One thing I don't see discussed enough is that, ok let's say the weights are unencumbered, and the source is under an OSI license: the point of open source licenses and free software was to expose the *human understandable* meaning of the final program.
That's why distributing binaries isn't allowed even though technically all of the functionality is present in the machine code. AI weights are basically binary blobs. We don't know what they mean, there is really no source code for them. The best we can do is various black box manipulations on them like LoRA, etc, similar to what we can do to a binary blob.
>> AI weights are basically binary blobs. We don't know what they mean, there is really no source code for them.
No. You can do further training on them. If they are something less than code I don't think it's going to warrant all this talk about licensing. GPL, MIT, or some proprietary should cover it.
You can do further training on them, just like you can patch a binary blob. There are some surgeries you can do to the weights, and there are analyses you can do to poke at them and try to understand them, but ultimately they weren't created from a human understandable spec, and without a ton of reverse engineering work the weights by themselves aren't human understandable: hence the "source" component is missing.
The source code that generated the weights is one step removed from the kind of source code we'd need to interpret a bunch of AI weights. It's really meta-source code
That's why distributing binaries isn't allowed even though technically all of the functionality is present in the machine code. AI weights are basically binary blobs. We don't know what they mean, there is really no source code for them. The best we can do is various black box manipulations on them like LoRA, etc, similar to what we can do to a binary blob.