After DeepSeek was open-sourced, major AI companies announced that they would soon open source their products: What exactly is “open source”?

With the development and popularization of artificial intelligence technology, the concept of "open source" has gone from a technical term to a hot word on the Internet. After DeepSeek announced that its latest AI technology would be open source, it triggered a global developer frenzy. And the recently popular Manus also said that it would be open source in the future. What exactly is open source? How has it quietly reshaped our world? Let's start with a bowl of beef noodles...

From "family secret recipe" to "shared recipe" Lao Zhang noodle shop on the corner is booming, and the secret lies in a spoonful of family soup base. Lao Zhang never lets outsiders into the kitchen, and even his son has to learn the recipe with his eyes blindfolded - this is very similar to the "closed source model" of traditional technology companies: the core technology is locked in a safe, and users can only eat the finished product, but will never know "what is added to the soup."

Open source is like a "transparent kitchen" restaurant. The boss not only makes the recipe public, but also encourages you to go into the kitchen and add peppers, change the heat, and even take the improved recipe to open a branch. Open source in the field of technology is to make the "recipe" (source code) of the software public for free, allowing anyone to download, modify, and redistribute it. For example, DeepSeek's open source AI model is like a "smart beef noodle recipe". Developers can freely adjust the algorithm "heat" to customize a version that is more suitable for local tastes. This model breaks the "technological hegemony" - the code is no longer a "magic black box" of a few companies, but like Lego blocks, it is disassembled, reorganized, and innovated by developers around the world.

A technological revolution of "cooking by everyone"

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish university student, posted a line of code on a mailing list: "I'm making a free operating system, just a hobby, don't expect too much." This "hobby" later became Linux, and now 90% of the world's servers are using it. The power of open source lies in allowing ordinary people to participate in the technological revolution.

In 2023, the non-profit organization Masakhane developed a translation system covering more than 38 African languages ​​using an open source framework. The team is composed of volunteers from all over Africa. They shared training models through the Hugging Face platform, using open source computing resources to greatly reduce development costs and fill the technology gap.

Your life has long been "invaded" by open source. Do you think open source is far away from you? Take a look at these scenarios: When watching short videos, the recommendation algorithm is built based on the Apache Storm open source framework. The route optimization of taxi software relies on Uber's open source H3 geographic index system. Primary school students use the MIT open source Scratch programming tool, whose underlying graphical interface is derived from the Google Blockly open source library.

What is even more groundbreaking is that in 2023, Peking Union Medical College Hospital and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly developed an AI screening system for lung nodules based on the DeepSeek-Medical open source model. Clinical data published in The Lancet showed that its sensitivity reached 94.3%, an increase of 11.5% over traditional methods.

The price of freedom: When recipes fall into the "dark cooking world" Of course, open source is not a utopia. A few years ago, a fraud gang used an open source face generation model to forge a celebrity live broadcast to sell fake goods and swindled tens of millions of dollars. This exposed the "Achilles heel" of open source: when technical recipes are shared by all people, bad guys can also enter the kitchen.

The open source ecosystem also faces practical challenges. In December 2023, Europol uncovered a transnational fraud case that used the open source StyleGAN model to generate about 1,200 fake identities. In view of such cases, the draft EU Artificial Intelligence Act added a deep fake watermark clause in March 2024, requiring deep fake content to be digitally watermarked.

Epilogue: You are also part of the "kitchen revolution"

Next time when you use AI to write weekly reports, automatically edit photos, or watch short videos, imagine this: millions of developers around the world are collaborating in an invisible "open source kitchen", with some adding fuel, others adding seasoning, and others responsible for tasting - and every click, feedback, and share you make is participating in this unprecedented technology co-creation . In this open source revolution, we may be witnessing how technology has stepped down from the altar and become a common "home-cooked meal" for mankind!

(This article is generated by AI, and some pictures are generated by Doubao AI)

Review expert: Zheng Meizan, senior engineer, data science expert of Daily Interactive, founder of Jiusan Chuangba, deputy secretary-general of the Digital Economy Committee of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of Jiusan Society, deputy secretary-general of the Zhejiang Jiusan Enterprise Development Promotion Association, and member of the Youth Work Committee of the Hangzhou Municipal Committee of Jiusan Society

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