Firstly, it is now pretty much exactly two years since OpenAI announced GPT-3 and it is great to see that access to these models – for scientists in particular – is becoming increasingly commonplace. I should also note that Hugging Face really have taken a “big tent” stance on the development of this model and their business in general. This is refreshing given that no other entity capable of raising the funds and manpower to develop these kinds of models have taken a similar stance (despite much deeper pockets…). Yes, Hugging Face is running on venture capital, but at least for now I see no reason to be cynical about their efforts that in every way appear genuine to me.

Still, it is not all great. OpenAI, DeepMind, Google, etc. continues to produce models that are completely closed and thus can never be the subject to analysis from the rest of the community. Models which all dwarf GPT-3 at this point. My fear is that those of us arguing for access will continue to play catch up – maybe even forever.

However, while BLOOM is more open than say FAIR’s OPT [1] – which had the gall to call itself both “open” and “democratising” despite restricting commercial usage in its “open” license – I believe there is a discussion to be had about how they (and many others in the community) use the word “open”.

[1]: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-s...

While I am not a lawyer, I am somewhat familiar with licenses and have gone through the BigScience RAIL License v1.0 [2], the associated blog post [3], and some background papers and documents to better understand how Hugging Face and its community motivate the licensing.

[2]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigscience/license

[3]: https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/the-bigscience-rail-l...

From the license itself: “[T]his License aims to strike a balance between both [open and responsible AI development] in order to enable responsible open-science…” I am of the opinion that this is impossible, as the definition of “responsible” they use (see Appendix A) is directly at odds with every definition of “open” that I am aware of. Furthermore, I find phrasings such as “Although the BigScience community does not aim to impose its values on potential users of this Model, it is determined to take tangible steps towards protecting the community from inappropriate uses of the work being developed by BigScience.” confusing, as it both claims not to seek to impose its values and to seek to impose its values in the very same sentence!

In essence, I wish entities such as FAIR and Hugging Face would stop using the term “open” when they so clearly disagree with all accepted definitions of it. In the blog post related to their license [2], they explicitly state that they are incompatible with the OSI definition of open which for example the ethical source movement [4] also agrees with and thus avoids labelling themselves as “open”.

[4]: https://ethicalsource.dev

Okay, so BLOOM is not “open” as in “open source”, then what is it “open” like? Putting limitations on usage makes it run afoul of definitions of “open access”: “free availability and unrestricted use” [5]. Although I have to admit that I am less familiar with how this community would view imposing ethical considerations on readers of science, I am fairly certain that barring access to scientific information based on anything other than very clear ethical considerations (say, easily-deployable, pandemic-level virus mutations) would run afoul of a great majority of the open access movement.

[5]: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

Right, so it is not “open” as in “open source” and nor “open” as in “open access”. How about “open science”? To the best of my knowledge there is no widely accepted definition of open science, but most seem to model themselves around open access, open source, and open data. Thus falling back on OSI’s definition and to quote the Open Knowledge Foundation: “Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness” [6]. Alternatively, their short definition makes it even clearer: “Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose” [7].

[6]: http://opendefinition.org/od/2.1/en

[7]: http://opendefinition.org

In summary, I do not believe that you can argue that anything that is “ethically licensed” is “open” by any reasonable definition. This however is fine, as anyone is free to dictate how the fruit of their labour is to be used. However, even when I am being charitable, it is difficult for me not to feel that there is a desire to ride on the coattails of the positive semantics attached with the word “open” that has taken arguably more than 30 years for others to build up and I feel that it is ethically questionable to muddy the waters around a term that others have worked hard to define and build communities upon. You are “ethical”, “responsible”, or some other nice term, but not “open” – own it.

Lastly, why do I as a researcher in this area object? Especially given that I think I can agree to every single ethical point in Appendix A.

Firstly – as I have argued above – it annoys me greatly that multiple entities outside the “open” movements use the terms frivolously and I believe to their own benefit. This feels like appropriation if ever I saw it.

Secondly, I believe that despite their good intentions multiple efforts motivated by ethics are reversing the direction of openness of where science has been heading over the last twenty years. Even if only marginally so.

Thirdly (and lastly), I believe these efforts to achieve their ethical goals will prove to have little to no effect and that efforts are more strongly warranted elsewhere. Actors with the capability to cause harm will either be able to ignore the license or are likely to have already obtained these kinds of models independent of publicly released models (not to mention that cutting-edge models are developed solely by multi-national corporations without ethical quandaries). Thus, to me, taking a legalistic approach is akin to paying for indulgences and staying in our academic ivory towers. Rather, I think successful initiatives to restrict potential harm much be wider in scope akin to the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots [8] or, even better, to educate the general public about these models and work on developing countermeasures to support public trust and communication once these models inevitably become commonplace are necessary and receiving far too little attention in the community in favour of hypothetical risk and legal word play.

[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_to_Stop_Killer_Robots

Unrelated notes: While browsing the license I noted that it has patent clauses akin to Apache 2.0, which I found interesting. It also contains a somewhat vague requirement to keep your models in sync with the upstream: “You shall undertake reasonable efforts to use the latest version of the Model.” I assume that this is intended to be used if the model is “patched” to restrict harm. But it creates another ongoing relationship between users of the model and Hugging Face.