out of curiosity, does anyone do anything "useful" with that knowledge? it's not like people can just randomly train models..
Today we introduce OLMoTrace, a one-of-a-kind feature in the Ai2 Playground that lets you trace the outputs of language models back to their full, multi-trillion-token training data in real time. OLMoTrace is a manifestation of Ai2’s commitment to an open ecosystem – open models, open data, and beyond.
what you're saying is just that it's non reproducible, which is a completely valid but separate issue
The training process is fully deterministic. It's just an algorithm. Feed the same data in and you'll get the same weights out.
If you're speaking about the computational cost, it used to be that way for compilers too. Give it 20 years and you'll be able to train one of today's models on your phone.
Where would other non-determinism come from?
I'm open to there being another source. I'd just like to know what it would be. I haven't found one yet.
Point at the science that says that, please: Current scientific knowledge doesn't agree with you.
I'd love a citation. So far you haven't even suggested a possible source for this non-determinism you claim exists.
Training is reproducible only if, besides the pipeline and data, you also start from the same random weights.
It sounds like you're referring to something like simulated annealing. Using that as an example, the fundamental requirement is to introduce arbitrary, uncorrelated steps -- there's no requirement that the steps be random, and the only potential advantage of using a random source is that it provides independence (lack of correlation) inherently; but in exchange, it makes testing and reproduction much harder. Basically every use of simulated annealing or similar I've run into uses pseudorandom numbers for this reason.
There simply aren't that many sources of non-determinism in a modern computer.
Though I'll grant that if you've engineered your codebase for speed and not for determinism, error can creep in via floating point error, sloppy ordering of operations, etc. These are not unavoidable implementation details, however. CAD kernels and other scientific software do it every day.
When you boil down what's actually happening during training, it's just a bunch of matrix math. And math is highly repeatable. Size of the matrix has nothing to do with it.
I have little doubt that some implementations aren't deterministic, due to software engineering choices as discussed above. But the algorithms absolutely are. Claiming otherwise seems equivalent to claiming that 2 + 2 can sometimes equal 5.
Not some of them; ALL OF THEM. Engineering training pipelines for absolute determinism would be, quite frankly, extremely dumb, so no one does it. When you need millions of dollars worth of compute to train a non-toy model are you going to double or triple your cost just so that the process is deterministic, without actually making the end result perform any better?
The cost of adaptive precision floats can be negligible depending on application. One example I'm familiar with from geometry processing: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/robust.html
Integer math often carries no performance penalty compared to floating point.
I guess my takeaway from this conversation is that there's a market for fast high-precision math techniques in the AI field.
No it is not. The training process is non-deterministic, and given exactly the same data, the same code and the same seeds you'll get different weights. Even the simplest operations like matrix multiplication will give you slightly different results depending on the hardware you're using (e.g. you'll get different results on CPU, on GPU from vendor #1 and on GPU from vendor #2, and probably on different GPUs from the same vendor, and on different CUDA versions, etc.), but also depending on the dimensions of the matrices you'll get different results (e.g. if you fuse the QKV weights from modern transformers into a single matrix and do a single multiplication instead of multiplying each separately you'll get different results), and some algorithms (e.g. backwards pass of Flash Attention) are explicitly non-deterministic to be faster.
That has everything to do with implementation, and nothing to do with algorithm. There is an important difference.
Math is deterministic. The way [random chip] implements floating point operations may not be.
Lots of scientific software has the ability to use IEEE-754 floats for speed or to flip a switch for arbitrary precision calculations. The calculation being performed remains the same.
The point is none of these models are trained with pure "math". It doesn't matter that you can describe a theoretical training process using a set of deterministic equations, because in practice it doesn't work that way. Your claim that "the training process is fully deterministic" is objectively wrong in this case because none of the non-toy models use (nor they practically can use) such a deterministic process. There is a training process which is deterministic, but no one uses it (for good reasons).
If you had infinite budget, exactly the same code, the same training data, and even the same hardware you would not be able to reproduce the weights of Deepseek R1, because it wasn't trained using a deterministic process.
torch.manual_seed(0)
random.seed(0)
np.random.seed(0)
torch.use_deterministic_algorithms(True)
E.g. see all the specialized third-party models out there based on Qwen.
"Open-source" is the wrong word here, what they mean is "you can modify and redistribute these weights".
https://chatgpt.com/share/6838c070-705c-8005-9a88-83c9a5550a...
Also, the "redistribute" part is key here.
