Open-source artificial intelligence explained

Open-source artificial intelligence is the application of open-source practices to the development of artificial intelligence resources.

Many open-source artificial intelligence products are variations of other existing tools and technologies which have been shared as open-source software by large companies.^[1]

Companies often develop closed products in an attempt to keep a competitive advantage in the marketplace.^[2] A journalist for Wired explored the idea that open-source AI tools have a development advantage over closed products, and could overtake them in the marketplace.^[2]

Popular open-source artificial intelligence project categories include large language models, machine translation tools, and chatbots.^[3]

For software developers to produce open-source artificial intelligence resources, they must trust the various other open-source software components they use in its development.^{[4] [5]}

Large language models

LLaMA

See main article: LLaMA. LLaMA is a family of large language models released by Meta AI starting in February 2023.^[6] Meta claims these models are open-source software, but the Open Source Initiative disputes this claim, arguing that "Meta's license for the LLaMa models and code does not meet this standard; specifically, it puts restrictions on commercial use for some users (paragraph 2) and also restricts the use of the model and software for certain purposes (the Acceptable Use Policy)."^[7]

Comparison of open-source large language foundation models!Model!Developer!Parameter count!Context window!Licensing

LLaMA	Meta AI	7B, 13B, 33B, 65B	2048	——
LLaMA 2^[8] ^[9]	Meta AI	7B, 13B, 70B	4k	Custom Meta license
Mistral 7B^[10]	Mistral AI	7 billion	8k^[11]	Apache 2.0
GPT-J^[12]	EleutherAI	6 billion	2048	Apache 2.0
Pythia^[13]	EluetherAI	70 million - 12 billion	——	Apache 2.0 (Pythia-6.9B only)^[14]

Notes and References

1. Web site: Heaven . Will Douglas . The open-source AI boom is built on Big Tech's handouts. How long will it last? . MIT Technology Review . en . May 12, 2023.
2. Solaiman . Irene . Irene Solaiman . May 24, 2023 . Generative AI Systems Aren't Just Open or Closed Source . Wired.
3. Castelvecchi . Davide . Open-source AI chatbots are booming — what does this mean for researchers? . Nature . 29 June 2023 . 618 . 7967 . 891–892 . 10.1038/d41586-023-01970-6.
4. Book: Thummadi . Babu Veeresh . Artificial Intelligence (AI) Capabilities, Trust and Open Source Software Team Performance . Responsible AI and Analytics for an Ethical and Inclusive Digitized Society . Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 2021 . 12896 . 629–640 . 10.1007/978-3-030-85447-8_52. 978-3-030-85446-1 .
5. Web site: Mitchell . James . 2023-10-22 . How to Create Artificial intelligence Software . 2024-03-31 . AI Software Developers . en-US.
6. Web site: 2023-09-11 . Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter language model . 2023-10-03 . https://web.archive.org/web/20230911095237/https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/ . 2023-09-11 .
7. Web site: Meta's LLaMa 2 license is not Open Source.
8. Web site: meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-chat-hf · Hugging Face . 2023-10-03 . huggingface.co.
9. Web site: Llama 2 - Meta AI . 2023-10-03 . ai.meta.com . en.
10. Web site: mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1 · Hugging Face . 2023-10-03 . huggingface.co.
11. Web site: AI . Mistral . 2023-09-27 . Mistral 7B . 2023-10-03 . mistral.ai . en-us.
12. Web site: 2023-05-03 . EleutherAI/gpt-j-6b · Hugging Face . 2023-10-03 . huggingface.co.
13. 2023-10-03 . [2304.01373] Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling . 2304.01373 . Biderman . Stella . Schoelkopf . Hailey . Anthony . Quentin . Bradley . Herbie . O'Brien . Kyle . Hallahan . Eric . Mohammad Aflah Khan . Purohit . Shivanshu . USVSN Sai Prashanth . Raff . Edward . Skowron . Aviya . Sutawika . Lintang . Oskar van der Wal . cs.CL .
14. Web site: 2023-05-03 . EleutherAI/pythia-6.9b · Hugging Face . 2023-10-03 . huggingface.co.