I saw a bunch of people complaining on Twitter about how GPT-OSS can't be customized or has no soul and I noticed that none of them said what they were trying to accomplish.
"The main use-case for fine-tuning small language models is for erotic role-play, and there’s a serious demand."
It's not just erotic role play that the censorship affects. My life involves a lot of sexual discussions and that means that everyday talk, chat summaries, email rewrites or translations will cause the model to shut down. I do the latter a lot especially to find colloquialisms because Google translate is often too literal. It's so annoying.
Right now I'm using abliterated llama 3.1. I have no need for vision but I want to use the saved memory for more context so 3.2 is not so relevant. Llama 3.1 is perfect. But I want to try newer models too.
Until gpt-oss can be uncensored it's no use to me. But if there was nothing erotic in its training data it can't be. And no, I never have it do erotic roleplay. I'm not really interested when there's no real people involved.
it's not erotic role-play, but I have a use case of making an AI-powered NetHack clone. specifically, to generate dungeon layouts, dialog for NPCs and to fill in the boatloads of minutae and interactions which NetHack is famous for.
you kind of need soul for that, and a lot of background knowledge on mythology/fantasy lore, but also tool use to work the world systems.
Are you getting good results with this? Some time ago I build an "overworld simulator" by having a bunch if jsons that represented villages, characters, building, story hooks and plots. I just asked ChatGPT to "simulate the gameworld by a week".
Technically this worked great, but everything was somewhat bland and generic.
Noteable not-highlights:
- there is a shimmer in the nearby forests that keep villagers up at night -> it's an orc camp
- there is a mysterious figure in town -> it's a Aragon type ranger
I've had some success in letting it generate lists of things at high temperature and picking the last item in the list.
Ask some model to generate a number uniformly between 0 and 100; you get 47 a lot. Or 27. Something like that.
Ask it for a list of numbers, uniformly distributed, and it also often starts with the same number. However later elements in the sequence will converge (imperfectly) to a better approximation of uniformity.
The same for names of the dwarves and paladins in your party.
Why would a language company censor language like that? I literally don't see the purpose.
Plenty of the best novels have explicit scenes. I certainly don't like novels about infantilized adults. Search engines don't do that, so why do we allow AI companies to do that so blatantly. It's basically culture engineering
It's a well-understood self-contained use-case without many externalities and simple business models.
What more, with porn, the medium is the product probably more than the content. Having it on home-media in the 80s was the selling point. Getting it over the 1-900 phone lines or accessing it over the internet ... these were arguably the actual product. It might have been a driver of early smart phone adoption as well. Adult content is about an 80% consumption on handheld devices while the internet writ large is about 60%.
Private tunable multi-media interaction on-demand is the product here.
Also it's a unique offer. Role playing prohibited sexual acts can be done arguably victim free.
There's a good fiction story there... "I thought I was talking to AI"
There's something Freudian about the idea that the more you can customize porn, the more popular it is. That, despite the impression that "all men want one thing", it turns out that men all want very different and very oddly specific things. Imbuing somrthing with a "magical" quality that doesnt exist is the origin of the term "fetish". Its not about the raw attractive preference for a particular hair color; its a belief in the POWER of that hair color.
oh it's wildly different. About 15 years ago I worked on a porn recommendation system. The idea is that you'd follow a number of sites based on likes and recommendations and you'd get an aggregated feed with interstitial ads.
So I started with scraping and cross-reference, foaf, doing analysis. People's preferences are ... really complex.
Without getting too lewd, let's say there's about 30-80 categories with non-marginal demand depending on how you want to slice it and some of them can stack so you get a combinatoric.
In early user testing people wanted the niche and found the adventurous (of their particular kind) to be more compelling. And that was the unpredictable part. The majoritarian categories didn't have stickiness.
Nor did these niches have high correlation. Someone could be into say, specific topic A (let's say feet), and correlating that with topic B (let's say leather) was a dice roll. The probabilities were almost universally < 10% unless you went into majoritarian categories (eg. fit people in their 20s).
People want adventure on a reservation with a very well defined perimeter - one that is hard to map and different for every person.
So the value-add proposition went away since it's now just a collection of niche sites again.
Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all.
This is interesting but there's a little more to it, especially with the erotic.
If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.
It's because you're polling for affinity or disclosed preference not for the actual engagement drivers.
For instance, if a male says they watch male pornography, they are labeling, or at least stating an affinity to a sexual identity.
However, the identities people choose to own are not the same as the preferences they actually have.
Instead if you track things like scroll velocity, linger time, revisitation, the time distance (such as 2 days apart instead of 5 minutes) a different story emerges.
For instance a given male could frequently look at male pornography but for all kinds of social reasons not want that affinity so they'd never even internally ideate the preference although their behavior of frequenting male content will be there regardless.
That's one of the problems with this approach is that not many people want to own all the social identities which map to their preferences so they don't openly identify it.
There (maybe) three levels of acceptance: admitting it to oneself, to others, identifying with it. And honestly these have a poor mapping to actual engagement with explicit content. You can have a (insert sexual affinity) rights activist who does not look at explicit content and someone protesting them who does all the time.
Man, I would pay money to see the (anonymized) trends on an adult website. Fascinating view into such an under studied area of humanity nature. I bet the porn tubes have data that sociologists could write papers on.
> If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.
That's because those are two entirely different things. If you polled people and asked them "what causes you to spend more time on social media", then at least some self-aware folks would likely identify conflict, "someone is wrong on the Internet" (https://xkcd.com/386/), etc. That doesn't mean that's "what they want to see on social media", that means that's "what gets them to spend more time on social media".
Grand Theft Auto 5 sold over 200 million copies, and military/crime/shooter games have always been incredibly popular. Yet crime has been decreasing over the past few decades in the United States, where both cars and guns are easily accessible.
There are hundreds of games designed to simulate criminal activities: hitman, the thief series, GTA, etc. I have yet to see a single reputable study that shows playing these games somehow results in an increase in that actual activity in real life.
Feels like you're falling into the same trap that Senator Lieberman did in the 90s, and just another spiritual successor to Satanic panic.
There’s probably some difference between someone who is visibly an adult and mature vs more deeply entrenching pathways of arousal in response to someone who is visibly a child. I still find the adult fetish version repellent but it’s also really hard to police in a way that’s remotely ethically permissible.
Ie yes it’s bad and in an ideal world nobody would do it. I see trying to restrict or ban it as the greater of two evils.
> let's say you publish a Steam game how to be a school shooter and shoot kids, wouldn't that lead to real school shootings ?
> who can definitely say that computer generated content about criminal behavior, won't lead to real crime with real victims?
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but there has been no found link between violent video games to violent crimes, despite it being researched extensively:
Let's be specific: Rape, incest, necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophila ideation.
I think we can all agree (1) these are harmful, anti-social behaviors that we do not want in our society, (2) people don't choose to have these desires, (3) most people who have them have no desire to actually traumatize others, (4) people who have these struggle with it.
These multi-media AI role-play environments would allow that type of engagement without any harm.
Now given all this, I am not a psychologist and do not know if that's part of how someone unfortunate enough to have those inclinations can deal with it healthily.
But if it is, now it exists and hopefully we can see less of it in the real world. I'm all for harm reduction if this is a way to get there.
It’s not unreasonable to suspect that engaging in high-fidelity simulations of these behaviors will further entrench and worsen paraphilias. This is pretty evident with the progression of many pornography addictions that don’t include these sorts of things that still follow the pattern of increasing novelty seeking leading to increasingly deviant stuff.
I am at a principled level uneasy with what’s fundamentally a sort of prior restraint (you haven’t yet hurt anyone but this may increase the likelihood and/or be an effective proxy to lock up those who are more likely to do so) but also see a really strong case for doing it given the fact that these are arguably the most antisocial behaviors one can imagine.
Are there any actual studies on this? Does access to simulations of illegal or objectionable material make pedophiles, rape fetishists, etc. more or less likely to try to access the real thing (or even worse, to try to commit crimes in the real world)?
Because both possibilities are plausible, it’s hard to know which is correct.
I feel like the people that would be capable of giving you an answer would be very careful not to actually give you one.
You can’t really research when the only thing you can be certain of is the known real cases. It’s much harder to quantify people that only have it in their head.
My wife has recently joined board of directors for a local non-profit helping victims of childhood sexual abuse. They are not religious or pornography prescriptive - they are liberal atheist whose entire focus is essentially sessions to help people who are currently adults and carrying baggage and impact of dreadful acts committed to them decades ago.
Anyhoo, The current "state of the art", as-scientific-as-we-currently have it findings are that for pedophilia, consuming content unfortunately normalizes and drives increasing urges, instead of giving them same outlet. It's a very very tricky area because current thought is also that pedophilia is "not curable" - it is sexual orientation thay we as society find unacceptable (me included, fwiw), so... Repression, wildly and rightly disawowed for other sexual orientations, is the current direction for pedophilia - I.e. Current thinking is that "victim-free" pornography consumption nevertheless tremendously increases actual risk to actual kids in the vicinity of the consumer.
Until relatively recently I was the technologist on a highty horse about online freedoms and largely still very much am. But in this specific area I've also had some semi personal experiences with pedophiles and my level of empathy to them has dropped to near zero and my level of empathy toward their victims has gone even further through the roof. Sometimes in technologist circles we think of this as edge case not worth consideration, but reality, very very unfortunately, is much much darker.
Don't get me wrong : I'm pro pornography freedoms, think it'd be huge fun to have a sexy high quality chatbot, and I find vast majority of those railing against it to be hypocrites with dishonest ulterior motives - and don't get me started on all the tangential "for the children" crap that religious rights tries to enact, as opposed to actually help children and families ;-<
But to the question of "is harmless pornography Indulgence better for paedophile and society", current thinking is "very much no".
most of the perpetrators of child sexual abuse are victim's close people: teacher/cousin/brother/uncle/father/etc.
the reinforcement of their lust will only remove whatever remaining barrier against such repulsive behavior, and once the novelty from synthetic CP wears out, it will create urge to commit real crime with real victims
Science always says more porn/gore = fewer crimes statistically. So opinions like these rarely come with citations.
