inference with their weights.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @11:18PM (#37684783)
> Would Mistral's engineers be satisfied with the release if they had to rebuild from scratch?

Yeah, probably. But depends on what you're asking. In the exact same method to get the exact same results down to epsilon error? (Again, ML models are not deterministic) Probably not. This honestly can even change with a different version of pytorch, but yes, knowing the HPs would help get closer.

But to train another 7B model of the __exact__ same architecture? Yeah, definitely they've provided all you need for that. You can take this model and train it from scratch on any data you want and train it in any way you want.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:12PM (#37697709)
I didn't ask if they'd be able to make do. I asked if they'd be satisfied.

Also, wrt

> Again, ML models are not deterministic)

ML models are absolutely deterministic if you have the discipline to do so (which is necessary at higher scale ML work when hardware is stochastically flaky).

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:38PM (#37684098)
It’s not a build artifact. The algorithm is the open source code.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:57PM (#37684246)
So the engineers that built this edited this release directly? Or did they write code that built this?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:15PM (#37684380)
Every engineer uses tools to create their products. Those products that are open source do not include the tools used to create them (usually).
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:20PM (#37684417)
"Open source" normally contains what the engineers working on it edit to submit a job to build into the build artifacts. This does not contain that, but instead the result of the build process.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Thursday September 28, 2023 @09:18AM (#37689196)
That’s because you’re failing to differentiate a build process meaning compiling your stuff to an end result, vs. fine tuning an algorithm to refine code.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:08PM (#37697681)
Explicitly.

I regard the distinction as meaningless and haven't heard a good reason as why I should reconsider when the process behind creating the weights is so integral to the overall engineering process here.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:43PM (#37697925)
Well fortunately that’s just your opinion and it is neither popular nor relevant.

To quote stallman

> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it

That’s what this is. This is not a work that produces weights. So the code related to making weights would not be the source code of this project. It would be the source code of the tools used to make this project.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:57PM (#37698014)
That quote is specifically designed to back up my position, hence why I've quoted it else where in this thread.

This is evidenced by the fact that if Mistral's engineers had to make modifications to this model, they would use other code to do so. This model is not the "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", but simply the best we have in a world that isn't used open sourcing these models.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Thursday September 28, 2023 @11:01PM (#37698845)
> This is evidenced by the fact that if Mistral's engineers had to make modifications to this model, they would use other code to do so.

It’s a PyTorch model. There is no secret internal code required to interact with it. You can write whatever you want. Unless you’re implying that in order to call this model open source they need to get all of PyTorch on the same license. You can write whatever you want to edit the weights.

Open source does not require babysit walking people through the basic competency steps of understanding how the tools of this domain work.

This model is 100% the preferred form of work for making modifications to it as evidenced by the large community oriented around sharing and adapting models from exactly this format.

And no, I’m calling you for changing your argument again. You were saying dumb shit about how they needed to open source all the data needed to train this thing from scratch, which is another wildly different argument.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by gary_0 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:04PM (#37680495)
I could kind of see things either way. Is this like not providing the source code, or is it like not providing the IDE, debugger, compiler, and linter that was used to write the source code? (Also, it feels a bit "looking a gift horse in the mouth" to criticize people who are giving away a cutting-edge model that can be used freely.)
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:18PM (#37680672)
I'd actually say that including the training data would be like providing the IDE/debugger/compiler rather than the model/checkpoint being analogous. If I hand you Signal's source code you can run it, use it, modify it, etc. All similar characteristics to what is provided here. What they didn't provide to us is how they created that code. You couldn't create that software from scratch by just having these and that's true for any open source project. But I wouldn't say training data is as good as an analogy to peering in the minds of engineers, because it is an important part to getting the final product and analyzing it.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:09PM (#37680559)
> I could kind of see things either way. Is this like not providing the source code, or is it like not providing the IDE, debugger, compiler, and linter that was used to write the source code?

Do the engineers that made this hand edit this file? Or did they have other source that they used and this is the build product?

> (Also, it feels a bit "looking a gift horse in the mouth" to criticize people who are giving away a cutting-edge model that can be used freely.)

