This is amazing to witness. Moonshot open sourcing Kimi K3, a frontier AI and other components really means we are getting abundant AI for all of humanity.
Kudos to Moonshot for truly being what OpenAI should have been.
Fable-level and frontier AI should be open source and available to everyone for free.
> Kudos to Moonshot for truly being what OpenAI should have been.
Kudos to Moonshot for making these weights available for download. Lets not fool ourselves and claim these are "open source" by any understanding of the concept though, there are usage restrictions (even if you download them) and also training data isn't clearly broken down either, nor it it actually using a FOSS license.
> Kudos to Moonshot for making these weights available for download. Lets not fool ourselves and claim these are "open source" by any understanding of the concept though, there are usage restrictions (even if you download them) and also training data isn't clearly broken down either, nor it it actually using a FOSS license.
They will probably never release the training data because that represents a large part of their competitive moat. The same is true of US companies (Google, OpenAI, Meta etc) none of which has released the full training data for its open models.
They use private datasets that cost a lot to acquire, synthetic datasets and a lot copyrighted material for which they don't have licensing.
What matters most is that, with the necessary hardware, I can download a near frontier model, run it and modify it however I want. The other concerns you mentioned are just noise. And if my company is generating $20 million in revenue or serving 100 million users, it can probably afford a relatively inexpensive commercial license.
> They use private datasets that cost a lot to acquire, synthetic datasets and a lot copyrighted material for which they don't have licensing.
Yeaaah, and this, of course, is worth it, because it leads to you being able to download a near frontier model. Don't get me wrong, long-term humanity is probably better of with science with little regards to pesky things like ethics and provenance, but we also have a tendency to not fully realize the downstream or wider effects until way too late.
And sure, there is a lot of reasons to go with keeping your software proprietary too, I'm not trying to claim otherwise, same with training data. It's just that usually we don't call proprietary software "open source" unless it is open source, regardless of the reasons someone keep it proprietary or not, could be for whatever reason really.
>They will probably never release the training data because that represents a large part of their competitive moat
Not that what you've written isn't the case. However, in addition to what you've written, (or probably even before what you've written), there's the fact that everything they're training on is stolen IP. Same with US LLM labs.
Let's not kid ourselve's about where the training data is coming from. They are not asking artists, writers, coders, content creators, etc etc etc for permission to use their creations.
Anthropic, Moonshot et al are doing incredible things, but we shouldn't gloss over the costs. Both present and future costs are kind of enormous.
Exactly. I wish people would just stop saying "open source" regarding models. Even "open weight" is disingenuous. "self-hostable" would be more honest.
It's a gradient almost, with some steps. So far, I think you could categorize every single released so far as one of:
- Proprietary - No access beyond remote endpoints
- Downloadable - You can run it, but there are restrictions and training data/code isn't public and/or under FOSS license, nor are the weights under a FOSS license
- Open weights - The weights are under a FOSS license and downloadable without restrictions, but not all of training code/data is public or under a FOSS license
- Open source - The model architecture, weights, training code and data are all under a FOSS license, and you can freely download and use them without any restrictions
Few models hit the mark for "open source model", many models people call "open weights" would go under "downloadable" here, which personally I think would be accurate.
"Downloadable" should be "weights available" by analogy to "source available". K3 is weights available because it includes usage restrictions. K2.6 is open weights, because the only restriction is a weaker version of the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause", which is accepted as FOSS.
Yeah, thanks, "Weights available" does sound much better than "Downloadable", I agree.