Meta is promoting its new Llama 2 as one of the most powerful large language models out there and an open-source artificial-intelligence offering from one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
Not quite.
In Meta's terms and conditions for those requesting access to Llama 2, the company, formerly known as Facebook, says that larger users won't be granted access to the model in the same way smaller companies and individual developers will.
Any company hoping to use Llama 2 that has a user base of 700 million active users a month or more is required to "request" use of the model. Meta "in its sole discretion" will decide whether such a company will be given access, the license says. In such a situation, Meta said the only way for a large company or platform to use Llama 2 was if it "expressly grants you such rights."
By having such a restriction, Llama 2 does not meet the standards of open source. These standards are maintained by the nonprofit Open Source Initiative, which also reviews whether software licenses can be approved as open source.
"The license that has been used by Llama 2 and Facebook is not an open-source license and would not be qualified as an open-source license because it contains restrictions on commercial needs," Stefano Maffulli, the executive director of the OSI, said.
A Meta spokesperson said the Llama 2 license was "a bespoke commercial license that balances open access to the models with responsibility and protections in place to help address potential misuse." She added that the restriction did not apply to any company that may grow to 700 million monthly users while using Llama 2. "They can continue to use Llama 2 freely so long as they abide by the other license terms," she said.
Concerns about Meta's restrictions
Most users of Llama 2 likely don't have 700 million monthly users. But major competitors of Meta, such as Google, Amazon, and Apple, and large governments, including those of the US and China, probably can't use the model.
Maffulli is still concerned about Llama 2's restrictions. Hypothetically, if someone wanted to use the AI model to solve an issue that affected hundreds of millions of people, they could have to request usage of Llama 2 from Meta, Maffulli said. Furthermore, if Meta as a company no longer existed, then users would not be able to request to use the project.
"Developers need to be able to decide for themselves how and where they can use this technology without having to engage with a party," Maffulli said. "That party may not be available and may not be reachable."
Open source in AI
The OSI is leading a series of meetings and debates and accepting proposals to formally define what "open source" means when it comes to AI and the machine learning it uses. Yet the way Meta offers Llama 2 does not even meet the basic requirement of any open-source license, Maffulli said.
Llama 2's community-license agreement is not certified as open source by the Open Source Initiative, and Maffulli said it would not be approved if it had that restriction. The OSI's open-source definition says an open-source-software license "shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources."
That Meta is even promoting Llama 2 as "open source" is troubling to Maffulli, who said the meaning of the term was being diluted by Meta's improper use.
"Open source is a well-understood and well-defined term in the industry," Maffulli said. "Large institutions, governments, and policymakers follow those principles and definitions. Having something as big and influential as open source and touting it as something it's not is a concern."
This isn't the first time companies have pushed back against the definition of open source. Companies such as MongoDB, Redis, Confluent, and Elastic, which have long maintained open-source software, changed their software licenses to restrict companies such as Amazon from selling their software (which would be possible with a true open-source license). This led to pushback, as the restrictions meant the software did not follow the standards of open source.
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