Windows was free for a year. Did that make it open source?

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:23PM (#37680727)
> Do the engineers that made this hand edit this file? Or did they have other source that they used and this is the build product?

Do any open source product provide all the tools used to make software? I haven't seen the linux kernel included in any other open source product and that'd quite frankly be insane. As well as including vim/emacs, gcc, gdb, X11, etc.

But I do agree that training data is more important than those things. But you need to be clear about that because people aren't understanding what you're getting at. Don't get mad, refine your communication.

> Windows was free for a year. Did that make it open source?

Windows didn't attach an Apache-2.0 license to it. This license makes this version of the code perpetually open source. They can change the license later, but it will not back apply to previous versions. Sorry, but this is just a terrible comparison. Free isn't what makes a thing "open source." Which let's be clear, is a fuzzy definition too.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:38PM (#37680960)
What I'm asking for is pretty clear. The snapshot of code and data the engineers have checked into their repos (including data repositories) that were processed into this binary release.

> This license makes this version of the code perpetually open source.

It doesn't because they didn't release the source.

There's nothing stopping me from attaching an Apache 2 license to a shared library I never give the source out to. That also would not be an open source release. There has to be actual source involved.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:40PM (#37684117)
If this ML algorithm were not open source, it would be illegal for you to release it yourself as Apache 2.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:58PM (#37684253)
What exactly is stopping anyone from releasing a binary as Apache 2 and never releasing the source?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:13PM (#37684359)
You’re welcome to fuck around and find out. Go release llama2 under Apache 2. You’re saying that’s fine right?

The answer to your question is that code stored as a binary is not different from code stored as text. Pickled models are code.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:22PM (#37684431)
> You’re welcome to fuck around and find out. Go release llama2 under Apache 2. You’re saying that’s fine right?

You're missing my point. Obviously you can't release someone else's IP under whatever license you see fit.

You can release your own binary under Apache 2. Doing so without releasing the source doesn't make it open source despite being an open source license.

> The answer to your question is that code stored as a binary is not different from code stored as text. Pickled models are code.

I'm not saying it's not code; I'm saying it's not source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Thursday September 28, 2023 @09:16AM (#37689188)
It is source.

The data used to derive this model is not different from the brain and worldly observations and learnings of the engineers, which are not part of any open source materials.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by camgunz on Thursday September 28, 2023 @01:54PM (#37693182)
What are you talking about "the brain" of the engineers, this is bonkers. Monocasa is being excruciatingly patient with you all but the fact is this was generated with tools and is not a source release, it's a final product or compiled or generated release.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Thursday September 28, 2023 @07:20PM (#37697251)
It’s bonkers because Monocasa’s take is bonkers.

Code generated with tools is still code. This code is the source. The output of the code is the output. Monocasa is failing to understand or perhaps intentionally not understanding the difference. In some contexts a “compiled release” implies an output that is largely immutable for practical purposes. That is not what this is. It’s technically a binary object, but it’s a binary object you can easily unpack to get executable code that you can read and edit. It is a convenient format different from classical text code. The fact that it’s a binary is completely irrelevant. It’s akin to arguing that code that is provided in a zip file cannot be open source. Both because it’s a compressed file and because it doesn’t include the compression algorithm.

With that understood, demanding the “tools” that were used to create the code is like asking for the engineers’ notebooks of design thoughts along the way. It has no bearing on your ability to use or modify it. This is not an open source project to make neural nets. This an open source project of a neural net.

If someone releases math_funcs.py, you don’t need anything about the tools that were used to create math_funcs.py to consider it open source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:04PM (#37697648)
Once again, what do Mistral's engineers edit to do their job? That's the source that when released would constitute 'opeb source'.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:27PM (#37697809)
So if you use tools that generate some boilerplate code as part of your project you need to include the boilerplate generator otherwise it’s not open source?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:48PM (#37697965)
The model weights aren't boilerplate.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Thursday September 28, 2023 @10:46PM (#37698735)
It’s all code. Is your opinion now that open source repos have to include the tools to generate only the parts you personally deem important enough?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by camgunz on Friday September 29, 2023 @02:52AM (#37700153)
Why are you being so obtuse? No, devs don't have to include the source to vim in their repos. They have to include the source files for their product in their repos. I'm confident this just isn't that hard to understand.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Friday September 29, 2023 @09:33AM (#37703987)
These are the source files! I’m going to stop responding to monocasa because I think he is being obtuse and leading me to say things that you are misinterpreting.

