Sometimes I get into arguments about AI and people comment weird stuff here on Lemmy. Like we have ethical AI models (meaning they’re not made up of unethically sourced training material). Or we got plenty “libre” or “free and open-source” AI models.
Am I missing something? Or is this just a bunch of people trying to bullshit me? Is anyone here aware of such large language models and would be so kind as to educate me? I mean we do have a ton of open-weights models. But proper open-source or ethical??? I’ve been following the news for quite a while and I’m aware of a very select few I’d call LLMs with training datasets available. I’m aware of:
- Pythia by EleutherAI (up to 12B, from 2023) and Dolly 2 by Databricks (12B, also from 2023)
- BLOOM by BigScience (176B, from 2022)
- GPT-2 by OpenAI (1.5B, from 2019)
- The recreation of LLaMA by the RedPajama-Project
- Apertus by the ETH Zürich
Edit: In the comments we got:
- LLM360 with K2-65B, Crystal-7b, Amber-7B
- the Soofi-Project
- OLMoE
That list needs a lot of footnotes, though. Some of them come with restrictions, terms and conditions… And none of them can do modern tasks like AI-assisted coding. The only one getting close is the Swiss model. Sadly the earlier version I tried didn’t perform well. Seems they released an updated v1.5 version this summer, I wonder if that’s better and anybody uses it for real-world applications.
So… Back to my initial question: Are there models out there with datasets available? I mean except the exactly one somewhat usable one I already found?
If the dataset is ethical and can be inspected, and the model is self-hosted, what is your objection
I don’t think this is an easy debate to have. Even those kinds of models have effects on society, on people, on the environment. A lot of resources are needed for research and training. Same for inference even if you own the computer. And we’d need to agree on what’s ethical. Usually that means treat the entire world like a self-service outlet and just take everything unless someone calls you and explicitly said no. At that point it’ll become a nasty technical problem because there’s no easy way to get rid of data after the fact.
Models could in theory be ethically sourced, but used for evil. Which is gonna be a problem to society. And then all of the debate is hypothetical because that’s not even what’s in use out there…
My post was more concerned with the facts. What kinds of models we do have. Not what we should do or an universally accepted definition of ethical.
An inspectable dataset would allow users audit according to their own project’s values and obligations. That’s the only standard that matters. I don’t yet see the need to bring a discussion of universal ethics into this.
Datasets containing unlicensed, stolen, and even privileged information have been used for major commercial models. This is a concrete problem for some people, and open source datasets address directly address it.
You tangentially bring up a bunch of other stuff but don’t appear willing to defend a position on any of it. I don’t really understand your point. You can speculate about what Jesus’s objection might be, but if you’re not willing to bring forward your own objections, I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish at this point.
IMHO, the problem with AI isn’t AI, it’s that we are permitting states and obscenely wealthy individuals to engage in an extremely wasteful winner-takes-all arms race. IMHO, there is nothing wrong with private individuals exploring LLMs and other new AI technologies, and self-hosted open source models are the only way we get to participate and potentially protect ourselves.