It's not completely clear if it's just a spurious correlation or if there's a real causation, but eh, more training data + neutral alignment training is how humans train AIs, I don't see why would some says that's not how baby humans are to be trained.
I can’t tell if the part of this post after they have made this “thing of questionable safety” and then bury their head in the sand is satirical or not.
Why is it controversial to state that medical expertise is a technical field that engineers should defer to experts in?
It doesn't mean I can do things recklessly. Instead it's an acknowledgment of when I need to defer to somebody else just like I need to call up an attorney for legal stuff or an accountant for tax stuff.
Right, I'm just a technologist. The psychological and sociological parts aren't my bailiwick
Typing a prompt in an AI box to make art has fewer real-world victims than performing the acts, filming them, and then sharing the videos.
I think that's inarguable. Maybe it's still unadvisable and someone should be in talk therapy. I have no idea. But at least nobody is actually getting molested and retraumatized in the ai art scenario.
If someone is spending their time using comfyUI drawing pictures instead of stalking the local middleschool, I'd hesitate to say mission accomplished ... but maybe I should?
People's time is finite. They can't be doing both. If the real is substituted for the imaginary then the real can no longer happen because that time is spent.
The model has to be trained on something though. It’s easy to see how this works for art art, because people have been drawing that shit for years, and most people wouldn’t feel to bad about training on it. I don’t think that’s true for the photorealistic models though.
I am playing around with interactive workflow where the model suggests what can be wrong with a particular chunk of code, then the user selects one of the options, and the model immediately implements the fix.
Biggest problem? Total Wild West in terms of what the models try to suggest. Some models suggest short sentences, others spew out huge chunks at a time. GPT-OSS really likes using tables everywhere. Llama occasionally gets stuck in the loop of "memcpy() could be not what it seems and work differently than expected" followed by a handful of similar suggestions for other well-known library functions.
I mostly got it to work with some creative prompt engineering and cross-validation, but having a model fine-tuned for giving reasonable suggestions that are easy to understand from a quick glance, would be way better.
I haven't tried your exact task, of course, but I've found a lot of success in using JSON structured output (in strict mode), and decomposing the response into more fields than you would otherwise think useful. And making those fields highly specific.
For example: make the suggestion output an object with multiple fields, naming one of them `concise_suggestion`. And make sure to take advantage of the `description` field.
For people not already using structured output, both OpenAI and Anthropic consoles have a pretty good JSON schema generator (give prompt, get schema). I'd suggest using one of those as a starting point.
what's the problem with that? we have erotic texts dating back thousands of years, basically as old as the act of writing itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_2461
There's nothing wrong with it, but you have to understand the differences between different user groups to know which limitations are relevant to your own use cases. "It doesn't follow instructions" could mean "it won't pretend to be a horny elf" or "it hallucinates fields outside the JSON schema I specified"; the latter is much more of a problem for my uses.
I have no problem with it and I can understand why people don't want to say "I'm trying to pornify this model and it refuses to talk dirty!" in public. But if you're calling a model garbage maybe you should be honest about what the "problem" is.
The pro-porn side has zero PR because respectable public figures don't see pro-porn advocacy as a good career move. At most, you'll get some oblique references to it.
Meanwhile, the anti-porn side has a formidable alliance:
Right-wing, religiously-motivated anti-porn activists. Left-wing, feminism-motivated anti-porn activists. Big corporate types with lots of $$$$ to spend who want their customer support chatbot to be completely SFW at all times. AI safety folk who think keeping the model on a tight leash is an ethical obligation, lest future iterations take over the world. AI vendors who are keen on the yes-it-might-take-over-the-world narrative. AI vendors who just don't want their developers having to handle NSFW stuff in work. Politicians who don't know a transformer from a diffusion model, but who've heard a chorus of worries about lost jobs and AI bias and deepfakes and revenge porn.
These people will speak up in public at the drop of a hat.
on the other hand, Musk et al are building AI-powered thirst traps, like Grok's "Ani", or the accursed Replika bots (whose user base went on suicide watch when the company abruptly decided to digitally neuter their "companions.")
erotic roleplay, imo, is much less harmful than using LLMs as surrogate partners. porn and sex workers have existed for millenia. they're an outlet for sexual tension. they don't alleviate feeling lonely or provide an alternative to human companionship.
I'm worried we'll produce a generation of hikkikomoris, who eschew human connection for sycophantic machines that always listen and never breaks their heart.
The founding story of Replika (c.2016 ?) sounds like someone watched Black Mirror S2E02 (2013) and didn’t quite understand it was supposed to be dystopian.
Maybe you have a porn test suite for LLM’s? See which ones are fine with or capable of talking about specific topics? I believe there was something similar for willingness to discuss sciency stuff.
It's not pro-porn and anti-porn. It's pro-porn and people who just don't think this is that important an issue. The latter massively, MASSIVELY outweighs you guys.
Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but is that use case really real and not just prudish hallucinations? The market for NSFW novels is smaller than even cyberpunk paperbacks, there's no way everyday people build up addiction for an interactive version of it.
Not NSFW, but I was surprised at hearing 2 random 20-something adults tell me they use chatgpt to write fan fiction to read. Those 2 people didn't know each other but were from similar demographic. It was surprising nonetheless. I can't imagine why anyone would care about such a bizarre use case.
The claim that Fifty Shades of Grey and, I don't know, Norman Mailer?, Chuck Tingle?, are less common on book shelves and night stands than cyberpunk paperbacks seems obviously wrong to me.
Perhaps you could elucidate further on this subject? I'm mostly into books from 1800-1985 or so and don't know much about contemporary literary fashion.
Edit: Jean M Auel was extremely common in occidental households a few decades ago, especially the first and second books about Ayla, I'd wager much, much more common than cyberpunk.
My use case has been trying to remove the damn "apologies for this" and extraneous language that just waste tokens for no reason. GPT has always always always been so quick to waffle.
And removing the chat interface as much as possible. Many benchmarks are better with text completion models, but they keep insisting on this horrible interface for their models.
Fine tuning is there to ensure you get the output format you want without the extra garbage. I swear they have tuned their models to waste tokens.
It turns out if you generate two LLM responses and ask a judge to choose which is better, many judges have a bias in favour of long answers full of waffle.
> use of [LLMs] as judges [..] reveals a notable bias towards longer responses, undermining the reliability of such evaluations. To better understand such bias, we propose to decompose the preference evaluation metric, specifically the win rate, into two key components: desirability and information mass [..]
(If you're interested, give it a click. I tried to pare this down to avoid quoting a wall of text.)
I've heard the theory a few times lately that AI businesses will increasingly move towards usage models over subscription models, so while it is probably accidental, it could also be a longer term strategy to normalize excessive token usage.
I don't know whether the major AI companies will move to usage models. But let's assume that they do.
However: I would expect chat interfaces to be charged per query, not per token. End users don't understand tokens, and don't want to have to understand tokens.
If you charge per query, you don't gain anything from extra wordy responses.
Most use of small models was erotic roleplay back when I closely followed r/LocalLlama. Made me wonder if I should even make one if that's what most used it for.
You might find this part funny. At first, I thought they had automated their coding for SAP or other ERP databases. Then, they started talking about how realistic the body parts were. I paused staring at the screen. The sad reality clicked.
You don't understand! Every erotic chatbot service keeps getting censored, what happened to CharacterAI just keeps happening. There's a serious supply-shortage, do you really want people turning to Grok? The spice must flow!!!
> For the same reason that Microsoft probably continued to train Phi-style models: safety. Releasing an open-source model is terrifying for a large organization. Once it’s out there, your name is associated with it forever, and thousands of researchers will be frantically trying to fine-tune it to remove the safety guardrails.
I don't think this is really an issue in practice. Llama 2 and 3 were uncensored within a week. There's no bad press about this.
What does give a company a bad reputation is crap models. The llama 4 disappointment hurt meta's AI reputation a lot more than some community uncensoring.
I've found good use of Phi-4 at home, and after a few tests of the GPT-OSS 20B version I'm quite impressed so far.
Particularly one SQL question that has tripped every other model of similar or smaller size that I've tried, like Devstral 24B, Falcon 3 7B, Qwen2.5-coder 14B and Phi 4 14B.
The question contains an key point which is obvious for most humans, and which all of the models I tried previously have failed to pick up on. GPT-OSS picked up on it, and made a reasonable assumption.
It's also much more thorough at explaining code compared to the other models, again including details the others miss.
Now if only I had a GPU that could run the whole thing...
Sadly no. I'd like to keep it untainted, but also because the tables involved are straight from my work, which is very much not OSS.
I can however try to paraphrase it so you get the gist of it.
The question asks to provide a SQL statement to update rows in table A based on related tables B and C, where table B is mentioned explicitly and C is implicit through the foreign keys provided in the context.
The key point all previous models I've tested has missed, is that the rows in A are many-to-one with B, and so the update should take this into account. This is implicit from the foreign key context and not mentioned directly in the question.
Think distributing pizza slices between a group of friends. All previous models has completely missed this part and just given each friend the whole pizza.
GPT-OSS correctly identified this issue and flagged it in the response, but also included a sensible assumption of evenly dividing the pizza.
I should note some of the previous models also missed the implicit connection to table C, and thus completely failed to do something sensible. But at least several of them figured this out. Of course I forgot to write that part down so can't say offhand which did what.
As for the code, for example I've coded a Y combinator in Delphi, using intentionally terse non-descriptive names, and asked the models to explain how the code works and what it does. Most ~7B models and larger of the past year or so have managed to explain it fairly well. However GPT-OSS was much more thorough and provider a much better explanation, showing a significantly better "understanding" of the code. It was also the first model smaller than LLama 3 70B that I've tried that correctly identified it as a Y combinator.
