Hi, Let me tell about an incident that occurred in Japan.
Japanese copyright law allows the use of unlicensed copyrighted material for AI training, and it is written most clearly in the world. This has led to several well-known AI companies to come to Japan and many large companies to develop AI models. The Japanese government is also supporting the development of AI, and at the academic center of these activities is the Matsuo Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, which sends developers to AI companies. In August this year, the Matsuo Lab released its Weblab-10B LLM, the most accurate AI model for Japanese, under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This release stating that the LLM had been launched as Open Source was reported by various media in Japan and got enormous attention. CC BY-NC is a non-commercial license, so it is not Open Source. In the immediate aftermath, Matsuo Lab was criticized by Open Source advocates on Twitter/X. However, AI is now national policy for Japan, and supporters of AI development has continued to claim that it is Open Source even though it is non-commercial. I have been working with a small organization called Open Source Group Japan since 2000 to promote the correct definition of Open Source in Japan, and I was very disturbed by this uproar. The reason why I felt this way is that the other side seemed to have no respect for the culture of Open Source, and it seemed difficult to fight the pro-AI side. I had considered taking a legal action, but some time later Matsuo Lab issued a press release admitting that they had misused the term Open Source and they would respect the OSI definition from now on. A translation of the article is below. https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2308/22/news146.html My point is this: companies developing AI will also end up relying on Open Source software. If we continue to speak out, there will be a time when they listen to our arguments. --- Shuji Sado https://opensource.jp/ 2023/11/1 10:51 Stefano Maffulli <stef...@opensource.org>: > > We're off-topic but I don't want to leave this unaddressed. OSI has a vast > amount of brand recognition but its authority is a soft power, more carrots > than sticks. And we use all the soft power we have. The most recent example > is the LLama 2 news: OSI very quickly issued a rebuttal for Meta using "open > source" to describe the license of LLama2. My post got very good pickup (lots > of mentions here > https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/ and > visitors > https://plausible.io/blog.opensource.org?page=%2Fmetas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source%2F). > But the sentiment I hear from many AI circles is still that LLama2 *is* open > source (or open enough), despite the popularity of my post on OSI's site and > social media channels. > _______________________________________________ The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address. License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