Fully agree, it isn't. Reverse engineering isn't necessary for modifying compiled program behaviour, so comparing it to finetuning is not applicable. Finetuning applied to program domain would be more like adding plugins or patching in some compiled routines. Reverse-engineering applied to models would be like extracting source documents from weights.
> Finetuning is a standard supported workflow for these models.
Yes, so is adding mods for some games, just put your files in a designated folder and game automatically picks it up and does required modifications.
> Also, the "redistribute" part is key here.
It is not. Redistributability and being open source is orthogonal. You can have a source for a program and not be able to redistribute source or program, or you can redistribute a compiled program, but not have it's source (freeware).
Open source has the word "source" in it for a reason, and those models ain't open source and have nothing to do with it.
There's a few efforts at full open data / open weight / open code models, but none of them have gotten to leading-edge performance.
I’d just assume they did because—why scrape again if you want to train a new model? But if you know otherwise, I’m not tied to this idea.
You will have to scrape again because you want the next AI to get trained on updated data. And, even at the scale needed to train an LLM, storing all of the text on the entire known internet is a very non-trivial task!
It's not "all of the text", it's like less than 100 trillion tokens, which means less than 400TB assuming you don't bother to run the token streams through a general purpose compression algorithm before storing them.
If you (or any human) violate copyright law, legal redress can be sought. The amount of damage you can do is limited because there's only one of you vs the marginal cost of duplicating AI instances.
There are many other differences between humans and AI in terms of capabilities and motivations to f the legal persons making decisions.
But enough about whether it should be legal to own a Xerox machine. It's what you do with the machine that matters.
The capabilities of a machine matter a lot under law. See current US gun legislation[1], or laws banning export of dual-use technology for examples of laws that have inherent capabilities - not just the use of the thing- as core considerations.
1. It's illegal to possess a new, automatic weapon with some grandfathering prior to 1986
I think the reason for all the current confusion is that we previously had two very distince groups of "mind" and "mindless"*, and that led to a lot of freedom for everyone to learn a completly different separation hyperplane between the categories, and AI is now far enough into the middle that for some of us it's on one side and for others of us it's on the other.
* and various other pairs that are no longer synonyms but they used to be; so also "person" vs. "thing", though currently only very few actually think of AI as person-like
(Standing by for the inevitable even-goofier analogy comparing AI with privately-owned nuclear arsenals...)
Assume for a moment, that the current AI is teaching us that compute transforming data → information → knowledge → intelligence → agency → ... → AGI → ASI, is all there is to Intelligence-on-Tap? And imagine an AI path opens to AGI now and ASI later, where previously we didn't see any. Seems a bad deal to me, to frustrate, slow down, or even forego the 2050-s Intelligence Revolution that may multiply total human wealth by a factor of 10 to 20 in value, the way the Industrial Revolution did in the 1800-s. And we are to forego this, for what - so that we provide UBI to Disney shareholders? Every one of us is richer, better off now, than any king of old. Not too long ago, even the most powerful person in the lands could not prevent their 17 miscarriages/stillbirths/child_deaths failing to produce an heir to ascend the throne (a top priority that was, for sure for a king+queen). So in our imagined utopia, even the Disney shareholders are better off than they would be otherwise.
Why do you assume the emergence of a super intelligence would result in human wealth increasing instead of decreasing? Looking at how humans with superior technology used it to exploit fellow humans throughout history should give you pause. Humans don't care about the aggregate "dog wealth" - let alone that of ants.
However, once these words are broadcast—once they’re read, and the ideas expressed here enter someone else’s mind—I believe it’s only fair that the person on the receiving end has the right to use, replicate, or create something from them. After all, they lent me their brain—ideas that originated in my mind now live in theirs.
This uses up their mental "meat space," their blood sugar, and their oxygen—resources they provide. So, they have rights too: the right to do as they please with those ideas, including creating any and all data derived from them. Denying them that right feels churlish, as if it isn’t the most natural thing in the world.
(Before people jump on me:- Yes, creators need to be compensated—they deserve to make a living from their work. But this doesn’t extend to their grandchildren. Copyright laws should incentivize creation, not provide luxury for the descendants of the original creator a century later.)
Copyright isn’t violated when someone consumes a copyrighted work.
Copyright is violated when a copyrighted work is used by someone who isn’t the author to generate profit without prior permission.
You can read a copyrighted book and remember it. You cannot copy it and sell copies. If you want to excerpt it you must give credit and there are limits to what’s considered “fair use”.
I remember there's a project "Open R1" that last I checked was working on gathering their own list of training material, looks active but not sure how far along they've gotten:
https://github.com/huggingface/open-r1