LLMs are even more proprietary than regular proprietary software, I think you've got it right here. They are destroying the free software movement and it seems like most people don't even realize what's happening.

LLMs are a fundamentally different category of thing to software. Developing them is closer to breeding cows than writing code.

Software and slop.

> You don't program an LLM

For now. But it may well become common practice to construct weights directly, or at least to directly adjust weights in trained models, rather than exlcusively train them from prior datasets.

The damage isn't restricted to software. AI is the intellectual equivalent of asbestos.

Asbestos is an amazing fire retardant. That's why nearly every building built before we knew how cancerous it was contains it.

Open source really should mean open training dataset, not merely open weights. There are some truly open source models and you can reproduce their training process if you have the compute. I can't think of a reason why those kinds of models would be incompatible with Stallmanism. Presumably they will get better and more widespread over time, like free software

Here's an example of a model that I believe fits this description: https://huggingface.co/common-pile/comma-v0.1-2t

Actually, this one also excludes nonfree data from the training set; there are probably more capable models that include downloadable nonfree data. I'm not sure if the dataset also needs to be free in order for the model to be considered free.