Open weights are not open source: Why AI's favorite label is under dispute

The AI industry likes to abuse the word "open." It appears in product releases, research papers, policy debates, and investor presentations. A company publishes model files to Hugging Face, developers run them on their own GPUs, and the release is quickly described as an "open source model." Not necessarily. It may only be open-weight. The difference is more than a technicality. It determines whether you can merely deploy a completed neural network or whether you can meaningfully inspect, reproduce, alter, and redistribute the system that produced it. A genuinely open source system should grant the freedom to do all of the above. Weights are the learned numerical parameters created by training. Together with the model architecture and...

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