IEE Spectrum: “Efforts to make AI open source have become a lightning rod for disagreements about the potential harms of the emerging technology. Last week, protesters gathered outside Meta’s San Francisco offices to protest its policy of publicly releasing its AI models, claiming that the releases represent “irreversible proliferation” of potentially unsafe technology. But others say that an open approach to AI development is the only way to ensure trust in the technology. While companies like OpenAI and Google only allow users to access their large language models (LLMs) via an API, Meta caused a stir last February when it made its LLaMA family of models freely accessible to AI researchers. The release included model weights—the parameters the models have learned during training—which make it possible for anyone with the right hardware and expertise to reproduce and modify the models themselves. Within weeks the weights were leaked online, and the company was criticized for potentially putting powerful AI models in the hands of nefarious actors, such as hackers and scammers. But since then, the company has doubled down on open-source AI by releasing the weights of its next-generation Llama 2 models without any restrictions.”