Meta making LLaMA commercially available, despite lawmaker inquiries

 Meta Making LLaMA commercially available, despite lawmaker inquiries

Meta reportedly making LLaMA commercially available, despite lawmaker inquiries

Sharon Goldman, @sharongoldman, June 16, 2023 

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Meta is working to make the next version of LLaMA, its open-source LLM — currently available only to researchers — commercially available, according to recent reporting from The Information. This news comes despite lawmaker inquiries, including a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week by two U.S. senators that questioned LLaMA’s leak to 4chan a week after the model was announced.

As VentureBeat has reported, Meta is considered the most “open” of the Big Tech companies, thanks to FAIR, the Fundamental AI Research Team founded by Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun in 2013. It had made LLaMA’s model weights available under a research license for academics and researchers on a case-by-case basis — including Stanford University for the Alpaca project — but those weights were subsequently leaked, which allowed developers around the world to fully access a GPT-level LLM for the first time.