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Note: This document is made of three parts: A preamble, stating the intentions of this document; the Definition of Open Source AI itself; and a checklist to evaluate licenses.
This document follows the definition of AI system adopted by the Organization for Economic and Co-operation Development (OECD)
An AI system is a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments. Different AI systems vary in their levels of autonomy and adaptiveness after deployment.
More information about definitions of AI systems on OSI’s blog.
Preamble
Why we need Open Source Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Open Source has demonstrated that massive benefits accrue to everyone when you remove the barriers to learning, using, sharing and improving software systems. These benefits are the result of using licenses that adhere to the Open Source Definition. The benefits can be summarized as autonomy, transparency, and collaborative improvement.
Everyone needs these benefits in AI. We need essential freedoms to enable users to build and deploy AI systems that are reliable and transparent.
Out of scope issues
The Open Source AI Definition doesn’t say how to develop and deploy an AI system that is ethical, trustworthy or responsible, although it doesn’t prevent it. The efforts to discuss the responsible development, deployment and use of AI systems, including through appropriate government regulation, are a separate conversation.
What is Open Source AI
An Open Source AI is an AI system made available to the public under terms that grant the freedoms to:
- Use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission.
- Study how the system works and inspect its components.
- Modify the system for any purpose, including to change its output.
- Share the system for others to use with or without modifications, for any purpose.
Precondition to exercise these freedoms is to have access to the preferred form to make modifications to the system. For machine learning systems that means having public access to:
- Data: Sufficiently detailed information on how the system was trained, including the training methodologies and techniques, the training data sets used, information about the provenance of those data sets, their scope and characteristics; how the data was obtained and selected, the labeling procedures and data cleaning methodologies.
- Code: The code used for pre-processing data, the code used for training, validation and testing, the supporting libraries like tokenizers and hyperparameters search code (if used), the inference code, and the model architecture.
- Model: The model parameters, including weights. Where applicable, these should include checkpoints from key intermediate stages of training as well as the final optimizer state.
Checklist to evaluate legal documents
This table is work in progress. See slide 7 of Jan 26 town hall for more details.
| Required components | Legal frameworks |
|---|---|
| Code | |
| – Data pre-processing | Available under OSI-compliant license |
| – Training, validation and testing | Available under OSI-compliant license |
| – Inference code | Available under OSI-compliant license |
| – Supporting libraries and tools | Available under OSI-compliant license |
| Model | |
| – Model architecture | Available under OSI-compliant license |
| – Model parameters (including weights) | To be defined in the next phase |
The following components are not required, but their inclusion in public releases is appreciated.
| Optional components |
|---|
| – Code used to perform inference for benchmark tests |
| – Evaluation code |
| Data All data sets, including: |
| – Training data sets |
| – Testing data sets |
| – Validation data sets |
| – Benchmarking data sets |
| – Data cards |
| – Evaluation metrics and results |
| – All other data documentation |
| Model All model elements, including: |
| – Model card |
| – Sample model outputs |
| Other Any other documentation or tools produced or used, including: |
| – Thorough research papers |
| – Usage documentation |
| – Technical report |
| – Supporting tools |