Mozilla is actively working for more open source standards and community. We explored the progress the industry has made in our Trustworthy AI Report and partnered with others to call for standards ahead of the Open Source Initiative (OSI)’s creation of the first Open Source AI definition.
Technically, Meta’s Llama large language model does not meet the definition of open source as defined by the Open Source Initiative in a definition updated only a month ago to grapple with a wave of AI models.
While there’s no shortage of “open” language models to choose from (see: Meta’s Llama), OLMo 2 meets the Open Source Initiative’s definition of open source AI, meaning the tools and data used to develop it are publicly available. The Open Source Initiative, the long-running institution aiming to define and “steward” all things open source, finalized its open source AI definition in October. But the first OLMo models, released in February, met the criterion as well.
The company points out that Tülu 3 and Ai2’s other models are fully open source, noting that big model trainers like Anthropic and Meta, who claim to be open source, have “none of their training data nor training recipes are transparent to users.” The Open Source Initiative recently published the first version of its open-source AI definition, but some organizations and model providers don’t fully follow the definition in their licenses.
Mer Joyce: I became involved in open source AI by being asked to lead co-design for OSI’s Open Source AI Definition. Like the Open Source Definition before it, the Open Source AI Definition will have a global impact. It needs to be based on global input. And my co-design firm, Do Big Good, does that work.
Unfortunately for them, though, guidelines published last week by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), an American non-profit, have suggested that the modern use of the term by tech giants has become stretched into meaninglessness. Burdened with restrictions and developed in secrecy, these free products are never going to power a true wave of innovation unless something changes, the OSI says. It is the latest salvo in a lively debate: what does open source really mean in the age of AI?
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) recently introduced the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) to clarify what qualifies as genuinely open-source AI. To meet OSAID standards, a model must be fully transparent in its design and training data, enabling users to recreate, adapt, and use it freely.
But the distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ AI models is not as simple as it might appear. While Meta describes its Llama models as open-source, it doesn’t meet the new definition published last month by the Open Source Initiative, which has historically set the industry standard for what constitutes open source.
The Open Source Initiative, which came up with the term “open source” and continues to act as its steward, recently issued a definition of open-source AI that clearly doesn’t apply to Llama for these reasons.
Developed over the past year and released in final form by the Open Source Initiative’s (OSI’s) more than 20 sponsoring organisations at the end of October, OSAID v1.0 outlines ‘four freedoms’ that members believe every genAI system must embrace.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) released Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) 1.0 on Oct. 28, 2024, at the All Things Open conference. Creating it wasn’t easy. It took the OSI almost two years to create and set up the OSAID.
This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with , Executive Director of the , about the definition of open source and… the definition of open source AI.
