Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdfksa | Hacker News Reader

Nice marketing that is written for investors. Let us translate:

> By making our Llama models openly available we’ve seen a vibrant and diverse AI ecosystem come to life [...]

They all use the same model and the same transformer algorithm. The model has an EULA, you need to apply for downloading it, the training data set and the training software are closed.

> Open source promotes a more competitive ecosystem that’s good for consumers, good for companies (including Meta), and ultimately good for the world.

So the "competitive" system means that everyone uses LLama and PyTorch.

> In addition to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure, we’ve partnered with Databricks, Dell, Google Cloud, Groq, NVIDIA, IBM watsonx, Scale AI, Snowflake, and others to better help developers unlock the full potential of our models.

Sounds really open.

View on HN

Meta has spent massive sums of money to train these models and they've released the models to the public. You can fine-tune the models. You can see the source code and the architecture of the model. The EULA is commercially-friendly.

You are free to quibble over how truly "open source" these models are, but I am very thankful that Meta has released them.

Thank them then. Please don't use your gratitude to also wash out an entire cultural idea because billionares make you grateful.

Open source developers have spent far more time to develop the truly free stack that Meta uses to power its business in the first place.

I am grateful to these developers. I am not grateful for a half open release and the redefinition of established terms. Which, judging by the downvoting in this thread, are now spread with fire and sword.

A lot of these open source developers that made and improved this "truly free stack" are employed by meta and other big techs

The stack was very usable in 2010. At that time, some gcc and kernel developers were employed by SuSE and RedHat. It was not common to be employed by a large corporation to work on open source.

Projects like Python were completely usable then. But the corporations came, infiltrated existing projects and added often useless things. Python is not much better now than in 2010.

So you have perhaps React and PyTorch. That is a tiny bit of the huge OSS stack. Does Meta pay for ncurses? for xterm? Of course not, it only supports flashy projects that are highly marketable and takes the rest for granted.

So no, only a tiny fraction of the really important OSS devs are employed by FAANG.

> Does Meta pay for ncurses? for xterm?

Should they? Both of those are client-side software that aren't even really being monetized or profited-off by Meta. You could maybe get mad at Meta's employees for not donating to the software they rely on, but in the case of ncurses and xterm they're both provided without cost. They're not even server-side software, much less a deliberate infrastructure decision.

There's an oddly extremist sect of people that seem to entirely misunderstand what GNU and Free software is. It does not exist to stop people from charging money for software. It does not exist to prevent private interests or corporations from contributing to projects. It does not exist to solicit donations from it's users. All of these are options that some GNU or FOSS projects can choose to embody, not a static rule that they must all abide by. Since Cathedral and the Bazaar was published, people have been scrutinizing different approaches to Free Software and contrasting their impacts. We don't have to champion one approach versus the other because they ultimately coexist and often end up stimulating FOSS development in the long run.

> Python is not much better now than in 2010.

C'mon, now. Next you're going to tell me about how great Perl is in 2024.

So, in this submission Meta adjacent opinions have called OSS supporters all sorts of names while being upvoted.

At least Meta is shows its true colors here. It must have hurt that the OSS position has arrived at the Economist yesterday, so everyone is circling the wagons.

Nobody here really has an agenda, least of all on HN where the majority of us hate Facebook like the living devil. Everyone remembers Cambridge Analytica and the ensuing drama, but we're also up-to-date on all of FAANG's exploits. Meta is a supporter of Open Source, and arguably contributes multitudes more than Apple or Amazon does. This idea that strings-attached weights releases tank their reputation is stupid; Meta's contribution is self-evident, and only looks stupid when you hold them to nonsense standards that no company would hold up to. Really, which Fortune 500 companies are donating to xterm and ncurses anyways? Is there anyone?

Again, there are arguments you can make that have weight but this isn't one of them. Every person with connection to wireless internet is running a firmware blob on their "open source" computer, it doesn't mean they're unable to bootstrap from source. Similarly, people that design Open Source infrastructure around Meta's binary weights aren't threatening their business at all. An "open" release of Llama wouldn't help those end-users, isn't even guaranteed to build Llama, and is too large to effectively fork or derive from. There's a good reason engineers aren't paying attention to the dramatic and insubstantial exposes that get written in finance rags.

Meta employs kernel developers (and MySQL developers and memcache developers and the people that created and released zstd and a lot more). Aside from all of these are also a bunch of python code developers, and you might want to recheck the performance improvements of 2010 vs 2024 python - much of it driven by FAANG developers!

> The model has an EULA, you need to apply for downloading it

I am confused - I grabbed Ollama and pulled down some of these models. I don't recall having to go through any legal agreements. I just type:

  ollama pull llama3.1

Maybe I missed something and am actually 10 steps behind. Who knows anymore. This whole space is totally insane to me.

https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3

"To download the model weights and tokenizer, please visit the Meta Llama website and accept our License.

Once your request is approved, you will receive a signed URL over email. Then, run the download.sh script, passing the URL provided when prompted to start the download.

Pre-requisites: Ensure you have wget and md5sum installed. Then run the script: ./download.sh.

Remember that the links expire after 24 hours and a certain amount of downloads. You can always re-request a link if you start seeing errors such as 403: Forbidden."

Go try it.

https://ollama.com

You may come away surprised.

You still agree to this EULA by using it:

https://ollama.com/library/llama3.1/blobs/0ba8f0e314b4

> By clicking “I Accept” below or by using or distributing any portion or element of the Llama Materials, you agree to be bound by this Agreement.

> You still agree to this EULA by using it

I think my lawyer would have a few things to say about automatic legal agreements hidden somewhere in source control.

Is the ollama project part of Meta? Is that what's going on here?

You never see that agreement with `ollama run`. It's not even a shrink-wrap licence - there's no indication there's a restriction at all between requesting the model and the API receiving requests for it. This situation is probably going to end up with the ollama folks getting a slap on the wrist and told to implement some shrink-wrap wording but until then, nobody can be bound by that licence because Meta can't demonstrate that anyone has seen the offer.

I think this is just the ollama site rehosting in violation of the license (unless there is some fine print I am missing). Huggingface makes you login and accept the agreement.

Far more open than the competition. I'll take it.

Don't let a gift be a curse.

>They all use the same model and the same transformer algorithm. The model has an EULA, you need to apply for downloading it, the training data set and the training software are closed.

Everything in that sentence is false except the training data part.

>So the "competitive" system means that everyone uses LLama and PyTorch.

This sentence shows you don't understand the LLM landscape and it's also false.

>Sounds really open

Correct. They partner with practically every vendor available for inference, which, isn't even needed if you run their models locally.

Meta has done a lot of wrong things over the years. How they are approaching LLMs is not one of them.

> Everything in that sentence is false except the training data part.

You do need to apply on Huggingface to download the model.

> This sentence shows you don't understand the LLM landscape and it's also false.

PyTorch definitely is the most used ML framework.

Could you provide a link for downloading the complete and exact training software for the latest models?

You need to provide an email address and click a license agreement. Then you get a download link that expires after a day. I do not have to do this with the Linux kernel. Perhaps you are downloading from within Meta and are not exposed to these issues?

erm its is still way more open than "openAI" or Anthropic...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com