Very much still early phase, but I've been working on extending @opencode to better fit my workflow.
Linked below: a token hungry attempt at beating ralph wiggums with an open-artisan, an @opencode plugin that tries to be smart with a deterministic coding state-machine.
I follow the Middle East & Israeli security matters rather closely and have for many years. Here’s my considered assessment of what’s really happening in discussions behind the scenes among all involved parties: I have no fucking idea
Until M3 weights are available on huggingface, it's not open weight. Let alone open-source.
MiniMax does not need to open source its models, but if it's not open-source don't market it as such.
Surprisingly naive take from the usually sensible @TheModerateCase.
Pro-Israel donors love @chiproytx who also opposes foreign aid more generally.
They also dislike that Massie won't meet with Jewish constituents, and has accepts $7000 donations from members of the Mahrouq family who fund anti-Israel candidates.
AIPAC and pro-Israel donors are spending millions against Thomas Massie because he opposes foreign aid in principle.
Not foreign aid solely to Israel — all of it.
Massie is 100x more conservative than Trump has ever been or ever will be.
@TheModerateCase Nonsense, pro-Israel donors love @chiproytx who also opposes foreign aid more generally.
Pro-Israel donors dislike the fact that Massie won't meet with Jewish constituents, has tons of $7000 donations from members of the Mahrouq family who fund anti-Israel candidates.
Ken Griffin donated $400 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His name is on this building. Mamdani should be buttering these guys up to give more.
Why @MiniMax_AI doesn't just adopt an existing non-commercial license like BSL 2.0 instead of adding even more confusing clauses to their license is beyond me. Absolute chaos in the comments.
I just updated our license.
For personal use, you’re free to run the software on your own servers for coding, building applications, agents, tools, or integrations, as well as for research, experimentation, and other personal projects.
Don’t worry, bro — go ahead and use it freely!🤗
https://t.co/wBvtE0iFtf
@RyanLeeMiniMax@ZenMagnets@The_ERP_Man Dude, you seem like a nice guy, but what a mess this is. Hire yourselves a lawyer or just choose a non-commercial license that was drafted by a lawyer. Like BSL 2.0. The thought of using MiniMax 2.7 for anything useful is scarier with every interaction.
To close the loop: thanks to @MiniMax_AI for committing to make their license more usable.
tldr; terms are still restrictive but Ryan has committed to updating them to be more friendly to enable using MiniMax to build software.
Full long response to Minimax linked:
Hi Ryan,
Really appreciate your engagement and clarifications here. I think it's absolutely reasonable to distribute without a fully open-source license. These models are expensive to train and distribute and you folks should have a path to monetization.
Rather than writing your own license you might want to use one written by companies with similar concerns like BSL-2.0. These are friendly non-commercial licenses that are designed to carefully balance your business interests with consumer interests.
I do want to respectfully push back in one area. Your fear of reputational damage when inference providers provide deployments of MiniMax that are sub-par is understandable. Nonetheless, prior to this release debacle, to me it was absolutely clear that M2.7 was the single best open-weight model under 300b parameters and probably under 400b parameters, and that with only 10b active it was punching way above its weight class (if you'll excuse the pun).
To me the much larger reputational risk is that you are seen exploiting the goodwill of the open-source community: promising open-source licenses, marketing it as open source, and benefitting from the goodwill of open-source enthusiasts who market your product under false pretenses.
M2.5's splash was inseparable from its open-source license, and the community note on M2.7 did more reputational damage than any poorly quantized deployment ever could.
If, in the future, you are able to find other feasible monetization channels (like domain-specific fine-tunes for financial, healthcare, and manufacturing use cases) and continue to offer open-source models, I would contend that the goodwill you gain by being contributors to the open-source community might prove to be commercially beneficial too.
In the meantime, though, an updated license with a clarification from the MiniMax account feels like a great start.
Thank you for your team's high-quality work and for everything you've contributed to the open-source community so far!