Pretty big difference. An open weight model is a model that you can run on your own machine. You just download and it’s yours to host and use. You don’t need to have anyone host it on their own backend for you, the entire model is available to you to do that on your own. What you don’t have is any control over or access to anything related to how the model was trained. You don’t know what kind of data they used to train it, and how exactly they used that dataset. If you did, that’d be an open source model.
Open weight is analogous to a compiled binary. Similar to how Windows is closed source, but still runs in your own hardware, whereas Linux is truly open source.
is their a meaningful difference between open weight and open source?
Pretty big difference. An open weight model is a model that you can run on your own machine. You just download and it’s yours to host and use. You don’t need to have anyone host it on their own backend for you, the entire model is available to you to do that on your own. What you don’t have is any control over or access to anything related to how the model was trained. You don’t know what kind of data they used to train it, and how exactly they used that dataset. If you did, that’d be an open source model.
Open weight is analogous to a compiled binary. Similar to how Windows is closed source, but still runs in your own hardware, whereas Linux is truly open source.