Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of China’s Alibaba Group Ltd., today announced the release of more than 100 new artificial intelligence large language models open source as part of the Qwen 2.5 family of models.
Revealed at the company’s Apsara Conference, the new model series follows the release of the company’s foundation model Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, last year. Since then, the Qwen models have been downloaded more than 40 million times across platforms such as Hugging Face and Modelscope.
The new models range from sizes as small as a half-billion parameters to as large as 72 billion parameters. In an LLM, parameters define the behavior of an AI model and what it uses to make predictions about its skills such as mathematics, coding or expert knowledge.
Smaller, more lightweight models can be trained quickly using far less processing power on more focused training sets and excel at simpler tasks. In contrast, larger models need heavy processing power and longer training times and generally perform better on complex tasks requiring deep language understanding.
A freely available and unencumbered binary (e.g., the model weights) isn’t the same thing as open-source. The source is the data. You can’t rebuild the model without the data, nor can you verify that it wasn’t intentionally biased or crippled.
That’s not how the license works.
“Open source” is not a license, it’s a description. Things can be free with no license restrictions and still not be “open source”.
The OSS movement was founded on a license. You can’t separate open source from its licenses. They are intrinsically linked.
A license that requires source. And since then there have been many different licenses, all with the same requirement. Giving someone a binary for free and saying they’re allowed to edit the hex codes and redistribute it doesn’t mean it’s open source. A license to use and modify is necessary but not sufficient for something to be open source. You need to provide the source.