There is no expectation to include vim, or any tools required to create a codebase. We agree. And that’s why this repo is sufficient. Asking for the tooling that was used to make this project would be out of scope and unreasonable.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by camgunz on Saturday September 30, 2023 @06:39AM (#37714194)
Well but you can see that you're a little downstream right?

c++ source -> photoshop -> images

source we're asking for -> the repo you're talking about -> predictions

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Saturday September 30, 2023 @12:49PM (#37717239)
The source code of the repo referred to by “open source” is the code of the repo.

You can ask all you want but that is irrelevant as to whether it is open source. If photoshop were open source, the c++ code would need to be available. Not the tooling used to make the c++ code. The c++ code is equivalent to the model. Not the separate pythoj codebase that was involved in making it.

Which is some BSD PyTorch + PyTorch calling code that anyone competent in the field can implement any number of ways and is not special to this output.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by camgunz on Monday October 02, 2023 @05:02AM (#37735654)
> You can ask all you want but that is irrelevant as to whether it is open source.

There's a pretty good definition of open source at OSI [0], point of 2 of which is (emphasis mine):

"The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed."

You can't bump the window on what "program" means. "Program" here doesn't mean "predictions", that's the output of the program. If you had a program that generated images, you wouldn't say that that program was the source code of the images. You would say that that program generates images and has source code.

This just isn't an open source release. It's freely released to the public, but it doesn't contain the source used to create or modify it.

> Which is some BSD PyTorch + PyTorch calling code that anyone competent in the field can implement any number of ways and is not special to this output.

It then seems trivial to release it.

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd/

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by jncfhnb on Monday October 02, 2023 @06:07PM (#37745119)
> You can't bump the window on what "program" means. "Program" here doesn't mean "predictions", that's the output of the program. If you had a program that generated images, you wouldn't say that that program was the source code of the images. You would say that that program generates images and has source code

My dude… you have no idea what you’re talking about.

The picked model is the preferred way to interact and modify it. It is the source code. It is not like a compiled program. It is literally code.

I am NOT claiming the predictions are the program. I am saying the pickled model is. You 100% don’t need anything else to do anything more with the model.

I don’t know or care if they released their model generating code but nobody competent who understands what they are talking about cares about this.

It’s pickled because it’s big. Just imagine this as a zip containing algo.py

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by lmm on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:52PM (#37682539)
> Do any open source product provide all the tools used to make software? I haven't seen the linux kernel included in any other open source product and that'd quite frankly be insane. As well as including vim/emacs, gcc, gdb, X11, etc.

BSD traditionally comes as a full set of source for the whole OS, it's hardly insane.

But the point is you don't need those things to work on Linux - you can use your own preferred editor, compiler, debugger, ... - and you can work on things that aren't Linux with those things. Calling something "open source" if you can only work on it with proprietary tools would be very dubious (admittedly some people do), and calling a project open source when the missing piece you need to work on it is not a general-purpose tool at all but a component that's only used for building this project is an outright falsehood.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @11:23PM (#37684822)
But what's proprietary here? That's what I'm not getting from the other person. You have the algorithm. Hell, they even provided the model in pytorch/python. They just didn't provide training parameters and data. But that's not necessary to use or modify the software just like it isn't necessary for nearly any other open sourced project. I mean we aren't calling PyTorch "not open source" because they didn't provide source code for vim and VS code. That's what I'm saying. Because at that point I'm not sure what's the difference between saying "It's not open source unless you provide at least one node of H100 machines." That's what you kinda need to train this stuff.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by lmm on Thursday September 28, 2023 @12:12AM (#37685158)
> But what's proprietary here? That's what I'm not getting from the other person. You have the algorithm. Hell, they even provided the model in pytorch/python. They just didn't provide training parameters and data. But that's not necessary to use or modify the software just like it isn't necessary for nearly any other open sourced project.

