Burkov: Open Weight Models Are Not Open Source Software
burkov · x · 2026-07-26
Eugene Yan recently pointed out that the AI industry frequently labels models as "open source," when in reality, most only provide open weights. Roman Yampolskiy and others emphasized that models lacking training code and datasets should not be considered truly open source.
Commenting on this, Valentin Burkov offered a vivid analogy: today's open-weight models are to open-source software what a Windows binary executable is to Linux source code. You can technically open it in an editor, but you'll just see gibberish.
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