Text Generation
Transformers
Safetensors
falcon
text-generation-inference

What are the key differences between "Falcon-180B TII license" and Apache 2.0 License?

#2
by wrh00 - opened

Congrats on this huge release. Nontheless, would appreciate a high-level clarification of what the modified license means and what motivated it.

Am I wrong to assume the wording of the license essentially implies they can change their acceptable use policy any time they want and effectively nullify your previous license? I thought maybe I was imagining things so I asked GPT-4 and this is what it said:

The text you provided from the "FALCON 180B TII LICENSE VERSION 1.0" does indicate flexibility for the Licensor (TII) to update their Acceptable Use Policy. The relevant sections in question are:

    Acceptable Use
    5.1. Subject to Section 5.3, your use of the Work or any Derivative Work must comply with the Acceptable Use Policy at all times.
    5.3. The Acceptable Use Policy may be updated from time to time. You should monitor the web address at which the Acceptable Use Policy is hosted to ensure that your use of the Work or any Derivative Work complies with the updated Acceptable Use Policy.

The above clauses indicate that:

Users must always comply with the current Acceptable Use Policy when using the Work or any Derivative Work.
The Acceptable Use Policy can be updated by the Licensor without explicitly notifying users.
It's the user's responsibility to periodically check for changes in the Acceptable Use Policy and adjust their usage accordingly.

While the license does not explicitly state that a change in the Acceptable Use Policy could retroactively nullify a user's license, the implication is that any changes to the policy could affect the user's compliance status. If a user is found non-compliant with the updated policy, there might be grounds for the Licensor to claim breach of the license.

So how is that not basically not the same thing as saying "We can take away your license to the software for any arbitrary reason at any time with zero explanation or warning"? Because it almost sounds like that's what it's saying. Maybe TII will revert and add back in that part about giving a percentage of profits as royalties once people get nice and comfortable with the model. That would be a smart business strategy.

Hence, UAE. The oil capital doing leftist AI.

I mean, to use 180B parameters to barely beat llama2 70B by a few percentage points is not exactly great of a value proposition, especially 4bit quantization already requires 320GB of vram to inference. Who's going to use 4x A100 80GB SXMs to inference this crap when llama2 70B q4_K_M is 42GB (you can run on a single RTX6000 Ada 48GB)

The main difference is that the Apache 2.0 license is an open source license, while the Falcon-180B TII license is a custom proprietary EULA.

leftist AI.

There is nothing leftist, or right-wing, about this.
If this had anything to do with left/right, it would follow that FLOSS licenses are right-wing, which they are not. In fact, many in the FLOSS community are pretty left-wing.

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