It's necessary if you want to rebuild the weights/factors/whatever the current terminology is, which are a major part of what they're shipping. If they found a major bug in this release, the fix might involve re-running the training process, and currently that's something that they can do and we users can't.

> I mean we aren't calling PyTorch "not open source" because they didn't provide source code for vim and VS code.

You can build the exact same PyTorch by using emacs, or notepad, or what have you, and those are standard tools that you can find all over the place and use for all sorts of things. If you want to fix a bug in PyTorch, you can edit it with any editor you like, re-run the build process, and be confident that the only thing that changed is the thing you changed.

You can't rebuild this model without their training parameters and data. Like maybe you could run the same process with an off-the-shelf training dataset, but you'd get a very different result from the thing that they've released - the whole point of the thing they've released is that it has the weights that they've "compiled" through this training process. If you've built a system on top of this model, and you want to fix a bug in it, that's not going to be good enough - without having access to the same training dataset, there's no way for you to produce "this model, but with this particular problem fixed".

(And sure, maybe you could try to work around with finetuning, or manually patch the binary weights, but that's similar to how people will patch binaries to fix bugs in proprietary software - yes it's possible, but the point of open source is to make it easier)

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Thursday September 28, 2023 @01:18AM (#37685509)
Is this code "open source?"[0] It is under a MIT license, has the training scripts, all the data is highly available, etc. But to the best of my knowledge no one has reproduced their results. These people sure couldn't[1] and I'm not aware of any existing work which did. This honestly is quite common in ML and is quite frustrating as a researcher, especially when you get a round of reviewers who think benchmarks are the only thing that matters (I literally got a work rejected twice with a major complaint being about how my implementation didn't beat [0] despite it beating [1]. My paper wasn't even on architecture... so we weren't even trying to improve the SOTA...).

As a researcher I want to know the HPs and datasets used, but they honestly aren't that important for usage. You're right that to "debug" them one method would be to retrain from scratch. But more likely is doing tuning, reinforcement learning, or using a LoRA. Even the company engineers would look at those routes before they looked at retraining from scratch. Most of the NLP research world is using pretrained models these days (I don't like this tbh, but that's a different discussion all together). Only a handful of companies are actually training models. And I mean companies, I don't mean academics. Academics don't have the resources (unless partnering), and without digressing too much, the benchmarkism is severely limiting the ability for academics to be academics. Models are insanely hard to evaluate, especially after RLHF'd to all hell.

> (And sure, maybe you could try to work around with finetuning, or manually patch the binary weights, but that's similar to how people will patch binaries to fix bugs in proprietary software - yes it's possible, but the point of open source is to make it easier)

The truth is that this is how most ML refinement is happening these days. If you want better refinement we have to have that other discussion.

[0] https://github.com/openai/glow

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.11137

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by lmm on Thursday September 28, 2023 @01:38AM (#37685642)
> Is this code "open source?"[0] It is under a MIT license, has the training scripts, all the data is highly available, etc. But to the best of my knowledge no one has reproduced their results. These people sure couldn't[1] and I'm not aware of any existing work which did.

I don't know about ML specifically, but I've seen a number of projects where people publish supposedly "the source" for something and it doesn't actually build. IMO if they're doing it wilfully that makes not open source, whereas if it's just good-faith legitimate incompetence then it can be.

(My litmus test would be: are they giving you all the stuff they'd give to a new hire/assistant working with them? If they've got a "how to build" on their internal wiki with a bunch of steps they're keeping secret, then it's not open-source. But if the process for a new hire is to hand over a code dump and say "huh, it works on my machine, I don't remember what I did to set it up", then at that point I'd consider it open source. I think this aligns with the "preferred form for making modifications" idea in the licenses).

> But more likely is doing tuning, reinforcement learning, or using a LoRA. Even the company engineers would look at those routes before they looked at retraining from scratch.

