Open+ML
From September 2022 to April 2026 I used this newsletter to think out loud about the collision of open and machine learning — what “open” even means when the artifact is a model, who ends up holding power, and what the open movements should do about it. It has concluded, so that I can focus more on learning by doing.
Start here
- Openish is dead. Long live Openish!
Open is dead! Open is everywhere! Long live open, long live the *praxis* of open. Which is what I'm going to go do some more of for a while.
- Agent of Change, three years in
About the next phase of the newsletter—what happens to open source when the LLM is an agent of change?
- Machine Learning As An Agent of Change
tldr: Machine learning should probably blow your mind more than it already does. What changed my mind on this was, probably ironically, a book on the impact of the printing press—and how it changed our world even more than most of us realize.
- Why open(ish)?
“Open” is a shortcut to a bundle of values, and the new generation of open will weigh those values differently. This newsletter is about those values, and those changes.
- Open data governance, after licensing
Open IP licensing was great, but I increasingly believe isn’t going to "solve" open data (including open ML and open social) at scale. Instead, the leadership of the open community should be thinking about how we can create open data entities.