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Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

zdnet.com

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Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#41

Post by jonnat »

greatpostman wrote: post #19

Meta is going to ruin open ais moat on purpose. Great business strategy and good for everyone but metas competitors

Quite the opposite, this is great for Meta's competitors. Meta is not trying to get market share with this strategy, it's trying to commoditize their complements (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/)

Content is a complement to a social network: the cheaper it is to create content, the more content is available, the easier it is to optimize a feed, the larger the time people spend in the platform, the higher the revenue. GenAI is just a method to drive the cost of content creation to zero.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#42

Post by spmurrayzzz »

zargon wrote: post #16

It's not open source, it's freeware or something like that. Weights aren't the source code of LLMs, they're the binaries.

Maybe this is just semantics, but I don't know if the OSS-vs-freemium distinction matters all that much (I'd have to think about the potential downsides a bit more tbh).

Virtually every discussion in the LLM space right now is almost immediately bifurcated by the "can I use this commercially?" question which has a somewhat chilling effect on innovation. The best performing open source LLMs we have today are llama-based, particularly the WizardLM variants, so giving them more actual industry exposure will hopefully be a force multiplier.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#43

Post by williamstein »

zargon wrote: post #16

It's not open source, it's freeware or something like that. Weights aren't the source code of LLMs, they're the binaries.

Maybe there is no source code? I imagine an LLM is like output of the following process. There's a huge room full of programmers that can directly edit machine code. You give them a random binary, which they then hack on for a while and publish the result. You then inspect it and tell them it isn't quite optimal in some way and ask them for a new version. Iterate on this process a bazillion times. At the end you get a binary that you're reasonably happy with. Nobody ever has the source code.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#44

Post by pphysch »

StackOverlord wrote: post #36
hoofedear wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for succinctly explaining the difference, I learned something today

Compiling source code doesn't cost million of dollars though

If you had petabytes of highly interconnected source code, it could.

In a rough way, a NN is just a compiler designed to translate a boatload of simple data into a useful program that operates on similar data.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#45

Post by staticman2 »

treprinum wrote: post #25
pueblito wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the strategy is more to prevent competitors from monetizing

You still need to build real-time serving infrastructure on top of LLaMA/Vicuna/Alpaca in order to compete with ChatGPT/OpenAI so it's not going to be done by that many companies and OpenAI already has a mindshare/first mover advantage.

When you use ChatGPT you are leasing their GPU infrastructure and their proprietary model, this opens the possibility of leasing GPU infrastructure from another company and using an open source model. You don't necessarily need to do the hard parts yourself, you can hire it out to competing companies.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#46

Post by justapassenger »

hospitalJail wrote: post #40
jerrygenser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the podcast with Lex Friedman and Mark Zuckerberg, see ~minute 30. My hypothesis based on the context of Mark discussing the release is that it's going to be completely open source and can licensed to be used commercially. Not that Meta is going to add a whole new revenue side of business to compete with OpenAI. i.e. "Here is model, with commercially permissive licensing" not "Here is model that you can use…

Another hypothesis is that they are trying to rehab their brand. They can even write it as 'good will' on their financial statements. It kind of is working.

Meta has been one of the major open source contributors for about a decade now. They open source/contribute to a lot of tech, as their business isn’t about tech, but products.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#47

Post by foob »

From the recent story about the Sarah Silverman lawsuit:

The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”

IANAL, but this basically sounds like LLaMa was trained on illegally obtained books by Meta's own admission. It's an exciting development that Meta is releasing a commercial-use version of the model, but I wonder if this is going to cause issues down the road. It's not like Meta can remove these books from the training set without retraining from scratch (or at least the last checkpoint before they were used).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657540

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#49

Post by schleck8 »

foob wrote: post #47

From the recent story about the Sarah Silverman lawsuit: The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together…

Really, really bad look for Eleuther if this is true. I did not expect them do something like this and not even see the issue with it.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#50

Post by zargon »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #42
zargon wrote: post #16

It's not open source, it's freeware or something like that. Weights aren't the source code of LLMs, they're the binaries.

Maybe this is just semantics, but I don't know if the OSS-vs-freemium distinction matters all that much (I'd have to think about the potential downsides a bit more tbh). Virtually every discussion in the LLM space right now is almost immediately bifurcated by the "can I use this commercially?" question which has a somewhat chilling effect on innovation. The best performing open source LLMs we have today are llama-bas…

Llama isn't open source either. But if I understand your point correctly, you're saying that the commercial use axis is what is important to people, and it's orthogonal to freeware vs open source. In the present environment, I agree. But I don't think we should let companies get away with poisoning the term open source for things which are not. I also believe that actual open source models have the near-term opportunity to make an impact and shape the future landscape, with red pajamas and others in the works. The distinction could be important in the near term, at the rate this field is developing at.
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