Facebook doesn't want the models to be the money making bit, because they aren't a licensing/subscription service. They are an ads and soon hardware-platform company. They want those bits to be what people pay for. Not the models.
All these models are licensed under a non-commercial license. So their competitors don't gain a real advantage.
Other than OpenAI (who are remarkably tight lipped), ML researchers are pretty chatty in both their papers and watercooler hangouts. So, the information is going to get out either way. Might as well get ahead of it, and look like the good guy in the process.
The author currently misses the issue that all decent LLMs that have been released have been created by companies rather than opensource communities.
Sure, a lot of models have been released under permissive licenses, but.
Thats like releasing shareware. The special source for making _new_ LLMs comes from the dataset, and training clusters. None of which are cheap or easily run/financed by the community.
(Full disclosure; I work for a Bumble competitor. And I applaud Bumble for open sourcing this. It's great if we can work together as an industry to protect people from sexual abuse).
There's some questions I have about this release
the interest is in the model itself. They released the pre-trained model as a zip that you can download from their website but they do not mention the license for using this model anywhere. It is unclear from the documentation and license under what conditions you're allowed to use it. The zipfile itself doesn't contain any terms of use inside.
Though they give instructions on how to tweak the model with your own additional input images; again it's unclear from the license if you can create derivatives of the Model.
One might assume it falls under the Apache license that's included in the repository. But the model itself does not live in the repository (is not bundled with the source code) so it's not clear. Also Apache isn't really suited for assets and models. it's more meant for source code.
It would be nice if they would adopt a license that explicitly mentions how the model can be used like StableDiffusion does.
I'm always happy to see the proliferation of open-source resources for the next generative models. But I strongly suspect that OpenAI and friends are all using copywritten content from the wealth of shadow book repositories available online [1]. Unless open models are doing the same, I doubt they will ever get meaningfully close to the quality of closed-source models.
Related: I also suspect that this is one reason we get so little information about the exact data used to train Meta's Llama models ("open weights" vs "open source").
> To maintain integrity and prevent misuse, we are releasing our model under a noncommercial license focused on research use cases. Access to the model will be granted on a case-by-case basis to academic researchers; those affiliated with organizations in government, civil society, and academia; and industry research laboratories around the world. People interested in applying for access can find the link to the application in our research paper.
It is still unclear if you are even going to get access to the entire model as open source. Even if you did, you can't use it for your commercial product anyway.
You're right. Either way it's impossible to recreate Llama 2 without the data set so perhaps "free to use model" is a better description than "open source model"
> Open models feature free access to the model weights, but terms of use, redistribution, and variant ownership vary according to a model’s specific terms of use, which may not be based on an open-source license.
does a model being "open" say anything about how it was trained?
Even the checkpoints are provided - for free! All you have to do is ask.
Someone at Facebook spent a ton of money to train a state of the art model, open sourced the code and even provides checkpoints free of charge, and you still complain? The level of entitlement is off the charts…
This is amazing. They even let the developers use it for commercial purposes;
“Developers can freely inspect, use, and adapt our StableLM base models for commercial or research purposes, subject to the terms of the CC BY-SA-4.0 license.“
You can use this link to interact with the 7B model;
I agree with the general motivation that having too much AI research in the hands of software companies who keep it proprietary harms transparency and progress. But there is already a lot of neural-network free software, so why another package?
Not only is there a lot out there, a lot of it was released by companies like IBM[1], Google[2], Yahoo[3], Baidu[4], Microsoft[5], etc. So while I'm generally sympathetic to the FSF's position, this case almost seems like a bit of a reversal of things: there doesn't seem to be a problem with for-profit companies taking the fruits of the labors of volunteers and building on top of it... instead, we have a surplus of riches, released as Open Source by a bunch of big companies. It just happens that most of it is under a permissive license like the ALv2.
Of course, one could suggest that that state of affairs isn't natural and/or sustainable, and that this doesn't negate the issues the FSF is dedicated to. So I support this effort, even if it seems redundant on some level at the moment.
For example there is StableDiffusion XL here:
https://huggingface.co/spaces/latent-consistency/lcm-lora-fo...
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