Here's a more concrete example where GPT-OSS 20B performed very well IMHO. I tested it against Gemma 3 12B, Phi 4 Reasoning 14B, Qwen 2.5-coder 14B.
The prompt is modeled as a part of an agent of sorts, and the "human" question is intentionally ill-posed to emulate people saying the wrong thing.
The prompt begins with asking the model to convert a question into matlab code, add any assumptions as comments at the start of the coder, or if it's not possible then output four hash marks followed by an reason why.
The (ill-posed) question is "What's the cutoff frequency for an LC circuit with R equals 500 ohm and C equals 10 nanofarrad?"
Gemma 3 took the bait and treated R as L and proceeded to calculate the cutoff frequency of an LC circuit[1], completely ignoring the resulting mismatch of units. It did not comment at all. Completely wrong answer.
Qwen 2.5-coder detected the ill-posed nature, but instead decided to substitute a dummy value for L before calculating the LC circuit answer. On the upside it did add the comments saying this, so acceptable in that regard.
Phi 4 Reasoning reasoned for about 3 minutes before deciding to assume the question is about an RC circuit. It added this as a comment, and correctly generated the code for an RC circuit. So good answer, but slow.
GPT-OSS reasoned for 14 seconds, and determined the question was ill posed, thus outputting the hash marks followed by The cutoff frequency of an LC circuit cannot be determined with only R and C provided; the inductance L is required. Good answer, and fast.
Does anyone know how synthetic data is commonly generated? Do they just sample the model randomly starting from an empty state, perhaps with some filtering? Or do they somehow automatically generate prompts and if how? Do they have some feedback mechanism, e.g. do they maybe test the model while training and somehow generate data related to poorly performing tests?
I don't know about Phi-5, but earlier versions of Phi were trained on stories written by larger models trained on real-world data. Since it's Microsoft, they probably used one of the OpenAI GPT series.
It’s common to use rejection sampling: sample from the model and throw out the samples which fail some criteria like a verifiable answer or a judgement from a larger model.
One way of getting good random samples is to give model a random starting points. For example: "write a short story about PP doing GG in XX". Here PP, GG and XX are filled algorithmically from lists of persons, actions and locations. The problem is model's randomly generated output from the same prompt isn't actually that random. Changing the temperature parameter doesn't help much.
But in general it's a big secret because the training data and techniques are the only difference between models as architecture is more or less settled.
> for instance, they have broad general knowledge about science, but don’t know much about popular culture
That seems like a good focus. Why learn details that can change within days of it being released? Instead, train the models to have good general knowledge, and be really good at using tools, and you won't have to re-train models from scratch just because some JS library now has a different API, instead the model goes out to fetch the latest APIs/gossip when needed.
You feed the model approximately all the text you have ever. And some things like 'popular culture of 2025' won't change, just because the calendar changed to 2026. Just like the popular culture of the 1980s is what it was, and won't change.
You are right, though on the other hand feeding it a selection of 1% of the entire corpus is already pretty close to 'all the text' (if you assume exponential growth in training over time).
Even multiplying that to approximately 100% of that corpus plus adding lots of non-internet text, will pale in comparison to all the non-text training data we will (or are) feeding our coming (and existing) multi-modal models.
If I may go out an a limb here: either we will see continuous great progress on text-based LLMs alone, or multi-modal models will become the next big focus. (Or both.)
That's because people are hungry for progress, and going multi-modal is the obvious thing to try to focus on, if text alone proves infeasible to drive progress.
Just to be clear: I make no prediction here on whether multi-modal will lead to progress, just that people will obviously try it and try it hard, if the focus on text starts to stall.
Yeah, it always seemed like a sad commentary on our world that AIs are devoting their weights to encyclopedic knowledge of Harry Potter, Pokemon, and Reddit trolling.
And it's far from sad that we have so many resources, we can give everyone a supercomputer in their pocket just to take selfies and talk about Pokemon. Why would our AIs be any different?
By definition, a model can't "know" things that are not somewhere in its training set, unless it can use a tool to query external knowledge.
The problem is that the size of the training set required for a good model is so large, that's really hard to make a good model without including almost all known written text available.
It's not particularly likely that the hidden information encoded in synthetic data would happen to include specific details for making LSD or VX, but it's much more plausible that synthetic data contains some information the model's trainers would prefer to not incorporate in the model.
I mean, yeah. From the Table 9: Hallucination evaluations in GPT-OSS model card [1], GPT-OSS-20b/120b have accuracy of 0.067/0.168 and hallucination rate of 0.914/0.782 separately, while o4-mini has accuracy of 0.234 and hallucinate rate of 0.750. These numbers simply mean that GPT-OSS models have little real world knowledge, and they hallucinate hard. Note that little real world knowledge has always been a "feature" of the Phi-LLM series because of the "safety" (for large companies), or rather, "censorship" (for users) requirements.
In addition, from Table 4: Hallucination evaluations in OpenAI o3 and o4-mini System Card [2], o3/o4-mini have accuracy of 0.49/0.20 and hallucination rate of 0.51/0.79.
In summary, there is a significant real world knowledge gap between o3 and o4-mini, and another significant gap between o4-mini and GPT-OSS. Besides, the poor real world knowledge exhibited in GPT-OSS is aligned with the "feature" of Phi-LLM series.
> It’s not discussed publically very often, but the main use-case for fine-tuning small language models is for erotic role-play, and there’s a serious demand. Any small online community for people who run local models is at least 50% perverts.
Meh. For the first few decades consumer internet traffic was mostly porn. Stop freaking out and use the free effort people are willing to put into to solve technical problems.
Is it confirmed that synthetic data was used for gpt-oss training? I didn't pick up on that in the press release or see it elsewhere. Did I miss it or is Sean speculating that it is the case?
What you wrote is somewhat ambiguous, so allow me to rephrase. It is true that most fine-tunes of relatively small (which can mean anything up to 150B params, depending on who you ask!) LLMs are for uncensored roleplay purposes.
This is really irresponsible, there's actual data on quality and this is just crazy to assert: "Any small online community for people who run local models is at least 50% perverts." --- I get what he's saying, there's def. communities where that's predominant, but it's simply not true in the vast majority of communities. Sort of like, in 1997, saying any small community on this here Internet thing is half perverts looking at porn
It's extremely frustrating to try and reply to this because that which is asserted without evidence can't really be debunked by evidence.
I find it especially shameful that he's dragging someone's name into this wildly histrionic review, in service of trying to find a sole person to attribute to, the sole attribute that led to whatever experience he had with it.
The model is insanely good, wildly exceeded my expectations for local models, and will generate at least 18 months of sustainable value. I maintain a llama.cpp wrapper and this is quantum leap in quality. I despair that this will become a major source of people's opinions on it. We desperately need big companies actually investing here, Gemma ain't it, and pretending it doesn't work because ??? and then using it to create a corporate chickenshit narrative isn't exactly gonna help.
Yeah, makes sense. Good observations regarding the benchmark vs. vibes in general, and I didn't know / made the connection between the lead of phi models going to oAI and gpt-oss. Could very well be a similar exercise + their "new" prompt level adherence (system > developer > user). In all the traces I've seen of refusals the model "quotes" the policy quite religiously. Similar thing was announced for gpt5.
I think the mention of the "horny people" is warranted, they are an important part of the open models (and first to explore the idea of "identities / personas" for LLMs, AFAIK). Plenty of fine-tuning bits of know-how trickled from there to the "common knowledge".
There's a thing that I would have liked to be explored, perhaps. The idea that companies might actually want what -oss offers. While the local llm communities might want freedom and a horny assistant, businesses absolutely do not want that. And in fact they spend a lot of effort into implementing (sometimes less than ideal) guardrails, to keep the models on track. For very easy usecases like support chatbots and the like, businesses will always prefer something that errs on the side of less than useful but "safe", rather than have the bot start going crazy with sex/slurs/insults/etc.
I do have a problem with this section though:
> Really open weight, not open source, because the weights are freely available but the training data and code is not.
This is factually incorrect. The -oss models are by definition open source. Apache2.0 is open source (I think even the purists agree with this). The requirement of sharing "training data and code" is absolutely not a prerequisite for being open source (and historically it was never required. The craze surrounding LLMs suddenly made this a thing. It's not).
Here's the definition of source in "open source":
> "Source" form shall mean the preferred form for making modifications, including but not limited to software source code, documentation source, and configuration files.
Well, for LLMs the weights are the "preffered form of making modifications". The labs themselves modify models the same as you are allowed to by the license! They might use more advanced tools, or better datasets, but in the end the definition still holds. And you get all the other stuff, like the right to modify, re-release, etc. I'd really wish people would stop proliferating this open weight nonsense.
Models released under open source licenses are open source. gpt-oss, qwens and mistrals (apache2.0), deepseeks(MIT), etc.
Models released under non open source licenses also exist, and they're not open source because the licenses under which they're released aren't. LLamas, gemmas, etc.
No the preferred way of making modifications is the weights _together_ with training (or fine tuning) scripts, and the entire evaluation pipeline to measure performance. And the data required to support all of this.
When someone joins your data science team your would give them all this code and data. Not just the weights and say - the weights are the source, modify that to improve the model, I look forward to see your MR next week.
EDIT: Heck, sometimes the way to make improvements (modifications) is just to improve the data, and not touch the training code at all. It is often one of the most powerful ways. You still need training code though, and evaluation to measure the impact.
The license gives you the right to modify the weights, how you do the modification is up to you. The rest is in the realm of IP, know-how, etc. Apples and oranges.
Having the right to modify one part of the product is not the same as having the right to modify the entire product. Labeling such projects as open source in the full spirit of the definition is disingenuous.
This is similar to the approach taken by some video game studios: release the source code under a permissive license, but not the game assets. Which is better than a proprietary license, but it still presents a hurdle for the final product to be built from source.
