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.
There's been all sorts of closed source libraries that you can freely integrate for whatever reason. They're not open source either.
Once again, this pickle file is not what's sitting in Mistral's engineer's editors as they go about their day.
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...
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.
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.
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.