Given that LLMs might be a generation-defining technology it's certainly weird that one of the biggest public companies is giving theirs away for free.
They're actually not giving it away for free. At least not LLAMA v2. Once a product successfully monetizes and gains over a certain number of users, an official license from Meta has to be negotiated otherwise Meta could revoke usage of the model. At least that's roughly what the license for LLAMAv2 implies.
But that clause pretty much only applies to mega companies like FB no?
Yeah IIRC its something like 700m users. ie. meta gets to piggy back off any generational winners
Does FB care about any companies smaller than that? If they're Instagram-competitive-successful, FB can afford to buy them.
That's not quite right. The license never gets revoked. Once over a certain size, the company will not receive licenses to new versions/releases.
This is how I understand it too, and it's very interesting. In any case, if your company reaches that size, I'm sure you'll have replaced it with something else by that time. I'm confident many fully open-source, high-quality and specialized models will be available in the next years - even thanks to Meta. Whatever their strategy is, the models are on our machines, legally, and this is incredible.
The open research tradition has been open for many defining technology, most companies continued releasing for free even when it became clear this tech would be transformative (I think it was obvious by GPT-2).
Web browsers were also a generation-defining technology.
This would be more like Google giving away their search algorithm in 2000.
That would be it if it was OpenAI releasing GPT4. Facebook releasing Llama is like Google releasing Chrome.