Re: Open vs proprietary LLMs

Hi Wookey,

On 8/25/26 8:49 AM, Wookey wrote:

> Having read the various options and some of the discussion on -vote I
> am surprised that none of the options we have to vote on seem to
> distinguish between LLMs where we have all the parts and can run them
> ourselves, and proprietary LLMs run remotely over which we have no
> control, reproducibility options, security/privacy insight, etc.

We have the necessary tools in Debian, but ingesting the entirety of the 
Debian source code and mailing list archive, which is all that we 
reasonably have access to in a reproducible way, would not be sufficient 
for anything but a fuzzy code search.

The training set would be too small to argue that copyrights are 
sufficiently diluted that we can ignore licenses (which is a dangerous 
position that we should not adopt), so code generation is out.

Any "open weights" are still just binary blobs, at best we could pretend 
they are like firmware.

    Simon