As an ML researcher, I agree. Meta doesn't include adequate information to replicate the models, and from the perspective of fundamental research, the interest that big tech companies have taken in this field has been a significant impediment to independent researchers, despite the fact that they are undeniably producing groundbreaking results in many respects, due to this fundamental lack of openness

This should also make everyone very skeptical of any claim they are making, from benchmark results to the legalities involved in their training process to the prospect of future progress on these models. Without being able to vet their results against the same datasets they're using, there is no way to verify what they're saying, and the credulity that otherwise smart people have been exhibiting in this space has been baffling to me

As a developer, if you have a working Llama model, including the source code and weights, and it's crucial for something you're building or have already built, it's still fundamentally a good thing that Meta isn't gating it behind an API and if they went away tomorrow, you could still use, self-host, retrain, and study the models

> If you don't have a way to replicate what they did to create the model, it seems more like freeware

Isn't that a bit like arguing that a linux kernel driver isn't open source if I just give you a bunch of GPL-licensed source code that speaks to my device, but no documentation how my device works? If you take away the source code you have no way to recreate it. But so far that never caused anyone to call the code not open-source. The closest is the whole GPL3 Tivoization debate and that was very divisive.

The heart of the issue is that open source is kind of hard to define for anything that isn't software. As a proxy we could look at Stallman's free software definition. Free software shares a common history with open source and in most open source software is free/libre, and the other way around, so this might be a useful proxy.

So checking the four software freedoms:

- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose: For most purposes. There's that 700M user restriction, also Meta forbids breaking the law and requires you to follow their acceptable use policy.

- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish: yes. You can change it by fine tuning it, and the weights allow you to figure out how it works. At least as well as anyone knows how any large neural network works, but it's not like Meta is keeping something from you here

- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor: Allowed, no real asterisks

- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others: Yes

So is it Free Software™? Not really, but it is pretty close.

> it seems more like freeware than open source.

What would you have them do instead? Specifically?

Kinda. Since you can self-host the model on a linux machine, there's no meaningful way for them to prevent you from having the trained weights. You can use this to bootstrap other models, or retrain on your own datasets, or fine-tune from the starting point of the currently-working model. What you can't do is be sure what they trained it on

I could be wrong but most “model” licenses prohibit the use of the models to improve other models

Doing something right vs doing something that seems right but has a hidden self interest that is harmful in the long run can be vastly different things. Often this kind of strategy will allow people to let their guard down, and those same people will get steamrolled down the road, left wondering where it all went wrong. Get smarter.