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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the UAE has beat them to the chase. Never thought I'd be thanking the Emirate for anything, but they did it.

Given the choice between equal models from Meta and the group that released Falcon, initially with a super shady royalty license that they then open sourced, and that nobody had ever heard of before, I'd personally go for meta.

Of course, variety is good and I hope the UAE group continues to establish themselves as a credible model provider.

I don't really care what license it was originally released on nor do I care if they have been heard of before.

See. When you have to convince corporate lawyers and security folks that whole switching licenses makes them uneasy. BD and legal are much happier to deal with Meta than the UAE.

This argument makes no sense.

People relicense software all the time and the lawyers are usually fine with it (especially when the terms are more favorable). What am I missing here?

I am not sure if you have been to the UAE. I’d probably prefer to deal with them than Meta or any other US corporation.

> initially with a super shady royalty license

I'm surprised this opinion still persists. Royalty-based licenses have been used by major game engines [0] for a long time, so that's not unprecedented.

[0] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license, https://www.cryengine.com/support/view/licensing

This isn't the first time I've seen this brought up. It's irrelevant here for so many reasons. It it unprecedented in ML models, the model was promoted as open source, the terms were absurd (10% for anything related to it plus some reporting requirements, for a foundation model that's not even tuned to anything).

In any event, bringing shitty practices from another industry into ML doesn't seem worth supporting.

> In any event, bringing shitty practices from another industry into ML doesn't seem worth supporting.

Why is this still an issue for you?

All players made licensing blunders in the past and the fine folks behind falcon seem to have learned from their mistake by releasing their weights under Apache 2.0, a well understood and respected permissive license.

Many major open source projects started as proprietary software that eventually went opensource. Why hold a grudge against this project specifically? Yes, they made a mistake and learned from it. What more do you want?

Indeed.

What the UAE did with Falcon was inspiring, well done! This is something that more governments could do.

Isn't there a problem with the Falcon models being too slow? At least I have seen reports of the quantised model being very slow [1]

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/WizardLM-Uncensored-Falcon-4...

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