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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

#51

Post by Ancalagon »

schleck8 wrote: post #49
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.

Move fast and break the law.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#52

Post by powersnail »

williamstein wrote: post #43
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…

Source code is the preferred form for development.

In your scenario, despite the unrealistic coding process, the machine code is the source code, because that's what everyone is working on.

In the development of LLM, the weights is in no way the preferred form of development. Programmers don't work on weights. They work on data, infrastructure, the model, the code for training, etc. The point of machine learning is not to work on weights.

Unless you anthropomorphize optimizers, in which case the weights are indeed the preferred form of editing, but I had never seen anyone---even the most forward AGI supportors---argue that optimziers are intelligent agents.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#53

Post by schleck8 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #22
40yearoldman wrote: post #17

Is the title an oxymoron? Open-source commercial?

No, you can sell open source software commercially. That being said, I'm wondering if the license will truly be open source or more like Stable Diffusion's license which is not really open source.

Because deep learning weights aren't source code.

https://huggingface.co/blog/open_rail

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#54

Post by isaacremuant »

TechnicolorByte wrote: post #29
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #2

What's the monetization model here? Is this a closed-source version of their open-source model? (That's suggested by the phrase in the article, "a commercial version of LLaMA, its open-source large language model".)

Like others said it’s probably to commoditize their competition. The models don’t matter so much as ownership of the platform and critical data. Which is why OpenAI is in a tricky position (although I guess they’re partnered with Microsoft). It seems like the existing large platforms of today—Microsoft’s enterprise moat, Google’s ads and internet services, Meta’s social networks, Apple’s consumer and mobile products—…

> More broadly speaking, I believe the days where the top X largest companies in the stock company would be displaced by newer companies every decade or so is over. The FAANGs just control so many major platforms in so many aspects of our lives.

It also helps that they buy or otherwise cooperate to destroy their competition in questionable ways while heavily lobbying the gov to favor them over others in a quid-pro-quo that benefits politicians and not their constituents.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#55

Post by strikelaserclaw »

jonnat wrote: post #41
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 pla…

kind of a dystopian nightmare world in which large corporations utilize AI to create low cost, infinite content that humans engage with (mostly content catering to the human tendency for tribalism, prestige, sexual desires etc...), sounds like we are creating a world similar to the Matrix.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#56

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#58

Post by treprinum »

staticman2 wrote: post #45
treprinum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but it's extra work slowing you down as your competitor is surfing the wave at full speed. Moreover, you are relying on an old LLM whereas OpenAI is developing newer versions of theirs, keeping their competitive advantage. Even Google who has the infra has a ridiculously bad LLM to compete.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#59

Post by andybak »

Ancalagon wrote: post #51
schleck8 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Move fast and break the law.

It's far from certain at this stage whether this does break the law.

Re: Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

#60

Post by spmurrayzzz »

zargon wrote: post #50
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opportun…

> But I don't think we should let companies get away with poisoning the term open source for things which are not.

Thats totally fair. And you're correct in that I was making an argument for positive outcomes being orthogonal to the semantics distinction.

> 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 very important in the near term, at the rate this field is developing at.

I think Falcon and MPT support your point as well, but those are still models that were trained on very small budgets relative to llama or gpt-3/4. There's a clear quality delta, albeit that gap is closing. Through that lens, I think having a large, well-funded org doing the pre-training work for the OSS community and releasing the weights permissively is a net positive.

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