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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely huge. LLaMA weights leaking was a big deal, but you couldn’t actually use them without attracting Meta’s ire. Would love to see some benchmarking vs. LLaMA and GPT.

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Do we even know if model weights are copyrightable or not?

No but unless you enjoy being sued by Meta you have to act as if they are.

I was asking myself the same question and am 99% sure it isn't protected by IP laws. It is another story for the training data and the source code used to run the model.

A JPG is copyrightable and that's just an array of numbers. Model weights seem pretty similar as a class.

Couldn't you just transform the weights in some predictable way and then untransform them before use in runtime? The weights at rest would be completely distinct from the meta weights.

It's not the JPG data you can copyright, but the recognisable image it produces. Every time you re-save or resize the image, the data changes, but the recognizable image remains.

It's not clear how this process applies to model weights. Once you run another training epoch on them, the data has changed. What is the essential copyrightable, trademarkable or patentable thing that remains? A legally untested question for sure.

But the data inside the jpg isn't generated by a machine, model weights are.

It depends on how the JPG is made. Some JPGs are not copy writable, like that picture a monkey took of itself. Model weights are probably (legally) more like a selfie of a monkey than a photographer's photo.

All sorts of llama weights are on huggingface now.

What is IRE?

anger. probably a lawsuit in this context

There were no lawsuits around LLaMA. They used DCMA requests to take down some GitHub and HuggingFace releases but the majority of releases (Alpacas and other animals) was left alone. It was enough to prevent commercial use, though. Edit: a lawsuit would be quite interesting, to clear up many things around how copyright works for LLMs.

They're going to court with the guy who made llamaDL actually.

Ire is the result of irritation.

Oh this is good. :)

Are you saying we shouldn’t scratch Meta’s itch?

It's a department at meta: Intellectual Rights Enforcement. /s

"Ire" is a synonym for "anger" or "wrath"

That's actually what I thought it might be. Thanks lol.

Your initialization hinted it. I must say, if Meta had a IP-litigation department called "IRE" or "MIRE" (Meta Intellectual Rights Enforcement), that would be a little on the nose.The unofficial motto would be "We will bog you down in the courts for years"

It’s a noun meaning anger or wrath. Usually it’s specific not just to triggering anger the emotion, but an angry response. So attracting Meta’s ire means attracting an angry response from meta - like the legal response users of LLaMA have triggered.

It’s not an acronym.

Internal recurrent expenditure

The real thing we should be asking is if the 3B or 7B model is capable of correctly answering this question.

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