Meta has been touted as the biggest proponent of open source. Building on the success of LLaMa, the company decided to partner with Microsoft and release Llama 2, an “open source” model for commercial use. In just two days, the entire AI ecosystem has been discussing how Meta is building an open source community, while OpenAI is keeping its technology closed. 

Interestingly, diving deeper into the release, it does not take much searching to realise that Llama 2 is not exactly open source. According to the commercial licence put forth by the company, any company that is going to use Llama 2 with an active monthly user base of 700 million or more would be required to “request” to gain access to the model. 

This means that Meta has the right to finally decide if a company will be given access to Llama 2 or not. In such a situation, Meta said the only way for a large company or platform to use Llama 2 is if it “expressly grants you such rights“. OSI has clearly stated that the Llama 2 licence agreement does not qualify open source definition at all and to “watch their language”.

So, while companies like Google, Amazon, or Apple, even large governments, would try to use Llama 2 to build their own generative AI technology, Meta can just say “no”. People would have to stick to training their models on their own or probably use GPT-produced data to build their models. 

Most of the people using Llama 2 wouldn’t have 700 million users now. A Meta spokesperson clarified that companies using Llama 2 to reach 700 million users would not be restricted to use the model afterwards as well. However, that is not yet clear on the licence policy, no one has yet reached that mark, so it is just about trusting the word of mouth.

Meta’s release of Llama 2 screams of the company’s aims to “democratise generative AI” by giving it to the open source community. But if the only big tech benefactor with this is Microsoft, it is not exactly open source but just a bid to overthrow the leadership of OpenAI.

Dethrone and overthrow

Apple recently announced that it is building its own chatbot. There are speculations around what data the company would use to train its model. On the other hand, people on Twitter were also discussing how Apple has always been using the open source community and contributing nothing in return. Meta with its licensing rules has made it impossible for Apple to copy and take the quick route. 

When it comes to dethroning ChatGPT or OpenAI, the partnership that the company has achieved with Microsoft might help them do that. But interestingly, Meta has made a sly move here as well. Though it is not explicitly mentioned in the paper, it is possible that Llama 2 is actually trained on GPT-4 output to train its behaviour. The paper reads that “Llama 2 has taken help of a large model for fine-tuning”, along with also citing that it has been trained on open source data — which includes GPT-generated data on the internet. 

Microsoft’s partnership with Meta has another malevolent angle to it. While Microsoft has made sure that OpenAI has an exclusive partnership with it, Meta can act as a poster boy of open source for Microsoft. This means that all OpenAI services and capabilities are exclusively available on Azure Cloud ensuring that OpenAI’s technology remains closed source. So, the secret sauce of GPT is exclusively held by Microsoft, while Meta will continue innovation for them.

On the other hand, Microsoft has made no such promise. It has decided to partner with Meta for its open source and smaller technology, while keeping OpenAI at bay. The ChatGPT maker will continue its focus on building AGI, while Microsoft will find more use cases of Llama 2, a model built by a possible dependency on OpenAI’s model.

‘We are (not) democratising AI‘

In the tech ecosystem, democratisation would just mean open sourcing the technology equally for everyone to use it the way they want. But Meta’s approach of restricting it for some users, which are its competitors, sounds anti-democratic or communistic. 

Interestingly, Meta has the highest number of open source contributions compared to any big tech with a total number of 689 repositories, while Microsoft has only 252. Seems like Microsoft has actually pushed Meta to do this. 

Open source Llama 2 is clearly a good thing for 99% of the companies and almost all startups. They can use the small models, fine-tune it on their proprietary data and achieve their use cases. Moreover, the data can also be generated by GPT models, which is already available on the internet.

Companies using OpenAI APIs through Azure would realise that instead of spending so much for the Microsoft services, they can just build on top of Llama 2. The only downside would be the lack of available NVIDIA GPUs, something that the companies wouldn’t have to worry about while using the APIs.

All in all, Meta was clearly playing the good guy in generative AI by siding with open source. Google and OpenAI apparently did not have a moat, and Microsoft tapped into that and got the open source leader under its belt. Now, while the world might continue criticising OpenAI for being closed doors, Microsoft can play the good guy with Meta. 

All this while they keep Llama 2 for everyone, including Microsoft, but no other big tech company. Sounds communistic, right?