Open Source AI's Vocabulary Problem: One Term, Four Incompatible Meanings

The Open Source Initiative's 2024 standard for open-weights AI was an attempt to impose precision on a conversation that had already outrun shared vocabulary. The distinction it draws — between releasing trained parameters and releasing the full reproducible pipeline — is technically sound and practically ignored by the marketing copy of every major lab. Meta, NVIDIA, and Mistral all describe their releases as 'open'; what they release differs substantially across . The OSI standard has not become the common reference point because the…