The whole reverse engineering and cracking scene is built upon this premise, you know.

losvedir 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Calling it a "cracking scene" shows the different, though. Open weight models are intended to be used this way.

	▲	simias an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Hotpatching binaries used to be extremely common. It's less so in the modern age but mainly because we moved software to higher levels of abstractions, virtual machines and interpreters, and also because rebuilding even a massive project from source is achievable on commodity hardware. You can still see various hotpatching schemes being developed, for instance to allow partial recompile of the sources while developping. If in 2080 we can retrain Opus 129.5 directly on dev machines from scratch in <2h, I doubt many will bother messing with the weights directly.

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Muromec an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

don't forget game modding. it's the only way it even works

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mirekrusin an hour ago | parent [-]

Post training is general purpose method, same process that original authors used - that's not the case with binaries.

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Muromec an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I think opening something in the hex editor, changing necessary bytes and saving it is as general purpose as it gets. You usually don't distribute it (I remember they days when it was common however) due to law, so in practice people write code that hot-patches stuff after starting the process.

You can also just open gdb and patch the process on the fly when you need to do things.

At the end of the day there isn't much hard difference between source code and binary code. By design source code is usually easier to read and write, but it's all syntax sugar and transformations all the way down.

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bayindirh an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

RedHat and Ubuntu has kernel hot-patching. That's a case with binaries.

	▲	mirekrusin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You're conflating runtime patching with continuing development. Post training directly evolves existing model weights using the same optimisation process that created them. Software: source code -> compiler -> binary Models: weights + training data + optimizer -> updated weights Ie. binary is output of the development process. Model weights are both – it's output and it's direct input for further development.