Sure. But they'd have that capability in their back pocket for if they needed it. It's a similar story for e.g. parts of the Linux kernel code that are generated via a perl script based on the architecture documentation - you only actually re-run that perl script once in a blue moon, but it's important that they publish the perl script and not just the C that was generated by it.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by efreak on Thursday September 28, 2023 @03:40AM (#37686528)
Build scripts are not required for open source. Usually they are provided, because nobody actually wants to maintain them separately, but they are not actually part of the project itself. Often times it's just a few gnu scripts, sometimes there's parts of it missing (because they're reused from another project, or they have secrets in them that the maintainer can't be bothered to remove, or other reasons), and rarely the build script is an entire project itself, and even more rarely there's nothing there at all except a single file of source code that can't be built alone (I've seen this in particular on several old golang projects, and it's incredibly annoying).
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by lmm on Thursday September 28, 2023 @05:16AM (#37687161)
"Source in the preferred form for making modifications" is required. That includes build scripts if the maintainer is using them, IMO.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by gary_0 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:28PM (#37680794)
No, but if the Windows binary code was made available with no restrictive licensing, I'd be quite happy, and the WINE devs would be ecstatic. Sure, the source code and build infrastructure would be nicer, but we could still work with that.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:39PM (#37680982)
'gary_0' being happy with the license terms isn't what defines 'open source'.

I'm fairly happy with the license terms too. They're just not open source. We dilute the term open source for the worst if we allow it to apply to build artifacts for some reason.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by gary_0 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:59PM (#37681222)
We were talking about "looking a gift horse in the mouth", as in it's still a positive thing regardless of the semantic quibbles about open source. Nobody would argue that a hypothetical openly licensed Windows binary-only release is "open source" and I'd appreciate it if you read my comments more charitably in future.

Source code licenses are naturally quite clear about what constitutes "source code", but things are murkier when it comes to ML models, training data, and associated software infrastructure, which brings up some interesting questions.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:14PM (#37681419)
> We were talking about "looking a gift horse in the mouth", as in it's still a positive thing regardless of the semantic quibbles about open source

Your gift horse in the mouth comment was visibly an aside in the greater discussion being enclosed in parenthesis.

> Nobody would argue that a hypothetical openly licensed Windows binary-only release is "open source" and I'd appreciate it if you read my comments more charitably in future.

That's why I'm using it as an example metaphor in my favor. It's clearly not open source even if they released it under Apache 2. It's not what their engineers edit before building it.

> Source code licenses are naturally quite clear about what constitutes "source code", but things are murkier when it comes to ML models, training data, and associated software infrastructure, which brings up some interesting questions.

I don't think they're all that murky here. The generally accepted definition being

> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.

Is this the form of the work that Mistral's engineers work in? Or is there another form of the work that they do their job in and used to build these set of files that they're releasing?

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by lawlessone on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:01PM (#37681249)
You're asking them to release all their training data? very unlikely that's going to happen.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:08PM (#37681327)
There's a lot of reasons why an org wouldn't want to open source their release. That doesn't make it open source.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by idonotknowwhy on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:44PM (#37681777)
What about this project?

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PSX_MiSTer

Only one man in the world of capable of creating or editing this code, not it's here.

Is it really open source of Robert doesn't provide his brain too?

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:14PM (#37682136)
I'm not asking for the engineers brains, I'm asking for more or less what's sitting in the IDE as they work on the project.

Robert has provided that there. Mistral has not.

As an aside, I'm more than capable of editing that code; I've professionally worked on FPGA code and have written a PS1 emulator. Taking that (wonderful looking code) and say, fixing a bug, adding a different interface for the cdrom, porting it to a new FPGA are all things I'm more than capable of.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:15PM (#37680624)
> a 14GB of a dump of mainly numbers that were constructed algorithmically are not "source".

I'm sorry, but what do you expect? Literally all code is "a bunch of numbers" when you get down to it. Realistically we're just talking about if the code/data is 1) able to be read through common tools and common formats and 2) can we edit, explore, and investigate it. The answer to both these questions is yes. Any parametric mathematical model is defined by its weights as well as its computational graph. They certainly provide both of these.

