It has a non-commercial cc-by-nc-4.0 license, I would guess the only way to use this in production is to use Nvidias data centers to host it? Or are there other ways?
The cc-by-nc-4.0 license applies to the network weights. The only thing non-commercial about the license is that it restricts how you may reproduce the licensed material:
> reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part, for NonCommercial purposes only; and
As long as you are not selling the network weights themselves, nothing in the license prevents you from evaluating the neural network for commercial purposes and selling the outputs. In 'production' you will have to directly download the weights from Nvidia themselves (or another 3rd party which is distributing the network weights non-commercially in good faith) though, you can't share the network weights onto your commercial inference server from another one of your commercial deployment servers. Or at least, it gets more dicy there and may be considered commercial reproduction so better avoid it.
For similar reasons you may 3D print a CC-BY-NC model of a tool and use that tool in your commercial workshop, you may use a CC-BY-NC compiler of a language to compile commercial programs, etc.
Creative Commons themselves write at https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... :
"Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software? We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available."
Of course, LLM weights aren't traditional software...
The problem is if you happen to sign any agreement with NVIDIA in order to get the weights. The problem is whatever contracts you may be bound by.
Can't this flip on a dime and a billion dollar company lose billions?
I'm not even sure if network weights are copyrightable independently of the code and data used to generate them. In my personal (not a lawyer) view, the weights of a neural network are the product of a mechanical transformation process much like a compiler or assembler, and we don't consider a compiled binary to have a copyright independent of its source code.
I still wouldn't notoriously try to violate a purported weights license, mind you, both because it's rude to ignore the authors' wishes and because it would not be fun being used by NVidia or any other deep-pocket AI company.