I.e., the more important thing - the more "free" thing - is the licensing now.
E.g., I play around with different image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and specific fine-tuned variations for ControlNet or LoRA that I plug into ComfyUI.
But I can't use it at work because of the licensing. I have to use InvokeAI instead of ComfyUI if I want to be careful and only very specific image diffusion models without the latest and greatest fine-tuning. As others have said - the weights themselves are rather inscrutable. So we're building on more abstract shapes now.
But the key open thing is making sure (1) the tools to modify the weights are open and permissive (ComfyUI, related scripts or parts of both the training and deployment) and (2) the underlying weights of the base models and the tools to recreate them have MIT or other generous licensing. As well as the fine-tuned variants for specific tasks.
It's not going to be the naive construction in the future where you take a base model and as company A you produce company A's fine tuned model and you're done.
It's going to be a tree of fine-tuned models as a node-based editor like ComfyUI already shows and that whole tree has to be open if we're to keep the same hacker spirit where anyone can tinker with it and also at some point make money off of it. Or go free software the whole way (i.e., LGPL or equivalent the whole tree of tools).
In terms of inference and interface (since you mentioned comfy) there are many truly open source options such as vLLM (though there isn't a single really performant open source solution for inference yet).
I.e., the more important thing - the more "free" thing - is the licensing now.
E.g., I play around with different image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and specific fine-tuned variations for ControlNet or LoRA that I plug into ComfyUI.
But I can't use it at work because of the licensing. I have to use InvokeAI instead of ComfyUI if I want to be careful and only very specific image diffusion models without the latest and greatest fine-tuning. As others have said - the weights themselves are rather inscrutable. So we're building on more abstract shapes now.
But the key open thing is making sure (1) the tools to modify the weights are open and permissive (ComfyUI, related scripts or parts of both the training and deployment) and (2) the underlying weights of the base models and the tools to recreate them have MIT or other generous licensing. As well as the fine-tuned variants for specific tasks.
It's not going to be the naive construction in the future where you take a base model and as company A you produce company A's fine tuned model and you're done.
It's going to be a tree of fine-tuned models as a node-based editor like ComfyUI already shows and that whole tree has to be open if we're to keep the same hacker spirit where anyone can tinker with it and also at some point make money off of it. Or go free software the whole way (i.e., LGPL or equivalent the whole tree of tools).
In that sense unfortunately Llama has a ways to go to be truly open: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36816395