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Comment by reckless | Hacker News Reader

I think the licensing that would likely apply to a company that's able to afford ~$6M rack and the associated infrastructure muddies this somewhat

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I think internal use is allowed at any scale in the license?

> 4. The requirements set forth in Sections 2 and 3 do not apply to: (a) internal use of the Software, defined as any use that does not make the Software, its outputs, or its underlying capabilities available to third parties; [...]

It's very hard to make sure none of the outputs are ever made available to third parties. Source code can end up widely distributed (e.g. client-side js, open source). Prose will frequently get shared across organization boundaries (e.g. emails, websites, documents).

License for LLMs already have very little strength (it's not clear at all that they have any legal basis whatsoever) an AI lab is very, very unlikely to sue you for violating this kind of license clause for the reason you mentioned. It's clearly worded in a way to deter people from running a third party inference business out of it, they would have been much more explicit if they wanted to deter people from running it for internal use.

As far as I can tell, license fees are only applicable if you have more than 20m USD/year revenue from services provided using the model, or serve more than 100m users.

Its an open question if model weights are even copyrightable. So the license may not mean anything.

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