Open-source artificial intelligence

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

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^[6]	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]

References

1. Heaven, Will Douglas (May 12, 2023). "The open-source AI boom is built on Big Tech's handouts. How long will it last?". MIT Technology Review.
2. Solaiman, Irene (May 24, 2023). "Generative AI Systems Aren't Just Open or Closed Source". Wired.
3. Castelvecchi, Davide (29 June 2023). "Open-source AI chatbots are booming — what does this mean for researchers?". Nature. 618 (7967): 891–892. doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01970-6.
4. Thummadi, Babu Veeresh (2021). "Artificial Intelligence (AI) Capabilities, Trust and Open Source Software Team Performance". Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 12896. pp. 629–640. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-85447-8_52. ISBN 978-3-030-85446-1. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)
5. Mitchell, James (2023-10-22). "How to Create Artificial intelligence Software". AI Software Developers. Retrieved 2024-03-31.
6. . 2023-09-11. Archived from the original on 2023-09-11. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
7. "Meta's LLaMa 2 license is not Open Source".
8. "meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-chat-hf · Hugging Face". huggingface.co. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
9. "Llama 2 - Meta AI". ai.meta.com. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
10. "mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1 · Hugging Face". huggingface.co. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
11. AI, Mistral (2023-09-27). "Mistral 7B". mistral.ai. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
12. "EleutherAI/gpt-j-6b · Hugging Face". huggingface.co. 2023-05-03. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
13. 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 (2023-10-03). "[2304.01373] Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling". arXiv:2304.01373 [cs.CL].
14. "EleutherAI/pythia-6.9b · Hugging Face". huggingface.co. 2023-05-03. Retrieved 2023-10-03.