I was excited when StabilityAI—the company behind Stable Diffusion—launched StableLM, their open source language model with a commercially permissive license. I was convinced it would become the new hub for open source community development.
Prior to the announcement, developers had coalesced around Meta’s LLaMA model which had always been a somewhat tenuous situation. It was initially only available to select researchers before it was leaked to the public. Since then, the company hasn’t been entirely clear in its messaging. On one hand, Mark Zuckerberg has expressed a desire to commodify generative AI through open source contributions. On the other hand, they have been issuing DMCA takedown requests for seemingly innocuous projects that incorporate LLaMA.
Now, two months after StableLM’s launch, it has become clear how difficult it is to redirect inertia. The open source community has continued contributing to LLaMA and development on StableLM has stalled. As I write this, there have been no updates to the StableLM code since April.
Well, it seems like Meta might be on the verge of announcing a successor to LLaMA with a more permissive license, allowing for commercial use.
Sylvia Varnham O’Regan, Jon Victor, and Amir Efrati, The Information:
Meta is working on ways to make the next version of its open-source large-language model—technology that can power chatbots like ChatGPT—available for commercial use, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation and a person who was briefed about it. The move could prompt a feeding frenzy among AI developers eager for alternatives to proprietary software sold by rivals Google and OpenAI.
Although Meta didn’t originally indend for the open source language model community to form around their models, they may as well come out and fully embrace it. It is their best chance at disrupting Microsoft and Google dominance.