The open weights approach is much more user hostile, however. Proprietary game assets can at least be purchased, and the final product can be built. With open weights, this is not possible. Nobody can realistically build the same model or similar models from weights alone. They can use the weights and self-host the prebuilt model, but not create revisions of it, which is the whole point of open source.
Weights are essentially the bytecode of language models. Sure, you can run and modify it with the right tools, but without the tools used to create it in the first place, the project is not much more useful than publishing binaries.
You also need the training data, so you can ensure you're not benchmarking on the training set, fine-tuning on the training set (overfitting with extra steps), or otherwise breaking things.
It's not about the preferred way. Else open source software would need to give you their IDE setup, CI/CD setup, access to all internal tools, etc. Software like sqlite don't release their full test suite. They paywall the preferred way of making changes, yet they are open source.
>The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications
The GPL refers to a form of the artifact being released
> open source software would need to give you their IDE setup, CI/CD setup, access to all internal tools, etc.
IMO they do. If you can't modify it like a core contributor would, then it's not really open source. Traditional open source projects always included development guides, test configurations etc.
> Software like sqlite don't release their full test suite. They paywall the preferred way of making changes, yet they are open source.
That's a matter of opinion. IMO sqlite is not true open source, for precisely this reason.
The key is if you consider weights source code. I do not think this is a common interpretation.
> The labs themselves modify models the same as you are allowed to by the license
Do the labs do not use source code?
It is a bit like arguing that releasing a binary executable is releasing the source code. One could claim developers modify the binary the same as you are allowed to.
The weights are part of the source code. When running inference on a model you use the architecture, config files and weights together. All of these are released. Weights are nothing but "hardcoded values". The way you reach those values is irrelevant in the license discussion.
Let's take a simple example: I write a chess program that is comprised of a source file with 10 "if" statements, a config file that matches between the variables used in the if statements and a "hardcoded values" file that stores the actual values. It would be a crappy chess program, but I hope you agree that I can release that as open source and no-one would bat an eye. You would also be granted the right to edit those hardcoded values, if you wish so. You'd perhaps make the chess bot better or worse. But you would be allowed to edit it, just like I would. That's the preferred way of modifying it. Me providing the methods that I used to reach those 10 hardcoded values has 0 bearing on my crappy chess bot being open source or not. Do we agree on that?
Now instead of 10 values, make it 100billion. Hey, that's an LLM!
> It is a bit like arguing that releasing a binary executable is releasing the source code.
That's the misconception. Weights are not a binary executable. In other words, there isn't another level above weights that the labs use to "compile" the weights. The weights exist from the beginning to the end, and the labs edit the weights if they want to modify the models. And so can you. There isn't a "compilation" step anywhere in the course of training a model.
If you will allow me the absurd analogy: my arm is also part of a person (me), but my arm is not a person. My arm does not have its own bank account and pays taxes independently.
I get how the weights are not exactly like binary code. Good points. But they are also not source code (from your own quote)
> "Source" form shall mean the preferred form for making modifications
The weights are not the preferred form of making modifications. At most, one could argue it is the weights + source code.
> In other words, there isn't another level above weights that the labs use to "compile" the weights
The source and training data?
I see your points, and it is an interesting discussion of nuances, but I profoundly disagree that the weights are "the preferred form for making modifications". For these reasons I prefer the term "open weights" for these projects.
If you have 10 harcoded values, you have a binary blob, a common feature particularly in hardware drivers that is opaque and commonly considered to not be fully free unless the instructions for deriving it are also included. It's frequently just an executable, occasionally just configuration information, but difficult to change while (assuming no signing shenanigans) still remaining technically possible.
The training data is the source code and the training process is the compiler. There's a fairly direct metaphor to be made there. Different compilers can have vastly different impacts on the performance of the compiled executable.
I think source code really only exists in terms of the source code/object code dichotomy, so what "traditional" open source means for model weights is really not obvious if you only go off of traditional definitions. Personally I think the word "open source" shouldn't apply here anymore than it would for art or binary code.
Consider the following: it is possible to release binaries under the Apache2 license. Microsoft has, at least at one point, released a binary under the BSD license. These binaries are not open source because they are not source.
This isn't the same argument as given in the article though, so I guess it is a third position.
> Consider the following: it is possible to release binaries under the Apache2 license. Microsoft has, at least at one point, released a binary under the BSD license. These binaries are not open source because they are not source.
Agreed. But weights are not binaries in the licensing context. For weights to be binaries it would imply another layer of abstraction, above weights, that the labs use as the preferred way of modifying the model, and then "compile" it into weights. That layer does not exist. When you train a model you start with the weights (randomly initialised, can be 0 can be 1, can be any value, whatever works best). But you start with the weights. And at every step of the training process you modify those weights. Not another layer, not another abstraction. The weights themselves.
> They're an artifact of a training process, not code that was written by someone.
If that were relevant to the licensing discussion, then you'd have to consider every "generated" parts (interfaces, dataclasses, etc) of every open source project artefacts. Historically, that was never the case. The license doesn't care if a hardcoded value was written by a person or "tuned" via a process. It's still source code if it's the preferred way of modifying said code. And it is. You can totally edit them by hand. It would not work as well (or at all), but you could do it.
There is actually a gray area about what code "counts" as source code to the point where you would consider it "open source" if it were licensed as such. I think if you had a repository consisting of only generated code and not the code used to generate it, it would definitely raise the question of whether it should be considered "source code" or "open source", and I think you could make arguments both ways.
On the other hand, I don't really think that argument then extends to model weights, which are not just some number of steps removed from source code, but just simply not really related to source code.
I mostly agree with your assessment of what we should/shouldn't call open source for models but there is enough grey area to make the other side a valid position and not worthy of being dismissed so easily. I think there is a fine line between model weights and, say, bytecode for an interpreter and I think if you released bytecode dumps under any license it would be called out.
I also believe the four freedoms are violated to some extent (at least in spirit) by just releasing the weights and for some that might be enough to call something not open source. Your "freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish" is somewhat infringed by not having the training data. Additionally, gpt-oss added a (admittedly very minimal) usage policy that somewhat infringes on the first freedom, i.e. "the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose".
You are free to look at every single weight and study how it affects the result. You can see how the model is architected. And you don't need training data to be provided to be able to modify the weights. Software can still be open source even if it isn't friendly to beginners.
I think you could say something remarkably similar about just releasing bytecode as well and I think most people would call foul at that. I don't think it's so cut and dry.
This isn't entirely about being a beginner or not either. Full fine-tuning without forgetting does really want the training data (or something that is a good replacement). You can do things like LoRa but, depending on your use case, it might not work.
"Good observations regarding the benchmark vs. vibes in general"
Most "vibes" people are missing that it as only has 5B active parameters.
They read 120B and expect way more performance than a 24B parameter model, even though empricaly a 120B model with 5B active parameters is expected to perform right around there.
I saw a bunch of people complaining on Twitter about how GPT-OSS can't be customized or has no soul and I noticed that none of them said what they were trying to accomplish.
"The main use-case for fine-tuning small language models is for erotic role-play, and there’s a serious demand."
Ah.
It's not just erotic role play that the censorship affects. My life involves a lot of sexual discussions and that means that everyday talk, chat summaries, email rewrites or translations will cause the model to shut down. I do the latter a lot especially to find colloquialisms because Google translate is often too literal. It's so annoying.
Right now I'm using abliterated llama 3.1. I have no need for vision but I want to use the saved memory for more context so 3.2 is not so relevant. Llama 3.1 is perfect. But I want to try newer models too.
Until gpt-oss can be uncensored it's no use to me. But if there was nothing erotic in its training data it can't be. And no, I never have it do erotic roleplay. I'm not really interested when there's no real people involved.
it's not erotic role-play, but I have a use case of making an AI-powered NetHack clone. specifically, to generate dungeon layouts, dialog for NPCs and to fill in the boatloads of minutae and interactions which NetHack is famous for.
you kind of need soul for that, and a lot of background knowledge on mythology/fantasy lore, but also tool use to work the world systems.
Are you getting good results with this? Some time ago I build an "overworld simulator" by having a bunch if jsons that represented villages, characters, building, story hooks and plots. I just asked ChatGPT to "simulate the gameworld by a week".
Technically this worked great, but everything was somewhat bland and generic.
Noteable not-highlights: - there is a shimmer in the nearby forests that keep villagers up at night -> it's an orc camp - there is a mysterious figure in town -> it's a Aragon type ranger
Might be fixable with promoting and/or a much lower temperature?
I've had some success in letting it generate lists of things at high temperature and picking the last item in the list.
Ask some model to generate a number uniformly between 0 and 100; you get 47 a lot. Or 27. Something like that.
Ask it for a list of numbers, uniformly distributed, and it also often starts with the same number. However later elements in the sequence will converge (imperfectly) to a better approximation of uniformity.
The same for names of the dwarves and paladins in your party.
token entanglement is an interesting emergent behaviour https://owls.baulab.info/
Where do you get started with something like this? Sounds like a fun project
Why would a language company censor language like that? I literally don't see the purpose. Plenty of the best novels have explicit scenes. I certainly don't like novels about infantilized adults. Search engines don't do that, so why do we allow AI companies to do that so blatantly. It's basically culture engineering
Porn is always the frontier.
It's a well-understood self-contained use-case without many externalities and simple business models.
What more, with porn, the medium is the product probably more than the content. Having it on home-media in the 80s was the selling point. Getting it over the 1-900 phone lines or accessing it over the internet ... these were arguably the actual product. It might have been a driver of early smart phone adoption as well. Adult content is about an 80% consumption on handheld devices while the internet writ large is about 60%.
Private tunable multi-media interaction on-demand is the product here.
Also it's a unique offer. Role playing prohibited sexual acts can be done arguably victim free.
