LW - Llama Llama-3-405B? by Zvi

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Llama Llama-3-405B?, published by Zvi on July 25, 2024 on LessWrong.
It's here. The horse has left the barn. Llama-3.1-405B, and also Llama-3.1-70B and Llama-3.1-8B, have been released, and are now open weights.
Early indications are that these are very good models. They were likely the best open weight models of their respective sizes at time of release.
Zuckerberg claims that open weights models are now competitive with closed models. Yann LeCun says 'performance is on par with the best closed models.' This is closer to true than in the past, and as corporate hype I will essentially allow it, but it looks like this is not yet fully true.
Llama-3.1-405B not as good as GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet. Certainly Llama-3.1-70B is not as good as the similarly sized Claude Sonnet. If you are going to straight up use an API or chat interface, there seems to be little reason to use Llama.
That is a preliminary result. It is still early, and there has been relatively little feedback. But what feedback I have seen is consistent on this.
Prediction markets are modestly more optimistic. This market still has it 29% to be the #1 model on Arena, which seems unlikely given Meta's own results. Another market has it 74% to beat GPT-4-Turbo-2024-04-09, which currently is in 5th position. That is a big chance for it to land in a narrow window between 1257 and 1287. This market affirms that directly on tiny volume.
Such open models like Llama-3.1-405B are of course still useful even if a chatbot user would have better options. There are cost advantages, privacy advantages and freedom of action advantages to not going through OpenAI or Anthropic or Google.
In particular, if you want to distill or fine-tune a new model, and especially if you want to fully own the results, Llama-3-405B is here to help you, and Llama-3-70B and 8B are here as potential jumping off points. I expect this to be the main practical effect this time around.
If you want to do other things that you can't do with the closed options? Well, technically you can't do most of them under Meta's conditions either, but there is no reason to expect that will stop people, especially those overseas including in China. For some of these uses that's a good thing. Others, not as good.
Zuckerberg also used the moment to offer a standard issue open source manifesto, in which he abandons any sense of balance and goes all-in, which he affirmed in a softball interview with Rowan Cheung.
On the safety front, while I do not think they did their safety testing in a way that would have caught issues if there had been issues, my assumption is there was nothing to catch. The capabilities are not that dangerous at this time.
Thus I do not predict anything especially bad will happen here. I expect the direct impact of Llama-3.1-405B to be positive, with the downsides remaining mundane and relatively minor. The only exception would be the extent to which this enables the development of future models. I worry that this differentially accelerates and enables our rivals and enemies and hurts our national security, and indeed that this will be its largest impact.
And I worry more that this kind of action and rhetoric will lead us down the path where if things get dangerous in the future, it will become increasingly hard not to get ourselves into deep trouble, both in terms of models being irrevocably opened up when they shouldn't be and increasing pressure on everyone else to proceed even when things are not safe, up to and including loss of control and other existential risks.
If Zuckerberg had affirmed a reasonable policy going forward but thought the line could be drawn farther down the line, I would have said this was all net good. Instead, I am dismayed.
I do get into the arguments about open weights at the end of this post, because it felt obligato...