[Havoc]

Must say I'm genuinely thankful for what Meta has done on this front. Without their research release of llama I think things would have been substantially less democratic.

This could easily have gone into a "only orgs with billions can play" direction and nobody even trying in the learned helplessness sense. Instead we're ending up in a hybrid "ok maybe can't quite train from scratch but can still tinker" space which is a lot more healthy

If they want to double down on that then I applaud them

[ren_engineer]

at best it's an example of "Commoditize your complements" by cutting OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google at the knees in their attempt to make much profit off AI - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Facebook isn't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, it just makes business sense for them to do it. AI seems to be in a smiling curve situation right now, where only Nvidia on the hardware side and the consumer facing products using AI as a feature are making money. The companies training the models and trying to sell the API seem like they'll have a hard time not being replaceable commodities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_curve

[el_nahual]

I don't think this is a case of "commoditize your complements." What's the complement to AI that meta owns?

I think it's more of a case of "commoditize your competitors".

[humanistbot]

> What's the complement to AI that meta owns?

- Platforms where users can interact with AI agents

- Extensive user and content data that can be used to fine tune large foundation models

[moonchrome]

Zuckerberg talked about this in his interview with Lex Friedman.

From what I understand they already benefited by the OSS work on quantization and they see themselves as well positioned to benefit from a world where there's a bunch of specialized AI models/assistants.

[fragmede]

So much of business is about people and connections, and hey, guess what Meta deals in? People and connections!

[spacebanana7]

He’s also got tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars worth of free labour from AI researchers working to make his models better.

[redbell]

> Facebook isn't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts

Personally, I don't care if they had a plan to profit from this move as long as it brings value for the public, it's a win-win action.

[getcrunk]

Sure it is not benevolent. But fuck do I love them for it right now. It’s better for all of us. And it took the game to a whole new level.

[stephc_int13]

Is this the beginning of a vilain redempion arc for Zuck?

[jack_pp]

Best to see him as a profit seeking robot/agent that can only be nudged by market forces and political pressure.

[ChatGTP]

No.

[gautamdivgi]

Meta has always been a big open source contributor. We use their prophet model for forecasting extensively.

Their quality of open source has always been good for the things I’ve used.

[sheepscreek]

Does anyone remember Facebook M? I believe that was their first big foray into creating an intelligent chatbot/personal assistant. Although that may not have anything to do with LLaMA directly - it’s still pretty cool to see that a crazy vision like that is so close to becoming reality.

I am genuinely excited about the positive impacts LLMs and their future derivatives can have in computing. We can now, for the first time, truly “program” a computer in natural language. It’s even intelligent enough to “fill in the gaps” using general intelligence. Just don’t rely on it for any niche topics without teaching it a thing or two, or you’ll get bull crap back.

[kibwen]

Wasn't Llama leaked, without Meta's consent?

[Havoc]

Nope wasn't leaked...somehow media latched on to that wording.

Initially it was behind a consent form for research purposes. i.e. Just give some basic deets and you get access to the weights under a non-commercial license. FB shut that down after it got lots of attention.

That obvious got copy pasted onto a torrent & grew legs from there. And FB hassled some people DCMA takedowns too but seemed pretty half hearted & was too late at that stage.

[Sidequest: I believe the repo they used to distribute access also had a magnetic link in it too at one point which further confused the narrative but not 100% sure on the precise details on this]

Point is at no stage was this 100% behind closed doors and someone leaked it as you & I would understand the word in the "stolen" sense.

[humanistbot]

Legally it is still restricted to those who have been granted permission for research / non-commercial purposes. That license still applies. The fact that they have stopped actively enforcing it does not change the legal status. If Elon were to announce that Twitter was using it for commercial purposes, they could sue in court and would likely win.

[bhickey]

It's unclear if model weights are protected by copyright in the US.

[fragmede]

Then breach of contract or trade secret.

[bhickey]

Someone else's breach of contact isn't my problem.

[kernal]

>Nope wasn't leaked...somehow media latched on to that wording.

Zuckerberg said it was during his Lex Fridman interview.

[edgyquant]

But as you just said… it was leaked

[Havoc]

If you want to consider filling in a form and downloading it a "leak" then yeah it was leaked. I wouldn't call it that but semantics I guess

[Uehreka]

I think people are referring to the part where someone made a torrent so you could get it without filling in the form as the leak.

[Havoc]

I see. Thanks for explaining. Yeah I guess that re-distribution was a little rogue and could perhaps be called a leak. I personally dislike that interpretation but I can see it.

[edgyquant]

No it’s the part after that where the torrent was leaked to the public that I’d consider a leak.

[JumpCrisscross]

It was "leaked."

They wanted to distribute it. But they couldn't, politically. So it "leaked."

[bick_nyers]

You can tell by Mark's wording and body language when he talks about it in the recent Lex Fridman episode. I got the impression from him that he would have released it in a manner closer to that of open source if there wasn't a question of legal liability.

[IshKebab]

Why couldn't they distribute it? They clearly could have. There's no law against it.

Perhaps you meant that they were nervous about companies using it commercially and either bringing them bad press or making money off their work? That's clearly why they only released it for researchers.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why couldn't they distribute it?

No legal issues per se. Hence the political qualifier. See: https://www.menendez.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_meta...

[elcomet]

It was trained on data they don't own. They could face a lawsuit for this, like it has happened for image generation models.