Their audience is people who build stuff, techs audience is enterprise CEOs and politicians, and anyone else happy to hype up all the questionably timed releases and warnings of danger, white collar irrelevence, or promises of utopian paradise right before a funding round.
doesn't it get tiring after a while? using the same (perceived) gotcha, over and over again, for three years now?
no one is ever going to release their training data because it contains every copyrighted work in existence. everyone, even the hecking-wholesome safety-first Anthropic, is using copyrighted data without permission to train their models. there you go.
There is an easy fix already in widespread use: "open weights".
It is very much a valuable thing already, no need to taint it with wrong promise.
Though I disagree about being used if it was indeed open source: I might not do it inside my home lab today, but at least Qwen and DeepSeek would use and build on what eg. Facebook was doing with Llama, and they might be pushing the open weights model frontier forward faster.
> There is an easy fix already in widespread use: "open weights"
They're both correct given how the terms are actually used. We just have to deduce what's meant from context.
There was a moment, around when Llama was first being released, when the semantics hadn't yet set. The nutter wing of the FOSS community, to my memory, put forward a hard-line and unworkable definition of open source and seemed to reject open weights, too. So the definition got punted to the closest thing at hand, which was open weights with limited (unfortunately, not no) use restrictions. At this point, it's a personal preference that's at most polite to respect if you know your audience has one.
The point is that "open source" by now has an established and widespread definition, and a "source" hints that it is something a thing is built from that is open.
Is this really a debate we still need to be having today? Sounds like grumpiness with Open Source Initiative defining this ~25 years ago when this term was rarely used as such.
If we do not accept a well defined term and want to keep it a personal preference, we can say that about any word in a natural language.
> "open source" by now has an established and widespread definition
For code, yes. For LLMs, the most commonly-used definition is synonymous with open weight (plus, I think, lack of major use restrictions).
> If we do not accept a well defined term and want to keep it a personal preference, we can say that about any word in a natural language
Plenty of people do. It’s generally polite to entertain their preferences, but only to a limit, and certainly not as a forcing function. The practical reality is describing DeepSeek’s models as open source is today the mainstream mode.
Perhaps you are right and this LLM-specific usage enters a dictionary at some point.
As I believe it is very misleading, I am doing my part to discourage it — it is not, imho, impolite to point out established meaning of words when people misuse them. We all create a language together, and all sides have their say.
I think the debate has been around what constitutes the source code. The mode has settled on weights. The spirit of the dictionary definition seems fine for excluding a definition that’s only practical if you own a multimillion-dollar ersatz mainframe.
> doesn’t make the wrong word the right one. Just that it’s a lazy combination and people don’t need to mind
That’s a fair interpretation. I’m going one step further: if most people use the term “wrong,” including experts and industry leaders, that’s eventually the correct use. The term “open source” as requiring open training data is impractical to the point of being virtually useless outside philosophical contexts. This debate is on the same plane as folks who like to argue tomatoes aren’t vegetables, when the truth is botanically they aren’t while culinarily they are. DeepSeek’s model not being open source is only true for the FOSS-jargony definition of open source—in non-jargon use, it’s open source.
I can dislike word "bread" being used to represent edible produce made from (wheat) flour, yeast and water and insist that be called dough-nut (it looks just like a big nut made from dough), but I would be frequently misunderstood.
This is why we standardize meaning of words, out them in a dictionary — so we can more effectively understand each other.
"Open Source" is normally reserved for OSI approved licenses but there are many non-OSI approved, source available licenses as well.
For example gemma4 is released under Apache 2.0 license – and can be called open source dataset.
On the other hand ie. deepseek, while publicly available weights model, is not released under OSI approved license, they released it under their own "Deepseek License Aggreement" – ie. in general it's free to use as normal OSI license but has some restrictions, ie. military use is explicitly forbidden.
Essentially yes (bottom got distorted), but Gemini uses Nano Banana Pro or Nano Banana 2 so it's not a surprising result. The image I linked uses the raw API.
Surely someone will jailbreak it now that they've allowed hardware modification:
"2026-04-07
We've replaced the requirement that there be no replacements of the original hardware with a rule that no more than 2 components may be added to, or replace components on, the original circuit boards."
Hear me out. Mergers and acquisitions that substantially lesson market competition can be blocked by governments, or even require approval in certain jurisdictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mergers_and_acquisitions
Maybe mergers or acquisitions that substantially impact security should require approval by marketplaces (industry governance), and notification and approval by even governments?
FTA: No merger challenged since January 2025. This means that dozens of mergers that would typically be anticompetitive bleed consumers for money (think vet and dentist rollups) will happen unchallenged.
I've seen gemini output it's thinking as a message too:
"Conclude your response with a single, high value we'll-focused next step"
Or sometimes it goes neurotic and confused:
"Wait, let me just provide the exact response I drafted in my head.
Done.
I will write it now.
Done.
End of thought.
Wait! I noticed I need to keep it extremely simple per the user's previous preference.
Let's do it.
Done.
I am generating text only.
Done.
Bye."
Thank you for the thoughtful analysis. I'd echo that the deregulation and corruption of these markets has two impacts:
1) less "legitimate" (non-corrupt) capital flowing to these markets which may ultimately reduce the liquidity and value of the asstrs.
2) more speculative deployment of capital, which means that capital is used for making bets rather than uses for productive purpose (such as investing in legitimate investments that are productive for the economy.
Why would a insider invest in legitimate, productive investment when they can make outsized gains in betting markets or corrupt futures markets?
And yes, long term this will massively taint the US financial power and make economies like the UK more appealing.
This is a vast and tricky question. The business model has basically fallen out from under journalism, and especially this kind of labor-intensive investigative reporting. The media landscape is increasingly dominated by moneyed individuals and companies essentially buying up the discourse.
I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging others to do so.
Only anti-trust action against big tech to break their ad monopoly (to make journalism profitable again) and breaking up media conglomerates (to reduce concentration of power in the journalism industry) can save journalism from becoming just a mouthpiece for the powerful. These things can only happen through politics. We need a political solution to save journalism.
Got it! Any recommendations on who to subscribe to? Any personal links for you?
In developer communities often you can support individual developers or groups through a monthly subscription / donation on their github page or similar.
Well, this piece was in The New Yorker, which is reasonably priced and regularly includes excellent investigative journalism. I get the physical copies, which can be too much to keep up with if you try to read everything, but it’s easy enough if you skim and just read the things that stick out as being of particular interest.
The New Yorker also comes with Apple News+ subscriptions (part of an Apple One plan that many people get for extra iCloud storage) which further includes a number of top-tier and local news orgs such as the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Times of London, etc.
Treating quality investigative reporting like the scarce resource that it is, as one of the most well-known can you shed any light on why Reuters would delegate resources to commission investigative reporters to unmask Banksy (in a world where all-things-Epstein represents an unending source of investigative opportunities in the public interest)?
I'm all ears:
1. Feel free to share why unmasking Banksy was in the public interest
2. Whether you feel all other public interest priorities had been served by investigative reporting prior to commissioning his unmasking.
I have no idea, nor care, whether or not unmasking Banksy, specifically, was in the public interest. My only point is that it's not limited to topics that you consider important.
As for your #2, that seems reminiscent of "why are we going to space when there are so many problems here on Earth."
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