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Re:LLaMA2 isn't “Open Source” – and why it doesn't matter by rcxdude on Friday July 21, 2023 @01:53PM (#36817096)
From my non-legal-professional POV I can see an angle which may work:

Firstly, llama is not just the weights, but also the code alongside it. The weights may or may not be copyrightable, but the code is (and possibly also the network structure itself? that would be important if true but I don't know if it would qualify).

Secondly, you can write what you want in a copyright license: you could write that the license becomes null and void if the licensee eats too much blue cheese if you want.

Following from that, if you were to train on the outputs of the AI, you may not be guilty of copyright infringement in terms of doing the training (both because AI output is not copyrightable in the first place, something which seems pretty set in precedent already, and possibly also because even if it was, it gets established that it is fair use like any other data), but if it means your license to the original code is revoked then you will at the very least need to find another implementation that can use the weights, or (if the weights can be copyrighted, which I would argue is probably not the case, if you follow the argument that the training is fair use, especially if the reasoning is that the weights are simply a collection of facts about the training data, but it's very plausible that courts will rule differently here).

This could wind up with some strange situations where someone generating output with the intent of using it for training could be prosecuted (or at least forced to cease and desist) but anyone actually using that output for training would be in the clear.

I agree it is extremely "have your cake and eat it" on the part of the AI companies: They wish to both bypass copyright and also benefit from the restrictions of it (or, in the case of OpenAI, build a moat by lobbying for restrictions on the creation and use of the models themselves, by playing to fears of AI danger).

Re:LLaMA2 isn't “Open Source” – and why it doesn't matter by danShumway on Friday July 21, 2023 @02:57PM (#36817972)
These are good points to bring up.

> This could wind up with some strange situations where someone generating output with the intent of using it for training could be prosecuted (or at least forced to cease and desist) but anyone actually using that output for training would be in the clear.

I'll add to this that it's not just output; say that someone is using another service built on top of LLaMA. Facebook itself launched LLaMA 2.0 with a public-facing playground that doesn't require any license agreement or login to use.

You can go right now and use their public-facing portal and generate as much training data as you can before they IP-block you, and... as far as I can tell you haven't done anything in that scenario that I can see that would bind you to this license agreement.

So I still feel like I'll be surprised if any AI company that's serious about wanting bootstrapping itself off of LLaMA is going to be too concerned about this license (whether that's a good idea to do just because the training data itself might be garbage is another conversation). It just seems so easy to get around any restrictions.

Re:LLaMA2 isn't “Open Source” – and why it doesn't matter by int_19h on Friday July 21, 2023 @08:26PM (#36821880)
The code is largely irrelevant - it's all simple enough that it can be easily replaced, and most current users of LLaMA only use the weights in practice.

NN design is more interesting, but I don't think we're at the point yet where they are sufficiently complex to be copyrightable in general. Patentable, maybe.

Re:LLaMA2 isn't “Open Source” – and why it doesn't matter by skissane on Friday July 21, 2023 @10:33PM (#36822617)
> Following from that, if you were to train on the outputs of the AI, you may not be guilty of copyright infringement in terms of doing the training (both because AI output is not copyrightable in the first place, something which seems pretty set in precedent already, and possibly also because even if it was, it gets established that it is fair use like any other data), but if it means your license to the original code is revoked

Majority of the time, the code and weights are under independent license terms-while in theory the code license could say it is revoked or revocable if you violate the terms of the weights licenses, I think such a license term is rare in practice.

It is quite common even when the weights are under a restricted license for the code to be released under a standard open source license, and no open source license contains such a license term (and it would probably make the license non-open source were it included)