I'm a bit worried the LLaMA leak will make the labs much more cautious about who they distribute models to for future projects, closing down things even more.

I've had tons of fun implementing LLaMA, learning and playing around with variations like Vicuna. I learned a lot and probably wouldn't have got so interested in this space if the leak didn't happen.

If the copyright office determines model weights are uncopyrightable (huge if), then one might imagine any institutional leak would benefit everyone else in the space.

You might see hackers, employees, or contractors leaking models more frequently.

And since models are distilled functionality (no microservices and databases to deploy), they're much easier to run than a constellation of cloud infrastructure.

Even if the weights are copyrighted, running one more epoch of fine-tuning will result in different weights. At a certain point, they'd have to copyright the shapes of the weight vectors.

is uncertain, as with codding you need white room methods to prove that new code is not contaminated with patented implementation, as it might be here, so basing anything on an existing model could be also copyrighted.

The training code is Apache 2.0 licensed so it can be copied and modified freely, including for commercial purpoes. https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama