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Comment by BulgarianIdiot | Hacker News Reader

They didn't leak it. Someone else did.

It's extremely common for a "leak" to actually be fully intentional, but the organization in question just wants plausible deniability to mitigate legal/political/popular blowback.

In order to preserve plausible deniability, the leak will look genuine in all aspects that are easy to simulate. "Someone else did it" is easy to simulate. A better gauge would be to see if anyone is caught and punished. If so, it was probably a real leak.

I think the key here is that, given the way that Meta distributed the model, a leak was inevitable. So while they may not have directly orchestrated a leak it must have been an intended result.

I dont think theyre saying Meta AI leaked it, but they anticipated someone else will and still went ahead with it as they wanted the consequences.

They have tacitly endorsed the leak. https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73#issuecomme...

Only because publicly visible actions are worse for them

People have gotten DMCA takedown requests from them over Llama repositories

If they were interested in limiting distribution, saying essentially "go ahead and seed this torrent more" is worse for them than doing nothing.

I’ve actually beat the streisand effect before by not responding.

The crowd gets bored and my DMCA requests flurry out a month later and all evidence disappears, individuals that might notice dont have the crowd to amplify that they noticed.

You can call that “tacit consent” if you want. But streisand removes all leverage.

Are they going after copies of LLaMA, or after LLaMA derivatives specifically?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287733

That's a contributor to the repo, not someone with commit access.

A contributor who is also a Facebook employee and co-author of the LLaMA paper, presumably speaking in official capacity.

Why would you presume that by default? Need a quote to conclude that

It's widely presumed within faang-type-of companies that anything an employee says or does can be interpreted as an official company statement, especially by the press. As a result, many of these companies offer, often mandatory, trainings that underscore the importance of speaking carefully in public, since one's words can end up on the front page of a popular newspaper.

Although I don't know how FB rolls internally, it seems more likely than not to me, that it was ack'd by someone higher up in the organization than line engineers or managers. Someone with a permission of speaking publicly for a given area of a company - doesn't need to be CEO, more like a VP/Director maybe.

Here's a couple more quotes from Yann LeCun, their Chief AI Scientist:

https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1643945742850031616

https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1644503237699969026

pretty clear the non-release and extremely half assed response to the leak is just CYA

You would not believe the amount of internal and public facing sabotage done by FB employees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com