There's a good fiction story there... "I thought I was talking to AI"
1, Porn. 2 Military.
The firmer is a lot more nimble and the procurement processes of your customers are easier to navigate.
> firmer
snort
Sometimes a typo makes you look wittier than you are.
There's something Freudian about the idea that the more you can customize porn, the more popular it is. That, despite the impression that "all men want one thing", it turns out that men all want very different and very oddly specific things. Imbuing somrthing with a "magical" quality that doesnt exist is the origin of the term "fetish". Its not about the raw attractive preference for a particular hair color; its a belief in the POWER of that hair color.
oh it's wildly different. About 15 years ago I worked on a porn recommendation system. The idea is that you'd follow a number of sites based on likes and recommendations and you'd get an aggregated feed with interstitial ads.
So I started with scraping and cross-reference, foaf, doing analysis. People's preferences are ... really complex.
Without getting too lewd, let's say there's about 30-80 categories with non-marginal demand depending on how you want to slice it and some of them can stack so you get a combinatoric.
In early user testing people wanted the niche and found the adventurous (of their particular kind) to be more compelling. And that was the unpredictable part. The majoritarian categories didn't have stickiness.
Nor did these niches have high correlation. Someone could be into say, specific topic A (let's say feet), and correlating that with topic B (let's say leather) was a dice roll. The probabilities were almost universally < 10% unless you went into majoritarian categories (eg. fit people in their 20s).
People want adventure on a reservation with a very well defined perimeter - one that is hard to map and different for every person.
So the value-add proposition went away since it's now just a collection of niche sites again.
Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all.
You may be interested in the data surfaced by this large-scale survey[1]
[1] https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity...
This is interesting but there's a little more to it, especially with the erotic.
If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.
It's because you're polling for affinity or disclosed preference not for the actual engagement drivers.
For instance, if a male says they watch male pornography, they are labeling, or at least stating an affinity to a sexual identity.
However, the identities people choose to own are not the same as the preferences they actually have.
Instead if you track things like scroll velocity, linger time, revisitation, the time distance (such as 2 days apart instead of 5 minutes) a different story emerges.
For instance a given male could frequently look at male pornography but for all kinds of social reasons not want that affinity so they'd never even internally ideate the preference although their behavior of frequenting male content will be there regardless.
That's one of the problems with this approach is that not many people want to own all the social identities which map to their preferences so they don't openly identify it.
There (maybe) three levels of acceptance: admitting it to oneself, to others, identifying with it. And honestly these have a poor mapping to actual engagement with explicit content. You can have a (insert sexual affinity) rights activist who does not look at explicit content and someone protesting them who does all the time.
Man, I would pay money to see the (anonymized) trends on an adult website. Fascinating view into such an under studied area of humanity nature. I bet the porn tubes have data that sociologists could write papers on.
> If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.
That's because those are two entirely different things. If you polled people and asked them "what causes you to spend more time on social media", then at least some self-aware folks would likely identify conflict, "someone is wrong on the Internet" (https://xkcd.com/386/), etc. That doesn't mean that's "what they want to see on social media", that means that's "what gets them to spend more time on social media".
> Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all.
Didn't reddit remove porn?
No. Not at all. You must be thinking of a different site. Tumblr did and onlyfans did for a hot minute and then backtracked.
Neither of them intended to be porn sites. It's kind of a natural occurrence on UGC sites . Look at Civitai...
Credit card processors are kinda weary of it for some legal reasons I'm not qualified to enough to really understand.
even if it is victim free, it can affect mental health in a way that a consumer will be more compelled to do a criminal act and create a real victim.
let's say you publish a Steam game how to be a school shooter and shoot kids, wouldn't that lead to real school shootings ?
who can definitely say that computer generated content about criminal behavior, won't lead to real crime with real victims?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Shooter
Grand Theft Auto 5 sold over 200 million copies, and military/crime/shooter games have always been incredibly popular. Yet crime has been decreasing over the past few decades in the United States, where both cars and guns are easily accessible.
There are hundreds of games designed to simulate criminal activities: hitman, the thief series, GTA, etc. I have yet to see a single reputable study that shows playing these games somehow results in an increase in that actual activity in real life.
Feels like you're falling into the same trap that Senator Lieberman did in the 90s, and just another spiritual successor to Satanic panic.
What about two consenting adults engaging in age play. By your logic, wouldn't that also lead to "real crime"?
There’s probably some difference between someone who is visibly an adult and mature vs more deeply entrenching pathways of arousal in response to someone who is visibly a child. I still find the adult fetish version repellent but it’s also really hard to police in a way that’s remotely ethically permissible.
Ie yes it’s bad and in an ideal world nobody would do it. I see trying to restrict or ban it as the greater of two evils.
An ideal world with less speeches and acts than we have today is a monastery, and monasteries are definitely not a model of an ideal world.
Who can say that it does?
> let's say you publish a Steam game how to be a school shooter and shoot kids, wouldn't that lead to real school shootings ?
> who can definitely say that computer generated content about criminal behavior, won't lead to real crime with real victims?
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but there has been no found link between violent video games to violent crimes, despite it being researched extensively:
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/03/violent-vide...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10964-019-01069-0
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6756088/
https://elifesciences.org/articles/84951
Of course, that hasn’t stopped video games being blamed for violence by the “think of the children” crowd and certain politicians:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protect...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/video...
Especially when shootings occur by white perpetrators:
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/09/video-games-...
The same narrative plays out for porn, despite the research findings being the same:
https://www.utsa.edu/today/2020/08/story/pornography-sex-cri...
But blaming violent video games or pornography is an easy scapegoat
I view it more like methadone.
Let's be specific: Rape, incest, necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophila ideation.
I think we can all agree (1) these are harmful, anti-social behaviors that we do not want in our society, (2) people don't choose to have these desires, (3) most people who have them have no desire to actually traumatize others, (4) people who have these struggle with it.
These multi-media AI role-play environments would allow that type of engagement without any harm.
Now given all this, I am not a psychologist and do not know if that's part of how someone unfortunate enough to have those inclinations can deal with it healthily.
But if it is, now it exists and hopefully we can see less of it in the real world. I'm all for harm reduction if this is a way to get there.
It’s not unreasonable to suspect that engaging in high-fidelity simulations of these behaviors will further entrench and worsen paraphilias. This is pretty evident with the progression of many pornography addictions that don’t include these sorts of things that still follow the pattern of increasing novelty seeking leading to increasingly deviant stuff.
I am at a principled level uneasy with what’s fundamentally a sort of prior restraint (you haven’t yet hurt anyone but this may increase the likelihood and/or be an effective proxy to lock up those who are more likely to do so) but also see a really strong case for doing it given the fact that these are arguably the most antisocial behaviors one can imagine.
Are there any actual studies on this? Does access to simulations of illegal or objectionable material make pedophiles, rape fetishists, etc. more or less likely to try to access the real thing (or even worse, to try to commit crimes in the real world)?
Because both possibilities are plausible, it’s hard to know which is correct.
I feel like the people that would be capable of giving you an answer would be very careful not to actually give you one.
You can’t really research when the only thing you can be certain of is the known real cases. It’s much harder to quantify people that only have it in their head.
My wife has recently joined board of directors for a local non-profit helping victims of childhood sexual abuse. They are not religious or pornography prescriptive - they are liberal atheist whose entire focus is essentially sessions to help people who are currently adults and carrying baggage and impact of dreadful acts committed to them decades ago.
Anyhoo, The current "state of the art", as-scientific-as-we-currently have it findings are that for pedophilia, consuming content unfortunately normalizes and drives increasing urges, instead of giving them same outlet. It's a very very tricky area because current thought is also that pedophilia is "not curable" - it is sexual orientation thay we as society find unacceptable (me included, fwiw), so... Repression, wildly and rightly disawowed for other sexual orientations, is the current direction for pedophilia - I.e. Current thinking is that "victim-free" pornography consumption nevertheless tremendously increases actual risk to actual kids in the vicinity of the consumer.
Until relatively recently I was the technologist on a highty horse about online freedoms and largely still very much am. But in this specific area I've also had some semi personal experiences with pedophiles and my level of empathy to them has dropped to near zero and my level of empathy toward their victims has gone even further through the roof. Sometimes in technologist circles we think of this as edge case not worth consideration, but reality, very very unfortunately, is much much darker.
Don't get me wrong : I'm pro pornography freedoms, think it'd be huge fun to have a sexy high quality chatbot, and I find vast majority of those railing against it to be hypocrites with dishonest ulterior motives - and don't get me started on all the tangential "for the children" crap that religious rights tries to enact, as opposed to actually help children and families ;-<
But to the question of "is harmless pornography Indulgence better for paedophile and society", current thinking is "very much no".
I agree you captured my thoughts exactly.
most of the perpetrators of child sexual abuse are victim's close people: teacher/cousin/brother/uncle/father/etc.
the reinforcement of their lust will only remove whatever remaining barrier against such repulsive behavior, and once the novelty from synthetic CP wears out, it will create urge to commit real crime with real victims
Science always says more porn/gore = fewer crimes statistically. So opinions like these rarely come with citations.
It's not completely clear if it's just a spurious correlation or if there's a real causation, but eh, more training data + neutral alignment training is how humans train AIs, I don't see why would some says that's not how baby humans are to be trained.
Even if there are I and likely you lack the qualifications of making any clinical takeaways from them.
I'd really defer to experts.
I try to make tools in good faith and hope they're used responsibly to make the world a better place.
I'm not a clinical psychologist nor can I pretend to understand medical literature like someone with a PhD
I can’t tell if the part of this post after they have made this “thing of questionable safety” and then bury their head in the sand is satirical or not.
Why is it controversial to state that medical expertise is a technical field that engineers should defer to experts in?
It doesn't mean I can do things recklessly. Instead it's an acknowledgment of when I need to defer to somebody else just like I need to call up an attorney for legal stuff or an accountant for tax stuff.
It’s not controversial but it doesn’t address my question at all.
A: I’m curious about X.
B: We should trust the experts!
Sure, but what do the experts say? That was my entire question.
Right, I'm just a technologist. The psychological and sociological parts aren't my bailiwick
Typing a prompt in an AI box to make art has fewer real-world victims than performing the acts, filming them, and then sharing the videos.
I think that's inarguable. Maybe it's still unadvisable and someone should be in talk therapy. I have no idea. But at least nobody is actually getting molested and retraumatized in the ai art scenario.
If someone is spending their time using comfyUI drawing pictures instead of stalking the local middleschool, I'd hesitate to say mission accomplished ... but maybe I should?
People's time is finite. They can't be doing both. If the real is substituted for the imaginary then the real can no longer happen because that time is spent.
The model has to be trained on something though. It’s easy to see how this works for art art, because people have been drawing that shit for years, and most people wouldn’t feel to bad about training on it. I don’t think that’s true for the photorealistic models though.
Want a good use case?
I am playing around with interactive workflow where the model suggests what can be wrong with a particular chunk of code, then the user selects one of the options, and the model immediately implements the fix.
Biggest problem? Total Wild West in terms of what the models try to suggest. Some models suggest short sentences, others spew out huge chunks at a time. GPT-OSS really likes using tables everywhere. Llama occasionally gets stuck in the loop of "memcpy() could be not what it seems and work differently than expected" followed by a handful of similar suggestions for other well-known library functions.
I mostly got it to work with some creative prompt engineering and cross-validation, but having a model fine-tuned for giving reasonable suggestions that are easy to understand from a quick glance, would be way better.
I haven't tried your exact task, of course, but I've found a lot of success in using JSON structured output (in strict mode), and decomposing the response into more fields than you would otherwise think useful. And making those fields highly specific.
For example: make the suggestion output an object with multiple fields, naming one of them `concise_suggestion`. And make sure to take advantage of the `description` field.
For people not already using structured output, both OpenAI and Anthropic consoles have a pretty good JSON schema generator (give prompt, get schema). I'd suggest using one of those as a starting point.
what's the problem with that? we have erotic texts dating back thousands of years, basically as old as the act of writing itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_2461
There's nothing wrong with it, but you have to understand the differences between different user groups to know which limitations are relevant to your own use cases. "It doesn't follow instructions" could mean "it won't pretend to be a horny elf" or "it hallucinates fields outside the JSON schema I specified"; the latter is much more of a problem for my uses.
Really, if you want a fey creature with horns, a satyr is probably a better bet than an elf.
Nah dude, tieflings. Cuz they're hot as hell.
Yeah, ok, I'll see myself out.
I have no problem with it and I can understand why people don't want to say "I'm trying to pornify this model and it refuses to talk dirty!" in public. But if you're calling a model garbage maybe you should be honest about what the "problem" is.
Why? Is there any reason to believe problems in that context won't generalise?
Lots, yes. The fine tuning may attempt to introduce concepts that were intentionally omitted from the training data for safety* reasons.
Maybe nothing wrong with that, but it might mean that the perceived weaknesses don't generalize to an area of the model that hasn't been lobotomized.
* using safety the way OpenAI have been using the term, not looking to debate the utility of that.
Are you serious? Of course there are reasons to believe they won't generalise.
The pro-porn side has zero PR because respectable public figures don't see pro-porn advocacy as a good career move. At most, you'll get some oblique references to it.
Meanwhile, the anti-porn side has a formidable alliance:
Right-wing, religiously-motivated anti-porn activists. Left-wing, feminism-motivated anti-porn activists. Big corporate types with lots of $$$$ to spend who want their customer support chatbot to be completely SFW at all times. AI safety folk who think keeping the model on a tight leash is an ethical obligation, lest future iterations take over the world. AI vendors who are keen on the yes-it-might-take-over-the-world narrative. AI vendors who just don't want their developers having to handle NSFW stuff in work. Politicians who don't know a transformer from a diffusion model, but who've heard a chorus of worries about lost jobs and AI bias and deepfakes and revenge porn.
These people will speak up in public at the drop of a hat.
on the other hand, Musk et al are building AI-powered thirst traps, like Grok's "Ani", or the accursed Replika bots (whose user base went on suicide watch when the company abruptly decided to digitally neuter their "companions.")
erotic roleplay, imo, is much less harmful than using LLMs as surrogate partners. porn and sex workers have existed for millenia. they're an outlet for sexual tension. they don't alleviate feeling lonely or provide an alternative to human companionship.
I'm worried we'll produce a generation of hikkikomoris, who eschew human connection for sycophantic machines that always listen and never breaks their heart.
The founding story of Replika (c.2016 ?) sounds like someone watched Black Mirror S2E02 (2013) and didn’t quite understand it was supposed to be dystopian.
We already have a generation of hikkikomoris stepping up at bat. The ones behind them in line will be something else altogether!
Maybe you have a porn test suite for LLM’s? See which ones are fine with or capable of talking about specific topics? I believe there was something similar for willingness to discuss sciency stuff.
It's not pro-porn and anti-porn. It's pro-porn and people who just don't think this is that important an issue. The latter massively, MASSIVELY outweighs you guys.
Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but is that use case really real and not just prudish hallucinations? The market for NSFW novels is smaller than even cyberpunk paperbacks, there's no way everyday people build up addiction for an interactive version of it.
Not NSFW, but I was surprised at hearing 2 random 20-something adults tell me they use chatgpt to write fan fiction to read. Those 2 people didn't know each other but were from similar demographic. It was surprising nonetheless. I can't imagine why anyone would care about such a bizarre use case.
I suspect NSFW novels is a bigger market than you think. Spicy romantasy is popular among a certain set of readers.
The claim that Fifty Shades of Grey and, I don't know, Norman Mailer?, Chuck Tingle?, are less common on book shelves and night stands than cyberpunk paperbacks seems obviously wrong to me.
Perhaps you could elucidate further on this subject? I'm mostly into books from 1800-1985 or so and don't know much about contemporary literary fashion.
Edit: Jean M Auel was extremely common in occidental households a few decades ago, especially the first and second books about Ayla, I'd wager much, much more common than cyberpunk.
Same goes for books by Alex Comfort.
My use case has been trying to remove the damn "apologies for this" and extraneous language that just waste tokens for no reason. GPT has always always always been so quick to waffle.
And removing the chat interface as much as possible. Many benchmarks are better with text completion models, but they keep insisting on this horrible interface for their models.
Fine tuning is there to ensure you get the output format you want without the extra garbage. I swear they have tuned their models to waste tokens.
The jargon to google here is "length bias"
It turns out if you generate two LLM responses and ask a judge to choose which is better, many judges have a bias in favour of long answers full of waffle.
Thanks for that pointer.
The abstract of this paper seems interesting: https://arxiv.org/html/2407.01085v3
> use of [LLMs] as judges [..] reveals a notable bias towards longer responses, undermining the reliability of such evaluations. To better understand such bias, we propose to decompose the preference evaluation metric, specifically the win rate, into two key components: desirability and information mass [..]
(If you're interested, give it a click. I tried to pare this down to avoid quoting a wall of text.)
> I swear they have tuned their models to waste tokens.
Which seems a bit weird, because the customers of the chat interface (ie non-API customers) don't pay per token.
I've heard the theory a few times lately that AI businesses will increasingly move towards usage models over subscription models, so while it is probably accidental, it could also be a longer term strategy to normalize excessive token usage.
I don't know whether the major AI companies will move to usage models. But let's assume that they do.
However: I would expect chat interfaces to be charged per query, not per token. End users don't understand tokens, and don't want to have to understand tokens.
If you charge per query, you don't gain anything from extra wordy responses.
Most use of small models was erotic roleplay back when I closely followed r/LocalLlama. Made me wonder if I should even make one if that's what most used it for.
You might find this part funny. At first, I thought they had automated their coding for SAP or other ERP databases. Then, they started talking about how realistic the body parts were. I paused staring at the screen. The sad reality clicked.
You don't understand! Every erotic chatbot service keeps getting censored, what happened to CharacterAI just keeps happening. There's a serious supply-shortage, do you really want people turning to Grok? The spice must flow!!!
From the article:
> For the same reason that Microsoft probably continued to train Phi-style models: safety. Releasing an open-source model is terrifying for a large organization. Once it’s out there, your name is associated with it forever, and thousands of researchers will be frantically trying to fine-tune it to remove the safety guardrails.
I don't think this is really an issue in practice. Llama 2 and 3 were uncensored within a week. There's no bad press about this.
What does give a company a bad reputation is crap models. The llama 4 disappointment hurt meta's AI reputation a lot more than some community uncensoring.
> researchers will be frantically trying to fine-tune it to remove the safety guardrails.
It is a really weak excuse. They are more likely to take a reputation hit for having silly guardrails than for having someone to remove them.
Imagine if Bill Gates decided not to release MS Paint in 1985 because someone could have drawn something offensive with it.
I've found good use of Phi-4 at home, and after a few tests of the GPT-OSS 20B version I'm quite impressed so far.
Particularly one SQL question that has tripped every other model of similar or smaller size that I've tried, like Devstral 24B, Falcon 3 7B, Qwen2.5-coder 14B and Phi 4 14B.
The question contains an key point which is obvious for most humans, and which all of the models I tried previously have failed to pick up on. GPT-OSS picked up on it, and made a reasonable assumption.
It's also much more thorough at explaining code compared to the other models, again including details the others miss.
Now if only I had a GPU that could run the whole thing...
Get a Strix Point or Strix Halo with 128GB DDR5 RAM and you can run gpt-oss 120B at 10-20+ TPS.
Good point, though at the price of a 5090 I'm more tempted to get the 5090, as I do still game a bit as well.
Can you share the question? Or are you intentionally trying to keep it out of the training data pool?
