“We welcome Hugging Face’s work on the benefits of ‘open’ models, and we need more of it from everyone who has ever built on open source,” said Katie Steen-James, a senior U.S. policy manager at the nonprofit Open Source Initiative, which promotes open-source software.
Open-source software is any such computer code that can be freely distributed, copied or altered to a developer’s own ends. The nonprofit Open Source Initiative, an industry organization, sets other stipulations and standards for what software is considered open source, but it is largely a matter of the code’s being free and open for anyone to use and improve.
Efforts to create a clearer definition for open source A.I. are underway. Researchers at the Linux Foundation in March published a framework that places open source A.I. models into various categories. And the Open Source Initiative, another nonprofit, is trying to draft a definition.
