I use the term “available weight”.
This is maybe a debatable claim, but I’ll contend that without the magnificent rebel who leaked the original LLaMA weights the last, what, 15 months would have gone completely differently.
The legislators and courts and lawyers will be years if not decades sorting all this out.
For now there seems to be a productive if slightly uneasy truce: outside of a few groups at a few firms, everyone seems to be maximizing for innovation and generally behaving under a positive sum expectation.
One imagines if some really cool tune of this model shows up as a magnet or even on huggingface, the courteous thing probably happened: Mistral was notified in advance and some mutually beneficial arrangement was agreed to in outline, maybe inked, maybe not.
I don’t work for Mistral, so that’s pure speculation, but the big company I spent most of my career at would have certainly said “can we hire this person? can we buy this company? can we collaborate with people who do awesome stuff with our stuff that we didn’t think of?”
The icky actors kind of dominate the headlines and I’m as guilty as anyone and guiltier than most of letting that be top of mind too often.
In the large this is really cool and kind of new.
I’m personally rather optimistic that we’re well past the point when outright piracy or flagrantly adversarial license violations are either necessary or useful.
To me this license seems like an invitation to build on Mistral’s work and approach them with the results, and given how well a posture of openness with some safeguards is working out for FAIR and the LLaMA group, that’s certainly the outcome I’d be hoping for in their position.
Maybe open AI was an unrealistic goal. Maybe AvailableAI is what we wind up with, and that wouldn’t be too bad.