The Brief and Wondrous Life of Open Models

Citation: Madiha Zahrah Choksi, Ilan Mandel, Sebastian Benthall (2025/06/23) The Brief and Wondrous Life of Open Models.
DOI (original publisher): 10.1145/3715275.3732206
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1145/3715275.3732206
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1145/3715275.3732206
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The Brief and Wondrous Life of Open Models
Wikidata (metadata): Q135644296
Download: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715275.3732206
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Summary

Studies how “open model” communities actually form and persist on Hugging Face, using interaction/participation traces plus qualitative case studies. It finds a characteristic pattern—model obsolescence, nomadic communities that migrate across releases, and a small number of persistent communities—and argues models, as largely static artifacts, rarely support the kind of iterative, co-creative collaboration familiar from OSS. The paper also evaluates licensing/governance against OSAID 1.0 and introduces a simple dual lens on openness—process openness vs. use openness—to clarify where current practices succeed or fail.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Reorients “open model” policy and platform design away from assuming OSS-like community dynamics: sustaining governance requires community scaffolding (maintainers, documentation, licensing clarity) that models alone don’t produce. The process/use openness split offers a compact rubric for audits, funding, and platform rules—e.g., weighting projects with durable communities and transparent processes, not just released weights—while cautioning against directly porting OSS norms to model-centric ecosystems.