> Fine-tuning and LoRAs and toying with the runtime are all directly equivalent to DLL injection[0], trainers[1], and various other techniques used to tweak a compiled binary before or at runtime, including plain taking at the executable with a hex editor.

No, because fine tuning is basically just a continuation of the same process that the original creators used to produce the weights in the first place, in the same way that modifying source code directly is in traditional open source. You pick up where they left off with new data and train it a little bit (or a lot!) more to adapt it to your use case.

The weights themselves are the computer program. There exists no corresponding source code. The code you're asking for corresponds not to the source code of a traditional program but to the programmers themselves and the processes used to write the code. Demanding the source code and data that produced the weights is equivalent to demanding a detailed engineering log documenting the process of building the library before you'll accept it as open source.

Just because you can't read it doesn't make it not source code. Once you have the weights, you are perfectly capable of modifying them following essentially the same processes the original authors did, which are well known and well documented in plenty of places with or without the actual source code that implements that process.

> Calling these models "open source" is a runaway misuse of the term, and in some cases, a sleigh of hand.

I agree wholeheartedly, but not because of "source". The sleight of hand is getting people to focus on that instead of the really problematic word.

The thing is, the core of the GPT architecture is like 40 lines of code. Everyone knows what the source code is basically (minus optimizations). You just need to bring your own 20TB in data, 100k GPUs, and tens of millions in power budget, and you too can train llama 405b.

If I understood the article correctly he intends to let the community make suggestions to selected developers which work on the source somehow. So maybe part of the source will be made visible.

> Your definition would make most video games open source - we modify them all the time.

No, because most video games aren't licensed in a way that makes that explicitly authorized, nor is modding the preferred form of the work for making modifications. The video game has source code that would be more useful, the model does not have source code that would be more useful than the weights.