While I'm a huge supporter of #linguistic diversity, I'm a little cold on Meta's Language Technology Partner Program. It aims to get language communities to speech training #data, for free, with the promise Meta will release trained models "open source". about.fb.com/news/2025/02... - ThreadSky

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kathyreid.au • 2 days ago

While I'm a huge supporter of #linguistic diversity, I'm a little cold on Meta's Language Technology Partner Program. It aims to get language communities to speech training #data, for free, with the promise Meta will release trained models "open source".

https://about.fb.com/news/2025/02/announcing-language-technology-partner-program/

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kathyreid.au•2 days ago

I have multiple issues with this approach:

1. It concentrates power in the hands of Meta - the data, when provided, is not being made openly available, which means that only Meta is able to benefit from the data.

Promising to "open source" models does not respect data sovereignty.

kathyreid.au•2 days ago

2. The term "open source" here is another case of open washing - while the models trained from the supplied data and released by Meta might be openly available, they cannot be easily reproduced - a core tenet of the *original* open source definition - before it was watered down by the OSI.

kathyreid.au•2 days ago

3. The implications for cultural heritage are unknown. Language encodes knowledge, customs, history. If that language is preserved only by a for-profit company, what are the implications for language transmission.

Will future generations have to pay to learn their ancestral language?

kathyreid.au•2 days ago

4. What's the bigger picture goal here? We have companies trying to represent "the world" in models - written language, imagery, video, and now speech.

The bigger piece here is enabling people all over the world to speak with each other ...

as long as each interaction is mediated by Meta.

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