They are instruction tuning it using the dataset released by stanford-alpaca team. The dataset itself is synthetic (created using GPT-3) and somewhat noisy and in my view can be easily recreated if OpenAI ever tries to go after it (which is very unlikely). Anyway, facebook has nothing to do with anything used by this project.

So, this is a "dirty" model, in that is was created by data which violated OpenAI ToS. Obviously, this kind of violation is basically fine if you're a massive corporation who the rules don't apply to, but it's a huge risk if you're a small fish.

ToS are not the law. It would be similar to your power company claiming copyright over the code written using "their" electricity. Not going to happen. I wouldn't be too concerned.

Especially when OpenAI explicitly doesn't have a claim to copyright on the model output.

No, but you could be banned from using OpenAI products in the future, which seems like quite a liability for a researcher or company.

That would be anticompetitive practice that is actually against the law in many countries[1]. In the unlikely event of OpenAI ever engaging in such things they will be sued into oblivion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusal_to_deal

No it wouldn't. Wikipedia has a crap definition that inexplicably focuses on cartels where multiple companies coordinate the refusal, which this definitely isn't. The FTC has a better definition for US law [1].

Companies routinely ban users for ToS violations. Just look at any thread about Google on here to see people complaining about it.

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

The FTC link has an example of the only newspaper in town refusing to deal with customers who are also running ads on a radio station. Do you think if the newspaper dressed such refusal as a ToS violation it would fly with FTC?

Google might be banning people for enforceable violations of their ToS but imagine the uproar if they banned a Bing engineer for using Google search to find solutions for some Bing problem (which is similar to the problem here). The upside for Google or OpenAI would be somewhat limited but the downside is almost boundless.

That's between OpenAI and the people that recorded the data. No one else needs to care.

"basically fine if you're a massive corporation who the rules don't apply to, but it's a huge risk if you're a small fish"

With these things, it is usually the other way around.

If you are a small fish, no one will care. But if you are big enough, that money could be extracted from you, then they will come. A big org just has better lawers and negotiating power, but they really cannot ignore the law. Especially not, if there is a competitor with money to sue.

So if you are small and want to become big, better be cautious on the legal ground you are walking.

If you use output, from a non-profit who open sourced the output gained by following the TOS, as in they aren't using it 'for profit', it's not illegal, because:

A. it's an output gained via following the letter of the law (TOS).

B. TOS only applies directly to people who've accepted the TOS, unless alpaca's license/TOS ALSO forwards the same criterion as it's source at openai, then derivatives wouldn't apply.

It's like if an app developer on IOS violated a TOS, and apple tried to go after everybody who ever used the app, they didn't agree directly to the TOS, only the developer did.

I don't know the full details but Alpaca is from Stanford and only based on the LLamA (not a derivative work afaik). That said :

Also Meta's licensing here https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/blob/main/LICENSE

Can't be sure what that license actually reffers to, the language model or just the tooling in the Git Repo.

I agree its a minefield, but with Meta I would eer on the side of caution.