Mark Zuckerberg wants to say Llama is open source. It’s not. Don’t let him.
Open source is a long-storied term that goes back to before the Internet. Don’t get me wrong—it’s nice of him to share the model file. I appreciate that, especially for my home LLM setup. But it doesn’t deserve the “open source” label.
Let me put it this way: Say I gave you a car. Nice gesture, right? Now imagine I also claimed I fucked your partner. That’s not part of the deal. Just because I gave you a car doesn’t mean I get to make wild, unrelated claims.
The GPL dates back to 1989, born from Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. It reflects core values. Copyleft is the ethos: if you use free software, you must share your changes under the same terms. Later versions patched loopholes, but the spirit remained—freedom through openness.
So what does that mean today, three decades later, with the Internet built on open source code?
The thing about source code is that we can read it. Understand what it’s doing. When you’re trying to create a new username and it’s rejected, it’s not because the computer hates you. The computer’s just executing instructions. If the code says “no usernames shorter than 8 characters,” that’s fair. We can read that. But if we can’t see the code? Then who knows? Maybe someone hardcoded a list of disallowed names, and yours is on it. That’s not a joke.
Transparency matters.
With something like GIM-Paint, you can go into the source, see what it’s doing, change it if you don’t like it, and build your own version. That’s freedom. That’s open source.
LLMs are different.
I’ve got access to a supercomputer that could rebuild Llama—if I had the source. I don’t. It’s not just the weights. It’s the training data. The scripts. The intent. And most folks don’t even have the compute to try.
Why do I want the source? Yeah, I’m curious. I like understanding things. That’s my dopamine button. But more than that: I want to see its alignment.
I want to see why it won’t tell me how to make cocaine. Not because I plan to—but because I want to know what other things it refuses to say. It won’t give me a pipe bomb recipe, fine. But it will tell me my grandma’s favorite cocktail recipe?
In China, brilliant engineers built DeepSeek on top of Llama. It won’t talk about Tiananmen Square. What else won’t it talk about? COVID? LGBTQ issues? Uyghur genocide?
If I can’t inspect it, I can’t know.
That’s why “open source” matters. If you don’t give me the source, I can’t see how it works. I can’t trust what it’s been told to do. And I definitely can’t tell if it’s hiding something.
So call it what it is: model-available. But don’t steal the term “open source” just because it sounds better. We know the difference.