You can benefit a lot from it, and I have... but do be sure you know what you are ferrying on your back before you decide to offer it a ride across the river.
Not only is "a lot" of FOSS not released like this, both free software and Meta's models cannot be monetized post-release. If Meta decides to charge money for Llama4, then everyone with access to the prior models can keep their access and even finetune/redistribute their model. There is no strategic flip Meta can attempt here without shotgunning their own foot off.
For two - they can't do shit. Every one of those businesses can try to pivot into being the next OpenAI, but even OpenAI can't be fucked to turn a profit. They can't retract their models (remember Llama 1.0? hahahahahahahahaha) and they can't piss and moan to the authorities when their weights leak because 99% of them contain unlicensed copyrighted material in the first place.
The real twist to this Gordian knot? Open source is the only model you can release conventional AI under, because anything else precludes a Fair Use defense. Everyone that has "proprietary" models only manages it by playing keep-away with the community.
> Only a five-year-old child is either surprised or angered by this turn of events.
Five year old children know that they can keep their toys once they stop selling them at Wal-mart. Pulling a model off HF doesn't stop new finetunes or even redistribution and re-quantization of the old model. Mistral and Runway can do whatever they want, all their models are belong to us.
Also it's bad when HN is downvoting fking GWERN