Meta made its Llama 2 AI model open-source because ‘Zuck has balls,’ a former top Facebook engineer says::Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a big risk by making its powerful AI model Llama 2 mostly open source, according to Replit CEO Amjad Masad.
It probably has more to do with the fuck up they did with accidentally creating a torrent for the original model’s weights allowing them to spread across the internet. Doesn’t really take “balls” to open source it after that and make it look like it was intentional. Still good that they did however rather than trying to use legal intimidation on anyone who used the leaked models.
It’s not open source, though.
The model, weights, and pre-trained data sets are. The training tools are not. You could argue that it’s not “truly FOSS” without the tools to create that data, but technically, the article is correct.
The whole point of open-source is to be able to recreate it yourself so you can make changes. This is freeware. Free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-speech. Hell, with freeware I can use it for commercial purposes, it’s not even as free as that.
In the AI world it’s a bit different. You can do whatever you want with the model and weights data which will net you the functional part of the resulting product. Train, retrain, dissect, segment…etc. They’re just not giving out the source for the actual engine. The people working with such things really only care about the data, and in most cases, would probably convert it to a different engine anyway.
Can I remake the model only including Creative Commons sourced training material?
You can reuse the data however you want, yes. You just can’t do it with their proprietary model. So, again, the ENGINE is not open source (the thing that drives their released version), but the model and data as it runs as released you can do whatever you want with.
I thought I was only licensed for non-commercial use
Nope. Free for educational, research, or commercial. I’m sure their license has some restrictions on what that actually means once you get to be competitive with the original as a product, but otherwise free unless you start a massive enterprise based on it, at which point you probably wouldn’t use it anyway. It’s just an LLM, it’s not doing anything super special like folding proteins for drug development, or curing cancer.
It was probably just to get all of the free development work the community has done. There are multiple engines designed around optimizing llama models specifically such as llama.cpp and exllama, and many other projects built around the architecture.
Facebook’s research division also has a pretty consistent track record of releasing things to the public rather than letting their research models rot.
people are still talking like this?
Apparently, the Zuck fucks
If the main risk is the model being used for something nefarious, like teaching terrorists how to make weapons, then can we PLEASE stop calling Zuck “bold” for doing it?
Not caring about moral consequences is not bold. It’s reckless and uncaring. Sure, the jackass who built his startup on it now lives up Zuck’s ass in thanks, but the rest of us should call it what it is.
