Live data from Hacker News

Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

ai.meta.com

31–40 of 40 posts

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#31

I saw this tweet from someone at the DoD discussing how stupid it was that the USA governement cannot use Llama2 technology but the CCP can. I searched up the use policy and it seems correct. What do you all think??

Believe it or not the differences between the CCP and DOD are not nall black and white.

Take for instance the CCP nuclear policy.

China deliberately has zero nukes ready for launch. Retaliation will ultimately take up to a week as nuclear warheads need to placed on missiles as they are deliberately not attached. This is 100 percent by design giving china time to prevent global obliteration via mistaken retaliation. Additionally

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use

Meanwhile the US has nukes fully ready and armed with deliberate intention to deliver retaliation before enemy nukes even hit their targets. There is no here.

It's definitely a different and more complicated story for other things outside of war. But Facebook is simply stopping usage related to war.

This makes sense to me. The CCP can't legally be stopped from not using it anyway.

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#32
Multiple people have posted the same snippet already, and I think it's fairly standard boilerplate in big tech legal documents. For example, I think I remember reading the same line or similar in iTunes' TOS many years ago.

But this stuff would probably get ignored by any army around the world. And realistically if the US military had to seriously use any of these tools to change the outcome of a conflict, are we going to pretend that this line of legalese is going to prevent them from doing so?

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#33

I assume they are referring to: "a. Military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage, use for materials or activities that are subject to the International Traffic Arms Regulations (ITAR) maintained by the United States Department of State..." Since that's the only reference to "military" I can find. Regardless, if we assume that the US Dept of State does not list the US military on its prohibited lis…

You are correct. The author of this drivel has apparently never read a terms of use policy before. This is pretty much boilerplate policy dating back to the 1980's, if not earlier.

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#34

This title is editorialized and wrong—there is nothing in this policy that mentions the DoD. I assume the poster misunderstood this line in the prohibited uses: > Military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage, use for materials or activities that are subject to the International Traffic Arms Regulations (ITAR) maintained by the United States Department of State This is the only mention of any US de…

> A better title would be "Meta prohibits use of LLaMA 2 for militaries", but that would be less exciting because it's a pretty common provision in many terms of use. I also don't see the point of such a provision. If an enemy military uses it, good luck taking them to court - if you are at war with a country, they probably won't be paying up any damages. If your own countries military wants to use it, then the milit…

My assumption is that like most of these "prohibited uses" it's there to cover Meta's liability for any of these use cases. It's not like someone who's going to use LLaMA 2 for criminal activity will be dissuaded by the ToS either, but it gives Meta a fig leaf to remove their own culpability for whatever ensues.

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#35

Multiple people have posted the same snippet already, and I think it's fairly standard boilerplate in big tech legal documents. For example, I think I remember reading the same line or similar in iTunes' TOS many years ago. But this stuff would probably get ignored by any army around the world. And realistically if the US military had to seriously use any of these tools to change the outcome of a conflict, are we goi…

This whole page is going to get ignored by anyone who's actually interested in using LLaMA 2 for anything violent or illegal, and their lawyers know it. All of these terms must have a different purpose than actual effective prohibition.

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#37
post #22

How will they enforce this...Prohibition without any threat of enforcement is just a piece of paper.

It doesn't matter, because it's not even on paper. OP is incorrect, the policy doesn't say anything of the sort.

Ah I got goofed. Clickbait

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#38

This title is editorialized and wrong—there is nothing in this policy that mentions the DoD. I assume the poster misunderstood this line in the prohibited uses: > Military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage, use for materials or activities that are subject to the International Traffic Arms Regulations (ITAR) maintained by the United States Department of State This is the only mention of any US de…

> A better title would be "Meta prohibits use of LLaMA 2 for militaries", but that would be less exciting because it's a pretty common provision in many terms of use. I also don't see the point of such a provision. If an enemy military uses it, good luck taking them to court - if you are at war with a country, they probably won't be paying up any damages. If your own countries military wants to use it, then the milit…

Sounds to me like “LLaMa 2 classified as a munition and subject to ITAR” is what is going on.

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#39
There's lots of ways to read this. The way I read it, Meta is trying to keep Llama from getting "poisoned" with ITAR-controlled data.

Why? Because, oh boy, once a word or sentence or paragraph is classified as ITAR technical data, that little nugget is a bomb waiting to go off in your system. ITAR-classified data can't so much as look at a wire that's outside of the borders of the United States, which, somewhat obviously, throws a cinder block into most systems designs for cloud stuff. And if it's one of these newfangled LLMs, there's no way to take the system apart to get the nugget out. That is a LOT of compute wasted.

There's a reason that GovCloud and other ITAR clouds are awesomely crippled versions of their original incarnations - they have to audit every scrap of every environment and tool available with a fine-f#@king-tooth-comb. A lot of software vendors I know gave up on their GovCloud ports, and just send a team to do the install on-prem. It turned out to be a lot less work than maintaining a special GovCloud build that you have zero idea will work at rollout. If the customer is ok with Docker on-prem, this is an even easier decision. GovCloud storage and emails, yeah, that's fine. Anything more complicated than that, oof - it's going to be its own completely forked build, or else you're going to be going nuts with flags and such.

Now, ok, not going to name names, but there are some vendors providing "AI" in the ITAR space, but, IMHO, I'm extremely skeptical that they have gone through the right channels. I would tread with extreme caution here. Their public faces are quite familiar from some other DoD IT fiascoes from the last few years, and on their DoD LLM thing they've been, at best, disingenuous when questioned about the nature of the waivers they've "acquired". At worst they're outright lying. They seem to be working through informal channels most of the time with highly-placed connections, but that's a very brittle way to do this sort of business. You probably know who I'm talking about here. Anyway, state of nature right now, the safe way for experimenting with LLM in defense is still on-prem.

Re: Meta prohibits Department of Defense to use Llama2

#40

Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy at Meta said this "We have decided not to make Llama 2 available for defense use, as we believe that the risks of misuse outweigh the benefits. We are committed to ensuring that our technology is used in a responsible and ethical manner, and we believe that this decision is in line with that commitment." https://about.fb.com/news/2021/12/metas-adversarial-threat-r...

Where did he state this? I looked at the link and linked reports, but not seeing this direct quote. Thanks!
Post reply on HN