Meta’s LLaMA May Become Commercially Available

Though Meta’s LLaMA is only available to researchers, it seems that its open-source LLM may become commercially available. This report comes to us from The Information, which comes right after the inquiries by lawmakers of LLaMA’s leak.

Two U.S. Senators sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the 4Chan leak about their concerns about the “potential for its misuse in spam, fraud, malware, privacy violations, harassment, and other wrongdoing and harms.”.

The LLaMA leak came only two weeks after it was released to researchers back in March, and is coming at a time when governing bodies across the world are trying to find ways to regulate the emerging technology. For example, OpenAI’s Sam Altman testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology & the Law last week.

He came out agreeing with the need for a new AI-focused regulatory agency. But in Meta’s case, the company has made quite clear its commitment to being open source. This was reaffirmed during an internal all-hands meeting at Meta with Zuckerberg. He made two things clear.

First, the company is actively working to build generative AI into all of its products.  Saying in the report according to VentureBeat.com, “In the last year, we’ve seen some really incredible breakthroughs — qualitative breakthroughs — on generative AI and that gives us the opportunity to now go take that technology, push it forward and build it into every single one of our products.”

This is the same approach being taken by rivals Microsoft and Google. Second, he reaffirmed the company’s commitment to an “open science-based approach” to its AI research.  It will likely be some time before we find out if LLaMA indeed moves out of academic-based licensing, to commercial.

As for AI regulation, currently, China has taken the lead in formulating AI regulation. But it’s clear that both the EU and the United States are actively looking into AI regulation and the possible effects of AI in society in general. If you’re interested in the hearing with Sam Altman, you can watch the entire hearing below: