If all you have are the model weights, you can very easily tweak the model. How else are all these "decensored" Llama2 showing up on Hugging Face? There's a lot of value in a trained LLM model itself and it's 100% a type of openness to release these trained models.
What you can't easily do is retrain from scratch using a heavily modified architecture or different training data preconditioning. So yes, it is valuable to have dataset access and compute to do this and this is the primary type of value for LLM providers. It would be great if this were more open — it would also be great if everybody had a million dollars.
I think it's pretty misguided to put down the first type of value and openness when honestly they're pretty independent, and the second type of value and openness is hard for anybody without millions of dollars to access.
Well, by that argument it's trivially easy to run emacs on a binary and change a pathname --- or wrap a program with another program to "fix a bug". Easy, no?
And yet, the people who insist on having source code so they can edit the program and recompile it have said that for programs, having just the binary isn't good enough.
What you can't easily do is retrain from scratch using a heavily modified architecture or different training data preconditioning. So yes, it is valuable to have dataset access and compute to do this and this is the primary type of value for LLM providers. It would be great if this were more open — it would also be great if everybody had a million dollars.
I think it's pretty misguided to put down the first type of value and openness when honestly they're pretty independent, and the second type of value and openness is hard for anybody without millions of dollars to access.