SAN FRANCISCO – The pace of AI development is moving at breakneck speed. And as Meta showed this week with the commercial release of its second-generation, open-source-ish Llama model, the competitive landscape is being constantly redrawn.

I’ve spent the past few days reading reactions to the news and talking to people in the AI field. Many believe that Llama 2 is the industry’s most important release since ChatGPT last November, though it obviously won’t generate as much press buzz as a developer-facing release. Companies will now be able to more easily and cheaply build bespoke bots with proprietary data that would never be accessible externally, like the internal AI bot that Stripe recently rolled out for its employees. This will make AI chatbots of all kinds more useful and personalized, which is an exciting step in the right direction.

Meta is effectively boxing out a small list of its largest independent competitors in social media

But as always, and especially with the new release by Meta, the devil is in the details. Llama 2 may be the most freely accessible model of its caliber. But its licensing restrictions mean that it’s not technically “open source,” even if Meta wants the world to believe it is.

No one who follows this space closely is surprised that Llama 2 can’t be used to train another AI model or that using it for criminal activity is prohibited. What’s unique is the stipulation that companies with 700 million or more monthly users have to request a license directly from Meta, which then has “sole discretion” to grant it or not. I found this supplemental “statement of support” that Meta had a bunch of people sign saying that Llama 2 “will let everyone benefit from this technology” (emphasis added) to be a bit rich given that restriction — not to mention the

The monthly user number is clearly targeted at a handful of Meta’s competitors, including Snapchat, which recently surpassed 750 million monthly users and currently pays OpenAI to power its “My AI” chatbot. There’s also the messaging app Telegram, which just exceeded 800 million monthly users and runs a chatbot platform for businesses that competes with WhatsApp’s. Given that most of the other services with 700-million-plus users out there belong to tech conglomerates with their own AI models (Google-owned YouTube, ByteDance-owned TikTok, etc.), Meta is effectively boxing out a small list of its largest independent competitors in social media.

Meta isn’t publicly saying what criteria it will use to grant a license if a company as large as Snap comes knocking or how much it would charge. Instead, it’s positioning Llama 2 as a free model for upstarts. (The restriction regarding user size applies to companies that already have 700 million users, not companies that reach said milestone after adopting Llama 2.) “Part of our open approach is to help companies and developers that may be resource constrained still have access to large language models like Llama 2, so it is free for the vast majority of users,” Meta spokesperson Nisha Deo told me.

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