[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.