Comment on Voxtral Transcribe 2: transcribes at the speed of sound
XLE@piefed.social 2 days ago
How much does it cost to run a system that supports it, in 2026 hardware prices? 4B is not the biggest AI model number, but RAM and GPU prices are very daunting thanks to the company releasing this closed-source model
Tetsuo@jlai.lu 2 days ago
Closed source model? What do you mean?
Isn’t this open weights?
XLE@piefed.social 2 days ago
“Open weights” just means you can download the blob they output from their sources. So… Closed source, unless they open it.
Their terminology is just tricky marketing. It would be like calling a closed source program “open executable” or something…
Tetsuo@jlai.lu 1 day ago
My understanding was that the weights were the “essence” of the training.
I think it’s a bit misleading to present them as “executables”.
I agree that open weights is a bit of marketing mumbo jumbo but I wouldn’t say they are akin to a closed source binary.
That being said I was just reading an article about LLM sleeper agents and their trigger words… So you can hide stuff on training and it’s fairly hard to spot with just the weights.
But again it’s not really like a black box executable. And I’ve seen many great models that successfully builds on top of an open weights model.
In the end I much prefer open weights to the very popular “‘’'openAI”“” that have opaque training and weights…
XLE@piefed.social 1 day ago
For the purpose of simplification, calling it a closed as an executable is close enough. Or a closed-source freeware ROM that you can download and run on an emulator (since you can just download models and run them via ollama or something similar). Or a closed-source game that supports modding and extension like Minecraft. Or a closed-source DLL with documentation…
Anyway, the point is, it’s closed. If it’s not closed source, I’d beg you to link the source, both code and data, that compiles to the output.
Tetsuo@jlai.lu 2 days ago
What about the mention of the Apache 2 licence?
Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Open weights under the Apache license. The model weights are open but not the training process.