Re: Proposal -- Interpretation of DFSG on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Models

On 28.04.25 21:24, Aigars Mahinovs wrote:
> So, very precisely speaking, modification of a LLM does *not* require 
> the original training data. Recreating a LLM does.

IMHO that's a rather academic distinction. Yes *some* modifications 
don't require original training data, much like some modifications to 
libc don't require source code (I'm doing it myself; in one of my 
projects I patch the libc loader to search in /v/u/lib instead of 
/usr/lib because of pseudo multi-arch) but most do.

However, and returning to the root of this discussion: When we talk 
about source as the preferred way of modifying something, we need to ask 
*whose* preferred way. The user's? Certainly not, otherwise we wouldn't 
need to ship nvim's source code.

Thus it's the developers' preferred source, which leaves pre-built 
models out in the cold.

However² IMHO we need to distinguish between things like gnubg or 
tesseract, and today's LLMs or similar "large" models.

We can, absent no copyright restrictions, more-or-less-easily recreate 
the former's models from their training data.

We can't do that with LLMs or similar-sized models, even if we had 
source code.

Their developers create a model's architecture, presumably some 
Python-or-whatever source code and/or a descriptive language, which *is* 
their source. We don't get that. This source gets compiled to whatever 
(we also don't get these binaries). The result is then run in training 
mode on a large corpus which Debian can't distribute (a) for copyright 
reasons but also (b) because it's too damn large, end up with a base 
model which they don't give us either and which gets tweaked by further 
training and human feedback (partly by poorly-paid gig workers in 
developing countries), then distilled down to manageable size (but still 
too large for us to distribute in many cases).

So our choice is basically between shipping something we don't control 
and can't introspect, and, well, not doing so.

There is no third choice of distributing a free alternative, because 
even if we get the architecture's source code and aside from the 
copyright issue and the humongous-size issue and the 
multiple-manual-build-steps issue and the 
shouldn't-we-save-energy-dammit issue there's the looming problem that 
almost(?) none of us have even remotely enough GPUs to reproduce the 
resulting model in the first place.

My vote is on not doing so. We might want to ship the requisite tools in 
contrib and let people download the models from huggingface, but that's 
as far as I want to take Debian in that direction.

-- 
-- regards
-- 
-- Matthias Urlichs

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