What are we missing? The only thing that is missing here is the training data. That means of course that you could not reproduce the results were you to also have tens of thousands to millions of dollars to do so. Which if you're complaining about that then I agree, but this is very different from what you've said above. They shouldn't be providing the dataset, but they should be at least telling us what they used and how they used it. I would agree that it's not full "open source" when the the datasets are unknown and/or unavailable (for all intents and purposes, identical). The "recipe" is missing, yes, but this is very different from what you're saying. So if there's miscommunication then let's communicate better instead of getting upset at one another. Because 14G of a bunch of algorithmically constructed numbers and a few text tiles is definitely all you need to use, edit, and/or modify the work.

Edit: I should also add that they don't provide any training details. This model is __difficult__ to reproduce. Not impossible, but definitely would be difficult. (within some epsilon, because models are not trained in deterministic manners, so training something in identical ways twice usually ends up with different results)

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:24PM (#37680746)
> I'm sorry, but what do you expect? Literally all code is "a bunch of numbers" when you get down to it. Realistically we're just talking about if the code/data is 1) able to be read through common tools and common formats and 2) can we edit, explore, and investigate it. The answer to both these questions is yes. Any parametric mathematical model is defined by its weights as well as its computational graph. They certainly provide both of these.

I expect that if you call a release "open source", it's, you know, source. That their engineers used to build the release.

> The "recipe" is missing, yes, but this is very different from what you're saying.

The "recipe" is what we generally call source.

> So if there's miscommunication then let's communicate better instead of getting upset at one another.

Who's getting upset here? I'm simply calling for not diluting a term. A free, permissive, binary release is great. It's just not open source.

> Because 14G of a bunch of algorithmically constructed numbers and a few text tiles is definitely all you need to use, edit, and/or modify the work.

Just like my Windows install ISO from when they were giving windows licenses away from free.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by godelski on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @11:12PM (#37684743)
> The "recipe" is what we generally call source.

Not really. At least not in normal software. The recipe is honestly only really interesting to researchers (like me). But for building and production stuff, you have everything you need.

> Just like my Windows install ISO from when they were giving windows licenses away from free.

I repeat, a free windows ISO doesn't have an Apache license attached. This is an inane comparison.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @11:31PM (#37684872)
> Not really. At least not in normal software.

Yes, in normal software, the 'recipe' used to create the build artifacts is the source.

> The recipe is honestly only really interesting to researchers (like me). But for building and production stuff, you have everything you need.

A lot of excuses about why it's not useful to a lot of people and that you don't actually need it to use it in production is exactly the argument made for why not open sourcing is ok. That doesn't mean this is a source release, open or otherwise.

> I repeat, a free windows ISO doesn't have an Apache license attached. This is an inane comparison.

Even if the Windows binary iso was released with an Apache license, it wouldn't be open source since no actual source was released. That's the point of that line of argument.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by kanwisher on Thursday September 28, 2023 @09:40AM (#37689463)
Like if someone only gave me binaries of Apache and said it's open source, you wouldn't agree with them. Cause you can't practically modify it. Open source of a model would be exact same, you would need to be able to do the same build process. A model is literally the same as an EXE or Elf Binary, its a "probabilistic" program, but its still a program
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by stefan_ on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:09PM (#37681339)
This is not a novel discussion and you are not being smart trying to nihilism it, just obtuse. Here is what the GPL has said on source for some 30+ years:

> Source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by cfuendev on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:03PM (#37682003)
We should push for GPL licensing then, which AFAIK requires a source that can be built from.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:32PM (#37682325)
We just also shouldn't call releases with no source "open source".

I wouldn't really have a complaint with their source being released as Apache 2. I just don't want the term "open source" diluted to including just a release of build artifacts.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by pk-protect-ai on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:15PM (#37679784)
>> tokenizer.model in their release is absolutely a binary

Is this not a BPE+sentencepiece? It is quite usual practice when you do the training or even prepare the data with fairseq ...

