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Show HN: A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama

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Re: Show HN: A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama

#31
post #10

IANAL, but this seems very fishy to me: 1) I don't understand how this isn't a derivative work of the original code, as I very highly doubt you've done a clean room implementation. I doubt this would hold up in court. 2) Doesn't the original FB license also apply to the weights? Just re-implementing the code would not change the license on the weights. So while THE CODE may now be re-licensed, the weights would still…

>I don't understand how this isn't a derivative work of the original code The original code is Apache 2 licensed. Derivatives are fine and allowed. This retains the same Apache 2 license as Facebook's code. It's only the model that isn't covered by that permissive Apache 2 license. A model produced by a derivative of the permissively licensed code, or even by the original code itself, is not a derivative or the origi…

> Apache 2

Isn't the original GPLv3[0]?

[0]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/blob/main/LICENSE

Re: Show HN: A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't understand how this isn't a derivative work of the original code The original code is Apache 2 licensed. Derivatives are fine and allowed. This retains the same Apache 2 license as Facebook's code. It's only the model that isn't covered by that permissive Apache 2 license. A model produced by a derivative of the permissively licensed code, or even by the original code itself, is not a derivative or the origi…

> Apache 2 Isn't the original GPLv3[0]? [0]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/blob/main/LICENSE

Correct, the original is GPL 3.

To produce this implementation from the LLaMA paper we started from github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT, the LLaMA architecture is really similar to GPT. For instance we added rotary positional encoding starting from the original RoPE repo published with the paper.

We finally ran the original model to make sure the two models were numerically.

Re: Show HN: A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama

#34
post #10

IANAL, but this seems very fishy to me: 1) I don't understand how this isn't a derivative work of the original code, as I very highly doubt you've done a clean room implementation. I doubt this would hold up in court. 2) Doesn't the original FB license also apply to the weights? Just re-implementing the code would not change the license on the weights. So while THE CODE may now be re-licensed, the weights would still…

1) I've looked at both codebases and this one is definitely a derivative of the nanoGPT. You can compare all three implementations yourself as they are actually surprisingly compact and readable.

2) The issue whether weights are copyrightable at all has not been settled yet. If they are, there is a fair use doctrine that allows transformative works of a copyrighted work. The line is a bit blurry but consider Cariou v. Prince case[1] where addition of colour to some black and white photos was considered enough to be transformative. Similarly, full fine tuning on current news or adding visual modality could potentially create a brand new model in the eyes of a law.

[1] https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/cx/2013_Cariou.pdf

Re: Show HN: A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama

#36
post #20

>GPL...prevents meaningful academic and commercial use WTF are you talking about?

GPL is a copyleft license which requires you to share anything that you build using the original software. This makes it difficult for commercial use.

Red Hat 30th anniversary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35337146

Re: Show HN: A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama

#37
post #23
post #22

I think implying that GPL is not "fully open source" is a hot take. It's specifically designed to ensure you and anyone you distribute your code gets the same freedoms. Maybe you don't agree that it's a good license but that is its intention. GPL vs BSD-type licenses I guess is decades long argument by now. Maybe I'm a naive idealist but IMO the GPL-family of licenses are underrated. You can use them to make sure you…

I think OP mischaracterized the issue with the license, its more that the weights don’t fall under the same scope. They’re research use only, no commercial use allowed.

Yeah, this is weird, because there are plenty of open source implementations of the lama model on github - alpaca.cpp in c++ is one, there are many others in PyTorch such as the one used by ChatLLaMa. But without the weights they're not very useful (unless you're going to try to train it yourself - good luck with that unless you've got a lot of compute power available).

A quick check on github and I find this one also with an Apache license: https://github.com/chris-alexiuk/alpaca-lora and alpaca.cpp with an MIT license: https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp/blob/master/LICEN...

Re: Show HN: A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama

#38
post #28
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, but I think the point was that if you have something in GPL license (like the code in this case) it's open source, but that doesn't mean you can use that for your business application. That's because GPL requires you open sourcing all derivative work and most businesses don't want to/can't do that.

The AI ecosystem is almost entirely Apache 2/MIT/BSD, and GPL is just incompatible with it. This is a blocker to mixing and matching, a simple Apache 2 rewrite fixes that problem. Weights? It’s another issue but we’ll be looking forward to fixing that too.

How is it incompatible? You can use code under all of those licenses in a GPLd work.

Re: Show HN: A fully open-source (Apache 2.0)implementation of llama

#39
FYI, there's something fishy going on in this thread. Multiple people from the LightningAI team theaniketmaurya (developer advocate for Lightning AI) and rasbt (developer at Lightning AI) are shilling for this post without disclosing their affiliations. The account that submitted this (osurits) also only has two comments, also with the same behavior.

Having interacted with the Lightning AI team in the past, this is unsurprising behavior.

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