See this discussion and blog post about a model called OLMo from AI2 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39974374). They try to be more truly open, although here are nuances even with them that make it not fully open. Just like with open source software, an open source model should provide everything you need to reproduce the final output, and with transparency. That means you need the training source code, the data sets, the evaluation suites, the inference code, and more.

Most of these other models, like Llama, are open weight not open source - and open weight is just openwashing, since you’re just getting the final output like a compiled executable. But even with OLMo (and others like Databrick’s DBRX) there are issues with proprietary licenses being used for some things, which prevent truly free use. For some reason in the AI world there is heavy resistance to using OSI-approved licenses like Apache or MIT.

Finally, there is still a lack of openness and transparency on the training data sets even with models that release those data sets. This is because they do a lot of filtering to produce those data sets that happen without any transparency. For example AI2’s OLMo uses a dataset that has been filtered to remove “toxic” content or “hateful” content, with input from “ethics experts” - and this is of course a key input into the overall model that can heavily bias its performance, accuracy, and neutrality.

Unfortunately, there is a lot missing from the current AI landscape as far as openness.