Facebook Against Free Software Rules
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Meta’s AI research head wants open source licensing to change
While Meta’s license makes Llama 2 free for many, it’s still a limited license that doesn’t meet all the requirements of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). As outlined in the OSI’s Open Source Definition, open source is more than just sharing some code or research. To be truly open source is to offer free redistribution, access to the source code, allow modifications, and must not be tied to a specific product. Meta’s limits include requiring a license fee for any developers with more than 700 million daily users and disallowing other models from training on Llama. IEEE Spectrum wrote researchers from Radboud University in the Netherlands claimed Meta saying Llama 2 is open-source “is misleading,” and social media posts questioned how Meta could claim it as open-source.
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Meta's VP of AI says the open-source licensing system should change
At the heart of this problem is Llama 2, which the company launched in July as the first “open-source” AI model. However, according to OSI’s requirements, for a service to be considered open-source, it should offer free distribution, full access to the source code, and allow for modifications. While Meta did fulfill some of these conditions, the fact that the company charged a licensing fee for developers with more than 700 million daily users and didn’t permit other companies to train their AI models using Llama made it ineligible for the “open-source” label.
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The Heated Debate Over Who Should Control Access to AI
Large companies like Meta should be able to comply with the safety standards relatively easily, and the effects on smaller open-source developers will be offset by reduced liabilities for smaller organizations, says Moës. Still, in July, a group of organizations including Hugging Face and Eleuther AI, a non-profit research lab, released a paper making recommendations for how the E.U. AI Act can support open-source AI development, including setting proportional requirements for foundation models.