Overview

The Open AI definition

This week, we attended (virtually) a talk by Nick Vidal of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) about the OSI’s endeavors to define the concept of open source in regards to AI. Since AI has already become a huge presence in our world, and seems set to keep growing, this has become quite important for the open source community. It’s interesting that the definition essentially requires that enough information is made freely available that the model could theoretically be recreated; there must be some concerns about inequity there, as most people do not have access to that much computing power.

I was surprised to learn Meta’s Llama was not open source; it was touted as such, and so I always had the impression that it was. I was glad that another audience asked why companies would go to so much effort to be labeled as open source, as I was also curious.

Group contributions are chugging along; we spent the past week familiarizing myself with Flutter and Dart, so no contributions have been made yet.