Stating independence as the advantage of Llama 3.1 is a bit funny. Without the huge amount of computational resources from Meta, Llama 3.1 won't be possible. We are still dependent on certain big companys' "good" willness to be able to enjoy the benefits of open source.
For the release, yes. But from now onwards everyone will benefit from Llama 3.1 regardless of Meta's involvement. That's the advantage; I can build something with Llama 3.1 and it will keep working indefinitely without any dependence on another party.
I’ve always wondered if it’s possible to pool together small amounts of resources from users e.g. similar to torrenting with networking, but with compute and use it to host a large model like this one. If the community wants open source to be the way, I believe this would be the only way to get these large models accessible to users while the community stay in semi-control of the platform.
May as well enjoy it while it lasts, but yeah it echoes the precarious state that VR is currently in, where Meta is more or less propping up the entire consumer market with their willingness to burn billions of dollars on Reality Lab every quarter, and anyone investing in VR development just has to hope that rug doesn't get pulled from under them any time soon. Llama 3.1 isn't going away of course, but how much are you willing on gamble on Llama 3.1 possibly being the last SOTA model to be released this freely?
> [...] the precarious state that VR is currently in, where Meta is more or less propping up the entire consumer market with their willingness to burn billions of dollars on Reality Lab every quarter,
They don't quite seem so happy to do that for much longer.
Yeah, that's a good point. On the other hand, the model is out there, irrevocably so, and you can use knowledge distillation techniques to train other weaker models. So yeah, we're not fully independent, but the situation is significantly improved.
Does the community license let companies fine-tune it or retrain it for their use cases?
There are significant restrictions on it so it's not fully open-source, but maybe it's only a real problem for Google and OpenAI and Microsoft.
Open source has turned into a game of, what's the most commercial value I can retain, while still calling it open-source and benefiting from the trust and marketing value of the 'open source' branding.
The last section is the most important. There’s a massive difference between what you can do with the text output of an LLM versus being able to know and play with the individual weights, depending on your use case.
The Llama models tend to spark a race-to-the-bottom in terms of pricing - I fully expect Llama 3.1 to end up cheaper than GPT-4o mini after a bunch of providers spin up endpoints that compete on price.
