The data and models are licensed for commercial use, setting them apart from recent releases trained on data from OpenAI.
This is not correct. It was fine-tuned with this data set, but the model itself is the 12B Eleuther AI pythia model.
Dolly 2.0 is Pythia-12B fine-tuned on this new dataset
on their hugging face page [1] they admit the performance may not be much or any better than the original model (I am guessing this may be a weakness of Pythia-12B, which was intended for model-training research rather than best results)
the main point of Dolly 2.0 is the new dataset is unencumbered legally [2] whereas Alpaca et al were trained on ChatGPT transcripts, so commercialising those models would contradict OpenAI licensing terms
[1] https://huggingface.co/databricks/dolly-v2-12b
[2] https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/04/12/dolly-first-open-...
So OpenAI can claim whatever they like, there is no way they will ever pursue legal actions, unless their intent is to (intentionally) lose the court case to establish the precedent that it is okay to train on random data you scraped from the internet.
We would also get into a weird situation anyhow where it is hard/impossible to prove whether all/some/none of the information in a dataset is curated by humans. So in the worst case, we will have companies work with human curators (but secretly supplement with gray sourced materials) during their training. Just like how its hard to get 100% slave free coffee beans or cacao.
But that they can sue you because, by making a competing product with data obtained by using their product, you contravened their terms & conditions for using their product
That's not within anyone's terms and conditions except Wikipedia.
That's what I mean with precedent. If OpenAI would win that they would be sued in term by Bloomberg for example.