Seems people here on HN were lucky. Signed up ~20 minutes ago and no download link, so surely they're doing some checking, it's not fully automated, unlike what others say here.

On Huggingface, the following disclaimer has been put in place:

> This is a form to enable access to Llama 2 on Hugging Face after you have been granted access from Meta. Please visit the [Meta website](https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-dow...) and accept our license terms and acceptable use policy before submitting this form. Requests will be processed in 1-2 days

https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-chat-hf/tree/m...

So seems it's a manual flow on their side to "accept" downloads.

the cog template is just starter code to make it super simple to deploy llama-v2 on any infrastructure of your choosing!

More about cog https://github.com/replicate/cog

Our thinking was just that a bunch of folks will want to fine-tune right away, then deploy the fine-tunes, so trying to make that easy... Or even just deploy the models-as-is on their own infra without dealing with CUDA insanity!

Meta sent me the link for the weights right away after I filled out the form.

Probaly Llama, it was too hard to get right before :)

https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/commit/6d4c0c290ae...

Got it immediately after signing up through huggingface

https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-chat-hf

> the rest of us have to wait to download the weights

they're openly torrentable

>its not clear but can we also download the model with this Llama v2 Cog thing? why did replicate/a16z seem to have the model but the rest of us have to wait to download the weights?

It's a club and we're not invited.

Just like what OpenAI did with early access with so-called AI startups with YC, Meta has done the same with the VC grifters.

Money is power and buys you into their club.