Sadly no. I'd like to keep it untainted, but also because the tables involved are straight from my work, which is very much not OSS.
I can however try to paraphrase it so you get the gist of it.
The question asks to provide a SQL statement to update rows in table A based on related tables B and C, where table B is mentioned explicitly and C is implicit through the foreign keys provided in the context.
The key point all previous models I've tested has missed, is that the rows in A are many-to-one with B, and so the update should take this into account. This is implicit from the foreign key context and not mentioned directly in the question.
Think distributing pizza slices between a group of friends. All previous models has completely missed this part and just given each friend the whole pizza.
GPT-OSS correctly identified this issue and flagged it in the response, but also included a sensible assumption of evenly dividing the pizza.
I should note some of the previous models also missed the implicit connection to table C, and thus completely failed to do something sensible. But at least several of them figured this out. Of course I forgot to write that part down so can't say offhand which did what.
As for the code, for example I've coded a Y combinator in Delphi, using intentionally terse non-descriptive names, and asked the models to explain how the code works and what it does. Most ~7B models and larger of the past year or so have managed to explain it fairly well. However GPT-OSS was much more thorough and provider a much better explanation, showing a significantly better "understanding" of the code. It was also the first model smaller than LLama 3 70B that I've tried that correctly identified it as a Y combinator.
Here's a more concrete example where GPT-OSS 20B performed very well IMHO. I tested it against Gemma 3 12B, Phi 4 Reasoning 14B, Qwen 2.5-coder 14B.
The prompt is modeled as a part of an agent of sorts, and the "human" question is intentionally ill-posed to emulate people saying the wrong thing.
The prompt begins with asking the model to convert a question into matlab code, add any assumptions as comments at the start of the coder, or if it's not possible then output four hash marks followed by an reason why.
The (ill-posed) question is "What's the cutoff frequency for an LC circuit with R equals 500 ohm and C equals 10 nanofarrad?"
Gemma 3 took the bait and treated R as L and proceeded to calculate the cutoff frequency of an LC circuit[1], completely ignoring the resulting mismatch of units. It did not comment at all. Completely wrong answer.
Qwen 2.5-coder detected the ill-posed nature, but instead decided to substitute a dummy value for L before calculating the LC circuit answer. On the upside it did add the comments saying this, so acceptable in that regard.
Phi 4 Reasoning reasoned for about 3 minutes before deciding to assume the question is about an RC circuit. It added this as a comment, and correctly generated the code for an RC circuit. So good answer, but slow.
GPT-OSS reasoned for 14 seconds, and determined the question was ill posed, thus outputting the hash marks followed by The cutoff frequency of an LC circuit cannot be determined with only R and C provided; the inductance L is required. Good answer, and fast.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC_circuit#Resonance_effect
Why Qwen2.5 and not Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct?
Does anyone know how synthetic data is commonly generated? Do they just sample the model randomly starting from an empty state, perhaps with some filtering? Or do they somehow automatically generate prompts and if how? Do they have some feedback mechanism, e.g. do they maybe test the model while training and somehow generate data related to poorly performing tests?
I don't know about Phi-5, but earlier versions of Phi were trained on stories written by larger models trained on real-world data. Since it's Microsoft, they probably used one of the OpenAI GPT series.
> stories written by larger models trained on real-world data
I suspect there are no larger models trained on pure real-world data. They all use a mix of real and generated.
It’s common to use rejection sampling: sample from the model and throw out the samples which fail some criteria like a verifiable answer or a judgement from a larger model.
One way of getting good random samples is to give model a random starting points. For example: "write a short story about PP doing GG in XX". Here PP, GG and XX are filled algorithmically from lists of persons, actions and locations. The problem is model's randomly generated output from the same prompt isn't actually that random. Changing the temperature parameter doesn't help much.
But in general it's a big secret because the training data and techniques are the only difference between models as architecture is more or less settled.
> for instance, they have broad general knowledge about science, but don’t know much about popular culture
That seems like a good focus. Why learn details that can change within days of it being released? Instead, train the models to have good general knowledge, and be really good at using tools, and you won't have to re-train models from scratch just because some JS library now has a different API, instead the model goes out to fetch the latest APIs/gossip when needed.
Why would anything change?
You feed the model approximately all the text you have ever. And some things like 'popular culture of 2025' won't change, just because the calendar changed to 2026. Just like the popular culture of the 1980s is what it was, and won't change.
We don't feed the model all the text ever. They are still trained on less than 1% of the entire Internet corpus.
You are right, though on the other hand feeding it a selection of 1% of the entire corpus is already pretty close to 'all the text' (if you assume exponential growth in training over time).
Even multiplying that to approximately 100% of that corpus plus adding lots of non-internet text, will pale in comparison to all the non-text training data we will (or are) feeding our coming (and existing) multi-modal models.
If I may go out an a limb here: either we will see continuous great progress on text-based LLMs alone, or multi-modal models will become the next big focus. (Or both.)
That's because people are hungry for progress, and going multi-modal is the obvious thing to try to focus on, if text alone proves infeasible to drive progress.
Just to be clear: I make no prediction here on whether multi-modal will lead to progress, just that people will obviously try it and try it hard, if the focus on text starts to stall.
Yeah, it always seemed like a sad commentary on our world that AIs are devoting their weights to encyclopedic knowledge of Harry Potter, Pokemon, and Reddit trolling.
Why? You gotta provide what your customers want.
And it's far from sad that we have so many resources, we can give everyone a supercomputer in their pocket just to take selfies and talk about Pokemon. Why would our AIs be any different?
Because we really could use all that time, money and uranium to train them on complex problems we need to solve, rather than entertainment.
But you're right, shareholders of OpenAI want profit, not progress, and they'll give us our intellectual Big Mac.
No training data, no open source. Don't fall for the company PR.
As long as it works who cares about training data. Obviously they can't open it for many reasons. License is one of them.
I don't care if it's open source or not. I care if people call something open source which it isn't.
Do you care about binary blobs in the kernel? No. Are binary blobs in the kernel open source? No.
But it is tedious to go through the same discussion every 10 years, with a relentless industry that wants to dupe people.
If there wasn't a benefit in for them, they would not call it open source.
If a model is trained only on synthetic data, is it still possible it will output things like this? https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/1952958577867669892
By definition, a model can't "know" things that are not somewhere in its training set, unless it can use a tool to query external knowledge.
The problem is that the size of the training set required for a good model is so large, that's really hard to make a good model without including almost all known written text available.
> By definition, a model can't "know" things that are not somewhere in its training set, unless it can use a tool to query external knowledge.
Well, it could also make inferences. Like, it could find a new mathematical proof, even if that's never in the training set.
But how, it's not like it's thinking, it's just spitting the next likely token
> all known written text available
If phi5 is trained on synthetic data only then info on how to make drugs must be in the synthetic dataset.
In theory, it's possible. https://x.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1947689616016085210
It's not particularly likely that the hidden information encoded in synthetic data would happen to include specific details for making LSD or VX, but it's much more plausible that synthetic data contains some information the model's trainers would prefer to not incorporate in the model.
I mean, yeah. From the Table 9: Hallucination evaluations in GPT-OSS model card [1], GPT-OSS-20b/120b have accuracy of 0.067/0.168 and hallucination rate of 0.914/0.782 separately, while o4-mini has accuracy of 0.234 and hallucinate rate of 0.750. These numbers simply mean that GPT-OSS models have little real world knowledge, and they hallucinate hard. Note that little real world knowledge has always been a "feature" of the Phi-LLM series because of the "safety" (for large companies), or rather, "censorship" (for users) requirements.
In addition, from Table 4: Hallucination evaluations in OpenAI o3 and o4-mini System Card [2], o3/o4-mini have accuracy of 0.49/0.20 and hallucination rate of 0.51/0.79.
In summary, there is a significant real world knowledge gap between o3 and o4-mini, and another significant gap between o4-mini and GPT-OSS. Besides, the poor real world knowledge exhibited in GPT-OSS is aligned with the "feature" of Phi-LLM series.
[1] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/419b6906-9da6-406c-a19d-1bb078ac7... [2] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f372...
> It’s not discussed publically very often, but the main use-case for fine-tuning small language models is for erotic role-play, and there’s a serious demand. Any small online community for people who run local models is at least 50% perverts.
Amazing
Meh. For the first few decades consumer internet traffic was mostly porn. Stop freaking out and use the free effort people are willing to put into to solve technical problems.
Is it confirmed that synthetic data was used for gpt-oss training? I didn't pick up on that in the press release or see it elsewhere. Did I miss it or is Sean speculating that it is the case?
Is that true that most small language models are fine tuned for erotic role-play?
What you wrote is somewhat ambiguous, so allow me to rephrase. It is true that most fine-tunes of relatively small (which can mean anything up to 150B params, depending on who you ask!) LLMs are for uncensored roleplay purposes.
This is really irresponsible, there's actual data on quality and this is just crazy to assert: "Any small online community for people who run local models is at least 50% perverts." --- I get what he's saying, there's def. communities where that's predominant, but it's simply not true in the vast majority of communities. Sort of like, in 1997, saying any small community on this here Internet thing is half perverts looking at porn
It's extremely frustrating to try and reply to this because that which is asserted without evidence can't really be debunked by evidence.
I find it especially shameful that he's dragging someone's name into this wildly histrionic review, in service of trying to find a sole person to attribute to, the sole attribute that led to whatever experience he had with it.
The model is insanely good, wildly exceeded my expectations for local models, and will generate at least 18 months of sustainable value. I maintain a llama.cpp wrapper and this is quantum leap in quality. I despair that this will become a major source of people's opinions on it. We desperately need big companies actually investing here, Gemma ain't it, and pretending it doesn't work because ??? and then using it to create a corporate chickenshit narrative isn't exactly gonna help.
