Code is data is code. Fundamentally, they are the same. We treat the two things as distinct categories only for practical convenience. Most of the time, it's pretty clear which is which, but we all regularly encounter situations in which the distinction gets blurry. For example:
- Windows MetaFiles (WMF, EMF, EMF+), still in use (mostly inside MS Office suite) - you'd think they're just another vector image format, i.e. clearly "data", but this one is basically a list of function calls to Windows GDI APIs, i.e. interpreted code.
- Any sufficiently complex XML or JSON config file ends up turning into an ad-hoc Lisp language, with ugly syntax and a parser that's a bug-ridden, slow implementation of a Lisp runtime. People don't realize that the moment they add conditionals and ability to include or refer back to other parts of config, they're more than halfway to a Turing-complete language.
- From the POV of hardware, all native code is executed "to the same extent kernel weighs of a gaussian blur filter" are. In general, all code is just data for the runtime that executes it.
And so on.
Point being, what is code and what is data depends on practical reasons you have to make this distinction in the first place. IMHO, for OSS licensing, when considering the reasons those licenses exist, LLM weights are code.
- Windows MetaFiles (WMF, EMF, EMF+), still in use (mostly inside MS Office suite) - you'd think they're just another vector image format, i.e. clearly "data", but this one is basically a list of function calls to Windows GDI APIs, i.e. interpreted code.
- Any sufficiently complex XML or JSON config file ends up turning into an ad-hoc Lisp language, with ugly syntax and a parser that's a bug-ridden, slow implementation of a Lisp runtime. People don't realize that the moment they add conditionals and ability to include or refer back to other parts of config, they're more than halfway to a Turing-complete language.
- From the POV of hardware, all native code is executed "to the same extent kernel weighs of a gaussian blur filter" are. In general, all code is just data for the runtime that executes it.
And so on.
Point being, what is code and what is data depends on practical reasons you have to make this distinction in the first place. IMHO, for OSS licensing, when considering the reasons those licenses exist, LLM weights are code.