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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

The reason for Meta making their model open source is rather simple: They receive an unimaginable amount of free labor, and their license only excludes their major competitors to ensure mass adoption without benefiting their competition (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, etc). Public interest, philanthropy, etc are just nice little marketing bonuses as far as they're concerned (otherwise they wouldn't be including this licensing restriction).

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All correct, Meta does obviously benefit.

It's helpful to also look at what do the developers and companies (everyone outside of top 5/10 big tech companies) get out of this. They get open access to weights of SOTA LLM models that take billions of dollars to train and 10s of billions a year to run the AI labs that make these. They get the freedom to fine tune them, to distill them, and to host them on their own hardware in whatever way works best for their products and services.

Interesting. So llama isn't actually open source! That would partially explain why they feel their moat isn't compromised.

Also... Wow, Mark Zuckerberg is such a liar! Implying that llama is open source when it isn't, while at the same time trying to gather the goodwill of FOSS developers.

Meta haven't made an open source model. They have released a binary with a proprietary but relatively liberal license. Binaries are not source and their license isn't free.

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