Yes, I thought that Zuckerberg blogpost was just a beautiful example of the Llama/Meta playbook to capture the term open source. What noticed is that last year, the push appeared to start in the EU, with French Meta AI folks like LeCun doubling down on the term.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that they were just then starting to intensify their EU lobbying and scheming (very likely with Mistral) to enlarge their posture in the ‘open source’ field in Europe.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that a few months later, the EU AI Act draft was released to much fanfare and it included an exemption for “open source” models.
There’s not a lot of gain to be had by Meta from just co-opting a term like this. It is not widely known enough to be of much use to them in their marketing to the general public, and folks who know FOSS are not likely to fall for it.
But there is a huge potential gain if they can somehow achieve “open source” status in a sense that counts as that (critically undefined) term in the EU AI Act — which would enable them to escape the onerous requirements that other general purpose model providers are hampered by. This is the massive loophole we and others have pointed out.
I am happy that OSI has at least put its foot down and clearly stated that Llama currently is not open source. But it is not clear to me that the current OSI definition will in any way prevent Meta from releasing a version that just scrapes by in terms of openness. Data is their main liability, and that is precisely the element that in the current RC has been watered down to “sufficient information”, i.e., some metadata of their own choosing.
There is nothing new here. Anybody who knows a bit about the history of “fair trade” will know how multinationals like Starbucks and Nestlé were happy to jump on the band wagon — and then used their influence to water down the concept. As a sociologist noted: “co-optation … occurs primarily on the terrain of standards in the form of weakening or dilution” (Jaffee 2012).
Daniel Jaffee. 2012. Weak Coffee: Certification and Co-Optation in the Fair Trade
Movement. Social Problems 59, 1 (Feb. 2012), 94–116. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.
2012.59.1.94