The Open Source Initiative (OSI), a long-running institution aiming to define and “steward” all things open source, today released version

We finally have an ‘official’ definition for open source AI

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2024-10-28 20:00:15

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), a long-running institution aiming to define and “steward” all things open source, today released version 1.0 of its Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). The product of several years of collaboration with academia and industry, the OSAID is intended to offer a standard by which anyone can determine whether AI is open source — or not.

You might be wondering — as this reporter was — why consensus matters for a definition of open source AI. Well, a big motivation is getting policymakers and AI developers on the same page, said OSI EVP Stefano Maffulli.

“Regulators are already watching the space,” Maffulli told TechCrunch, noting that bodies like the European Commission have sought to give special recognition to open source. “We did explicit outreach to a diverse set of stakeholders and communities — not only the usual suspects in tech. We even tried to reach out to the organizations that most often talk to regulators in order to get their early feedback.”

To be considered open source under the OSAID, an AI model has to provide enough information about its design so that a person could “substantially” recreate it. The model must also disclose any pertinent details about its training data, including the provenance, how the data was processed, and how it can be obtained or licensed.