> Llama (v4 notwithstanding) and Gemma (particularly v3) aren't my idea of lagging far behind...
While neat and of course Llama kicked off a large part of the ecosystem, so credit where credit is due, both of those suffer from "open-but-not-quite" as they have large documents of "Acceptable Use" which outlines what you can and cannot do with the weights, while the Chinese counter-parts slap a FOSS-compatible license on the weights and calls it a day.
We could argue if that's the best approach, or even legal considering the (probable) origin of their training data, but the end result remains the same, Chinese companies are doing FOSS releases and American companies are doing something more similar to BSL/hybrid-open releases.
It should tell you something when the legal department of one of these companies calls the model+weights "proprietary" while their marketing department continues to calling the same model+weights "open source". I know who I trust of those two to be more accurate.
I guess that's why I see American companies as being further behind, even though they do release something.
> both of those suffer from "open-but-not-quite" as they have large documents of "Acceptable Use" which outlines what you can and cannot do with the weights
Even worse, the "Acceptable Use" document is a separate web page, which can be updated at any time. Nothing prevents it from, for instance, being updated to say "company X is no longer allowed to use these weights".
The "FOSS-compatible" licenses for these Chinese and European models are self-contained and won't suddenly change under your feet. They also have no "field of use" restrictions and, by virtue of actually being traditional FOSS licenses being applied to slightly unusual artifacts (they were originally meant for source code, not huge blobs of numeric data), are already well-known and therefore have a lower risk of unusual gotchas.
While neat and of course Llama kicked off a large part of the ecosystem, so credit where credit is due, both of those suffer from "open-but-not-quite" as they have large documents of "Acceptable Use" which outlines what you can and cannot do with the weights, while the Chinese counter-parts slap a FOSS-compatible license on the weights and calls it a day.
We could argue if that's the best approach, or even legal considering the (probable) origin of their training data, but the end result remains the same, Chinese companies are doing FOSS releases and American companies are doing something more similar to BSL/hybrid-open releases.
It should tell you something when the legal department of one of these companies calls the model+weights "proprietary" while their marketing department continues to calling the same model+weights "open source". I know who I trust of those two to be more accurate.
I guess that's why I see American companies as being further behind, even though they do release something.