Hello and welcome back to Eye on A.I. In a paper published this past week, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the AI Now Institute, along with Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker, dove deep into what exactly is—and is not—open about current “open” A.I. systems.
From Meta’s LLaMA-2 to OpenAI’s various models, many of the A.I. technologies being released are touted by their corporate creators as “open” or “open source," but the authors argue many of them aren’t so open after all and that these terms are used in confusing and diverse ways that have more to do with aspiration and marketing than as a technical descriptor. The authors also interrogate how, due to the vast differences between large A.I. systems and traditional software, even the most maximally “open” A.I. offerings do not ensure a level playing field or facilitate the democratization of A.I.; in fact, large companies have a clear playbook for using their open A.I. offerings to leverage the benefits of owning the ecosystem and capture the industry.
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