100%, what an insanely baseless article
Yeah, makes sense. Good observations regarding the benchmark vs. vibes in general, and I didn't know / made the connection between the lead of phi models going to oAI and gpt-oss. Could very well be a similar exercise + their "new" prompt level adherence (system > developer > user). In all the traces I've seen of refusals the model "quotes" the policy quite religiously. Similar thing was announced for gpt5.
I think the mention of the "horny people" is warranted, they are an important part of the open models (and first to explore the idea of "identities / personas" for LLMs, AFAIK). Plenty of fine-tuning bits of know-how trickled from there to the "common knowledge".
There's a thing that I would have liked to be explored, perhaps. The idea that companies might actually want what -oss offers. While the local llm communities might want freedom and a horny assistant, businesses absolutely do not want that. And in fact they spend a lot of effort into implementing (sometimes less than ideal) guardrails, to keep the models on track. For very easy usecases like support chatbots and the like, businesses will always prefer something that errs on the side of less than useful but "safe", rather than have the bot start going crazy with sex/slurs/insults/etc.
I do have a problem with this section though:
> Really open weight, not open source, because the weights are freely available but the training data and code is not.
This is factually incorrect. The -oss models are by definition open source. Apache2.0 is open source (I think even the purists agree with this). The requirement of sharing "training data and code" is absolutely not a prerequisite for being open source (and historically it was never required. The craze surrounding LLMs suddenly made this a thing. It's not).
Here's the definition of source in "open source":
> "Source" form shall mean the preferred form for making modifications, including but not limited to software source code, documentation source, and configuration files.
Well, for LLMs the weights are the "preffered form of making modifications". The labs themselves modify models the same as you are allowed to by the license! They might use more advanced tools, or better datasets, but in the end the definition still holds. And you get all the other stuff, like the right to modify, re-release, etc. I'd really wish people would stop proliferating this open weight nonsense.
Models released under open source licenses are open source. gpt-oss, qwens and mistrals (apache2.0), deepseeks(MIT), etc.
Models released under non open source licenses also exist, and they're not open source because the licenses under which they're released aren't. LLamas, gemmas, etc.
No the preferred way of making modifications is the weights _together_ with training (or fine tuning) scripts, and the entire evaluation pipeline to measure performance. And the data required to support all of this.
When someone joins your data science team your would give them all this code and data. Not just the weights and say - the weights are the source, modify that to improve the model, I look forward to see your MR next week.
EDIT: Heck, sometimes the way to make improvements (modifications) is just to improve the data, and not touch the training code at all. It is often one of the most powerful ways. You still need training code though, and evaluation to measure the impact.
The license gives you the right to modify the weights, how you do the modification is up to you. The rest is in the realm of IP, know-how, etc. Apples and oranges.
Having the right to modify one part of the product is not the same as having the right to modify the entire product. Labeling such projects as open source in the full spirit of the definition is disingenuous.
This is similar to the approach taken by some video game studios: release the source code under a permissive license, but not the game assets. Which is better than a proprietary license, but it still presents a hurdle for the final product to be built from source.
The open weights approach is much more user hostile, however. Proprietary game assets can at least be purchased, and the final product can be built. With open weights, this is not possible. Nobody can realistically build the same model or similar models from weights alone. They can use the weights and self-host the prebuilt model, but not create revisions of it, which is the whole point of open source.
Weights are essentially the bytecode of language models. Sure, you can run and modify it with the right tools, but without the tools used to create it in the first place, the project is not much more useful than publishing binaries.
You also need the training data, so you can ensure you're not benchmarking on the training set, fine-tuning on the training set (overfitting with extra steps), or otherwise breaking things.
It's not about the preferred way. Else open source software would need to give you their IDE setup, CI/CD setup, access to all internal tools, etc. Software like sqlite don't release their full test suite. They paywall the preferred way of making changes, yet they are open source.
>The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications
The GPL refers to a form of the artifact being released
> open source software would need to give you their IDE setup, CI/CD setup, access to all internal tools, etc.
IMO they do. If you can't modify it like a core contributor would, then it's not really open source. Traditional open source projects always included development guides, test configurations etc.
> Software like sqlite don't release their full test suite. They paywall the preferred way of making changes, yet they are open source.
That's a matter of opinion. IMO sqlite is not true open source, for precisely this reason.
The key is if you consider weights source code. I do not think this is a common interpretation.
> The labs themselves modify models the same as you are allowed to by the license
Do the labs do not use source code?
It is a bit like arguing that releasing a binary executable is releasing the source code. One could claim developers modify the binary the same as you are allowed to.
> Do the labs do not use source code?
The weights are part of the source code. When running inference on a model you use the architecture, config files and weights together. All of these are released. Weights are nothing but "hardcoded values". The way you reach those values is irrelevant in the license discussion.
Let's take a simple example: I write a chess program that is comprised of a source file with 10 "if" statements, a config file that matches between the variables used in the if statements and a "hardcoded values" file that stores the actual values. It would be a crappy chess program, but I hope you agree that I can release that as open source and no-one would bat an eye. You would also be granted the right to edit those hardcoded values, if you wish so. You'd perhaps make the chess bot better or worse. But you would be allowed to edit it, just like I would. That's the preferred way of modifying it. Me providing the methods that I used to reach those 10 hardcoded values has 0 bearing on my crappy chess bot being open source or not. Do we agree on that?
Now instead of 10 values, make it 100billion. Hey, that's an LLM!
> It is a bit like arguing that releasing a binary executable is releasing the source code.
That's the misconception. Weights are not a binary executable. In other words, there isn't another level above weights that the labs use to "compile" the weights. The weights exist from the beginning to the end, and the labs edit the weights if they want to modify the models. And so can you. There isn't a "compilation" step anywhere in the course of training a model.
> The weights are part of the source code.
If you will allow me the absurd analogy: my arm is also part of a person (me), but my arm is not a person. My arm does not have its own bank account and pays taxes independently.
I get how the weights are not exactly like binary code. Good points. But they are also not source code (from your own quote)
> "Source" form shall mean the preferred form for making modifications
The weights are not the preferred form of making modifications. At most, one could argue it is the weights + source code.
> In other words, there isn't another level above weights that the labs use to "compile" the weights
The source and training data?
I see your points, and it is an interesting discussion of nuances, but I profoundly disagree that the weights are "the preferred form for making modifications". For these reasons I prefer the term "open weights" for these projects.
If you have 10 harcoded values, you have a binary blob, a common feature particularly in hardware drivers that is opaque and commonly considered to not be fully free unless the instructions for deriving it are also included. It's frequently just an executable, occasionally just configuration information, but difficult to change while (assuming no signing shenanigans) still remaining technically possible.
The training data is the source code and the training process is the compiler. There's a fairly direct metaphor to be made there. Different compilers can have vastly different impacts on the performance of the compiled executable.
Training is obviously the compilation step.
I think source code really only exists in terms of the source code/object code dichotomy, so what "traditional" open source means for model weights is really not obvious if you only go off of traditional definitions. Personally I think the word "open source" shouldn't apply here anymore than it would for art or binary code.
Consider the following: it is possible to release binaries under the Apache2 license. Microsoft has, at least at one point, released a binary under the BSD license. These binaries are not open source because they are not source.
This isn't the same argument as given in the article though, so I guess it is a third position.
> Consider the following: it is possible to release binaries under the Apache2 license. Microsoft has, at least at one point, released a binary under the BSD license. These binaries are not open source because they are not source.
Agreed. But weights are not binaries in the licensing context. For weights to be binaries it would imply another layer of abstraction, above weights, that the labs use as the preferred way of modifying the model, and then "compile" it into weights. That layer does not exist. When you train a model you start with the weights (randomly initialised, can be 0 can be 1, can be any value, whatever works best). But you start with the weights. And at every step of the training process you modify those weights. Not another layer, not another abstraction. The weights themselves.
In my opinion, though, they're also not really source code either. They're an artifact of a training process, not code that was written by someone.
> They're an artifact of a training process, not code that was written by someone.
If that were relevant to the licensing discussion, then you'd have to consider every "generated" parts (interfaces, dataclasses, etc) of every open source project artefacts. Historically, that was never the case. The license doesn't care if a hardcoded value was written by a person or "tuned" via a process. It's still source code if it's the preferred way of modifying said code. And it is. You can totally edit them by hand. It would not work as well (or at all), but you could do it.
There is actually a gray area about what code "counts" as source code to the point where you would consider it "open source" if it were licensed as such. I think if you had a repository consisting of only generated code and not the code used to generate it, it would definitely raise the question of whether it should be considered "source code" or "open source", and I think you could make arguments both ways.
On the other hand, I don't really think that argument then extends to model weights, which are not just some number of steps removed from source code, but just simply not really related to source code.
I mostly agree with your assessment of what we should/shouldn't call open source for models but there is enough grey area to make the other side a valid position and not worthy of being dismissed so easily. I think there is a fine line between model weights and, say, bytecode for an interpreter and I think if you released bytecode dumps under any license it would be called out.
I also believe the four freedoms are violated to some extent (at least in spirit) by just releasing the weights and for some that might be enough to call something not open source. Your "freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish" is somewhat infringed by not having the training data. Additionally, gpt-oss added a (admittedly very minimal) usage policy that somewhat infringes on the first freedom, i.e. "the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose".
You are free to look at every single weight and study how it affects the result. You can see how the model is architected. And you don't need training data to be provided to be able to modify the weights. Software can still be open source even if it isn't friendly to beginners.
I think you could say something remarkably similar about just releasing bytecode as well and I think most people would call foul at that. I don't think it's so cut and dry.
This isn't entirely about being a beginner or not either. Full fine-tuning without forgetting does really want the training data (or something that is a good replacement). You can do things like LoRa but, depending on your use case, it might not work.
"Good observations regarding the benchmark vs. vibes in general"
Most "vibes" people are missing that it as only has 5B active parameters.
They read 120B and expect way more performance than a 24B parameter model, even though empricaly a 120B model with 5B active parameters is expected to perform right around there.