Comment by lolinder

AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.

Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.

The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.