Although Meta has announced that it will open-source its LLM and allow free usage for commercial and research purposes, a closer examination of its community license agreement reveals a different story.
According to Meta’s commercial terms, companies with 700 million or more monthly active users (MAU) are required to obtain a license from Meta. This means that Meta’s new AI technology is off-limits to some of its social media competitors.
Additionally, another clause in the commercial terms of Llama 2 states that users are prohibited from utilising it to enhance or improve other large language models, aside from Llama 2 itself.
For me those licensing terms are not genuine open-source, but I get what Meta is aiming for in terms of being accessible, while being off limits to competitors. Seems big tech is happy to rape and pillage other people’s data, but don’t want the same thing done to them.
The first point makes sense. I’m just some dude goofing around with it, so it doesn’t affect me.
Not sure what I think about Llama2 being disallowed from improving other language models, though.
