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by JimDabell 980 days ago
What’s the situation with the license? Your blog post says you are open sourcing it, but it’s currently only available under a non-commercial license instead. Is an open source release forthcoming?
3 comments

Yeah... in the blog post, they do explicitly mention "cc-by-nc", which I find disappointing.

Anything that Adept is "excited to see what the community builds on top of it" would only serve Adept and no one else! What incentive does the community have to build on top of Fuyu, when the community can't benefit from its own work? If Adept wants to benefit from word-of-mouth discussion of their models and from community contributions that make those models work better, as has happened dramatically with Llama 2, then they need to give the community the opportunity to benefit too.

Also weird: if you look at the tags on Hugging Face, you'll see it is listed as "cc". This comes from the README[0] metadata. "cc" is not really a license.

[0]: https://huggingface.co/adept/fuyu-8b/blob/main/README.md?cod...

It's open source by their definition, that is source available (open). Everyone always thinks the term open source is protected in any way while the entity that has established the commercial usage aspect is the Open Source Foundation. And noone is forced to abide by their ideology

FOSS meets the commercial usage requirement much better. Otherwise the term FOSS would be redundant.

You can download the weights on Hugginface.

I believe the copyright on AI model weights in the US is not fully established, but so far it has been held that a list of numbers can not be copyrighted, so likely the same applies to model weights. Note that you don't have to enter into an agreement with Adept to use the model.

Alternatively, use and download the weights in Japan that has explicitly no copyright on AI models.

> a list of numbers can not be copyrighted

Any digital object can be represented as a list of numbers (this is precisely the origin of the term digital). Since there is clearly precedent for copyrighted digital objects (media, software, etc), reducing something to "a list of numbers" is not a useful distinction in regard to copyright law.

IANAL but as far as I remember, you can't copyright a list of objective facts, for example a phone book containing a list of phone numbers.

Model weights are clearly not in that category. Happy to be corrected if I misremember.

Model weight are akin to markov chains and compressed data. They are direct representations of the data they where created from in the same way that markov chains are created from hidden markov chains and Zipped files are created from files.

Zipping a file does not grant the copyright protection of the zipped output beyond the copyright of the original file.

Moreover the American federal registrar has officially stated that AI generated artifacts are not eligible for copyright https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05....

If you take some copyrighted data, a set of books, for example. And count words in these books and then plot a distribution of top 100 word frequencies. The copyright for that new image would belong to you.
Copyright in the specific image sure, but not the graph itself. Someone else could do the same thing and make their own graph image.
I highly doubt that any of this will hold up infront of a court. For intellectual property not just the result is important but also the creation process, and there is enough work going into the data science here