Can social media companies be trusted with AI governance? Call me sceptical. Perhaps it’s their track record of engineering addictive doom-scrolling to make money selling ads, their failure to scale in the fight against disinformation campaigns, or their deployment of heavily biased algorithms that promote the operators' political perspective.

Access to the Llama - a preview “open source” version of their GPT3 challenger - was gated by a form submission and manual acceptance review.

A week on, Llama’s models' weights and biases (the essential sauce of an LLM) surfaced on torrent sites. The leaker appeared to have left their unique approval identifier in the dump…no Meta Christmas card for them this year.

The model was quickly mirrored to Cloudflare R2 storage for super-fast download, and hackers were spinning up GPU-enabled cloud instances on vast.ai to run the bare Llama for 1.5 USD per hour.

As one Redditor noted:

You shouldn’t compare it with ChatGPT, they are not really comparable. You should compare it to GPT-3. The 65B model performs better than GPT-3 in most categories. The 13B model is comparable to GTP-3, which is quite impressive given how much smaller the model is. In order to make LLaMA more like ChatGPT, you’d have to heavily fine-tune it to be more like a chatbot, the way OpenAI did with InstructGPT.

This isn’t the first time an AI model has escaped the lab. However, Llama’s jump in sophistication places a new level of capability in the public domain. With fine-tuning, the potency of the model for domain-specific competence can be improved further. This will be a boon for groups with threat-centric use cases.

As AI developments come thick and fast, will events like this one trigger policymakers to legislate AI model access and ownership? Will GPU manufacturers respond with firmware-level controls to limit model training and/or execution? Or will they be compelled into some form of GPU licensing regime?