EDIT: I mean it will be a binary file for the tokenizer model after all but I see no problem here ...

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:19PM (#37679834)
Just because you don't see a problem with it being a binary, doesn't make it source. It's still a build artifact.
[dead]
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @04:48PM (#37681098)
That's one of the libraries, not the source of this binary release.

What does Mistral's engineers edit before sending this model off to be trained? That's the source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by pk-protect-ai on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:45PM (#37681784)
It is literally takes 20 min on my PC to prepare multilanguage corpus and train BPE+sentencepiece tokenizer with fairseq. You have all the documentation in there. If you do not know how to use these tools, does not mean they are not there. You literally do not need to edit anything.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:10PM (#37683895)
Sweet. I've also been able to reverse engineer stripped binaries and reimplement them; I talked at a major conference last year about that actually.

That doesn't make this release anymore source.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by WanderPanda on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:18PM (#37679813)
„the automation“ is probably manual and not even deterministic
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:23PM (#37679900)
I guarantee you there's automation around training this model. There's also the factor of the dataset itself.

And it doesn't matter much if it's perfectly deterministic. Source builds of traditional software aren't typically fully reproducible either. That doesn't change

And I give you better than coin flip odds that it is actually deterministic. The engineers at the big ML shops I've had conversations with have been doing deterministic training for quite some; they believed it was key to training at scale. That's what gives you the "did this model go way off the deep end because of something we did in the model, or because a training GPU is on the fritz".

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by GuB-42 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:28PM (#37679976)
> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.

That's the definition in the GPL. That it is text or binary doesn't matter.

So are the weights the preferred form for making modifications? Partly yes, because of fine tuning, but also no, because you are limited in what you can do with fine tuning. If Mistral had to make major changes to their model, they would probably start with the dataset and code they have but you don't, the one that created the weights file.

So I wouldn't call it "open source", just "open". You can do whatever you want with what you have, but you don't have the same abilities as Mistral to modify the model because you lack some data.

Still, it is a bit of an unusual situation since even with the "real sources", i.e. training data and code, most people wouldn't have the resources to retrain the model, and a big part of the value in these models is the computing resources that were invested in training them.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by scosman on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:15PM (#37679772)
You could fine tune and release that. It’s not software so exact parallels don’t make sense, but the open permissions are great.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:37PM (#37680096)
I mean, it's absolutely software.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by scosman on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:05PM (#37682028)
Software is used to make models, but the models aren’t software anymore than Toy Story is software.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by mbakke on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:34PM (#37682358)
Forgive my ignorance, I haven't studied the AI tooling landscape yet. Are you saying these models have a structured binary format and "running" them is just a matter of having a "player" with the right "codec"?

Or are they directly executing CPU instructions?

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:06PM (#37682710)
They are basically a series of intermediate bytecodes to be compiled to the hardware they actually run on, in addition to the large tables of weights that bytecode references.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by scosman on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @11:27PM (#37684842)
Just a few billion of them that no person created or understands, which are based on the their input data and not design decisions, which include random initialization. I see no reason to treat them any differently than software in a conversation about OSS.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by kanwisher on Thursday September 28, 2023 @09:43AM (#37689501)
Model inputs are definitely design decisions, what data to use, how to fine tune them, what methods were used in weighting things. This is LITERALLY the source of the model. The model is a binary like an EXE
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:15PM (#37682147)
There's literally a list of opcodes to be executed in the model. There's a whole lot of data too, but that's part of the build just as much as anything in a .data section.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by camgunz on Thursday September 28, 2023 @01:58PM (#37693234)
Toy Story is also software. It's a program you run on a renderer to generate a/v.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by gfodor on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:26PM (#37681562)
Sounds false, this is only an analogy wrapped up in what sounds like an argument. If you think about what you’re actually getting it’s open source.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @05:37PM (#37681700)
What do Mistral's engineers work with? Do they have this 14GB pickle file open in their IDEs at 3PM? If not, why is that not the source to this?
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by uoaei on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:42PM (#37684544)
It's remarkably telling that no one who's pushing back has any answer to this line of reasoning.

I wonder how they might benefit from retconning the notion of open source to fit the ways they're describing models now. At this point it seems bad faith in more than just a naive way.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by gfodor on Thursday September 28, 2023 @05:55PM (#37696401)
The reason is because "open source" is a vague enough concept anyone can project what they want onto it. Being able to fully replicate the construction of the model is one lens on it, but being able to modify it to suit your own needs is another.

Given that a released base model allows things like fine tuning, generating your own training sets, and so on, it's not obviously closed source in the way the poster is acting like it is. Releasing the full training data and reproduction pipeline would be "more" open source, but having the raw, non RLHF'ed model is extremely open compared to most alternatives beyond that.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @08:02PM (#37697630)
It's not as vague as you're making it sound.

Open source would mean what the engineers who work on this build artifact edit. This is clearly not that.

This is 'more open' than other releases, yes. That doesn't mean it reaches the bar of what 'open source' means.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by gfodor on Friday September 29, 2023 @04:42PM (#37709865)
If a company makes a product that involves a code generator, and publishes the generated code, but not the code generator itself, it’s still open source.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by uoaei on Friday September 29, 2023 @06:32AM (#37701690)
"Some people are right but if you tilt your head and squint you can almost understand the argument from the others"

I don't know how to respond to these lines of reasoning anymore except to say that words mean things and it's worth keeping definitions consistent for the sake of our common understanding.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by gfodor on Friday September 29, 2023 @04:45PM (#37709883)
Machine learning models force us to reconsider the definitions or introduce new ones. A published model has characteristics of open source and closed source software, given the extent to which it can be fundamentally modified, inspected, and used to generate derivative works in a way executable binaries cannot.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by hcks on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:19PM (#37682182)
This fallacious talking point is getting annoying.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by Dowwie on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:28PM (#37682926)
You want to see the source code of the transformer that created the compiled llm model, the dictionary corresponding to token values, etc. Instead, you got the weights and binary.

I don't know what's going on in this discussion thread, as to whether you are being gaslit or engaging with people who shouldn't comment.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by uoaei on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:40PM (#37684537)
Right, my interpretation (and I think monocasa's too) is that the training and packaging pipeline is not published therefore the code used to build the model is not open, therefore there is no source available to rebuild the model as Mistral's engineers have done.

In essence the output of the training pipeline is "data" (weights), not code. The way those data are read to make things work is the "model". In the (bad) analogy of the JPEG, the data is the coefficients and the model is the encoding/decoding scheme.

I'm impressed by the patience monocasa has in the face of so many (seemingly intentionally) obtuse responses.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by artursapek on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @10:59PM (#37684664)
The JPEG analogy makes no sense. A more correct analogy is: they released compiled binaries, not the source code.

The difference is though, here compiling from source is prohibitively expensive for the average person. And the source is massive.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by uoaei on Thursday September 28, 2023 @03:18AM (#37686395)
My analogy makes perfect sense.

Also, being able to reverse-engineer the precise build process is an orthogonal concern to having the source code available.

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by zwaps on Thursday September 28, 2023 @07:04AM (#37687894)
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by monocasa on Thursday September 28, 2023 @09:01PM (#37698048)
That's not the code the use to build the vast majority of the release.
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by dang on Saturday September 30, 2023 @04:40PM (#37719557)
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37676210)
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by blueboo on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @02:44PM (#37679308)
Persimmon-8B from Adept did it first no https://www.adept.ai/blog/persimmon-8b
Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by dartos on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @03:39PM (#37680122)
Have you seen the RWKV model?

They have a 40B one and IIRC are part of the Linux foundation now too

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by ekelsen on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @09:09PM (#37683890)
That would be Persimmon-8B, no?

https://www.adept.ai/blog/persimmon-8b

Re:Mistral 7B, the most powerful language model for its size... by logicchains on Thursday September 28, 2023 @01:09PM (#37692585)
> Major kudos to Mistral for being the first company to Apache license a model of this class.

Falcon 40B is under the Apache license, and as a 40B model it outperforms this 7B model on most tasks.