This is a no-commercial-use-allowed license; it is neither considered free software nor open source, the definitions of which disallow restrictions on what you can use the work for.
> We are also releasing a set of research models that are instruction fine-tuned. Initially, these fine-tuned models will use a combination of five recent open-source datasets for conversational agents: Alpaca, GPT4All, Dolly, ShareGPT, and HH. These fine-tuned models are intended for research use only and are released under a noncommercial CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, in-line with Stanford’s Alpaca license.
The snippet you quoted is not talking about the main model in the announcement. It's talking about fine-tuned models based on other models. Stability has to respect the license of the originals. They cannot change it.
The main model is described higher up in the post and is permissible for commercial:
> Developers can freely inspect, use, and adapt our StableLM base models for commercial or research purposes, subject to the terms of the CC BY-SA-4.0 license
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...
https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use
Thank you for using OpenAI! These Terms of Use apply when you use the services of OpenAI, L.L.C. (snip) By using our Services, you agree to these Terms. (snip) You may not (iii) use output from the Services to develop models that compete with OpenAI. (snip) We may terminate these Terms immediately upon notice to you if you materially breach Sections 2 (Usage Requirements).
Not unless they're aligned well.
There are all sorts of horrible use cases that these could be used for.
While humans are not perfectly aligned, especially if you just look at individuals, we are collectively aligned enough that many people can live together in communities of various scales. That imperfect alignment has been good enough that we have scaled from small tribal groups to an international network of nations. We need AI alignment to be good enough if we hope to continue advancing.
Now, if Iran created an AGI that poorly aligned with the global community before other nations had similar AGI, then then I suspect that would result in a future world I wouldn't be happy with. But it could be much better than a world with AGI that is unaligned with any human values, regardless of who created it.
My best case scenario could be AGI being created by a broad international coalition that is able agree with some combination of capabilities and alignment. I'm not very confident that this is our future, though. If anyone is going to do it, I think it is more likely that the USA would be the first to create a culturally aligned AGI. Which of course would still be considered a disaster for incongruent cultures.
Main positive point for open models is that we will start seeing the abuse sooner and at smaller scales. That might give us more time to build an immune system up against exploits by encouraging us to prioritize development of comprehensive AI safety practices.