In a blog post last July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “selling access” to Meta’s openly available llama ai models “isn’t it.” [Meta’s] Business model. ” However, according to a new, unedited court filing, Meta is making at least some money from Llamas through revenue sharing agreements.
The filing filed by the lawyer for the plaintiff in the copyright lawsuit was Kadreyv. It is Meta, and Meta has been accused of training llama models with hundreds of terabytes of pirated e-books, revealing that Meta is “sharing a percentage of revenue.”
The filing does not indicate which particular hosts pay. However, Meta lists many Llama host partners in various blog posts, including AWS, Nvidia, Databricks, Groq, Dell, Azure, Google Cloud, Snowflake, and more.
Developers do not need to use the llama model via their host partner. The model can be downloaded, tweaked and run on a range of hardware. However, many hosts offer additional services and tools, making the Llama model simpler and easier to run.
Zuckerberg mentioned the possibility of licenseing access to the Llama model during a revenue call last April. He monetized Llama in other ways, including ads for “AI Interactions.” However, he did not outline the details.
“[I]You’re like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and you’re basically going to resell these services. That’s what I think we should get a portion of the revenue,” Zuckerberg said.
More recently, Zuckerberg argued that most of the value meta derived from Llama is in the form of improvements to the AI research community model. Meta uses Llama Models to drive numerous products across platforms and properties, including Meta AI assistant Meta AI.
“I think it’s a good business to do this in an open way,” Zuckerberg said in Meta’s third quarter 2024 revenue call. “[I]T is not only building models that no one in the industry has standardized, but also makes the product even better than if they were on an island. ”
The fact that Meta could potentially make revenue in a rather direct way from the llama is important. This is because the plaintiffs in Cadrey v. Meta argue that Meta not only developed llamas using pirated works, but also promoted infringement by “seeding” or uploading. The plaintiffs allege that Meta used secret torrenting methods to obtain the e-book for training, and in the process, they shared the e-book with other torrenters through the torrenting mechanism.
Meta plans to significantly increase its capital expenditure this year thanks to increased investment in AI. In January, the company said it would spend between $60 billion and $80 billion (about twice the meta CAPEX in 2025) on CAPEX in 2025, expanding its AI development team.
As it is likely to offset some of the costs, Meta is reportedly considering launching Meta AI subscription services that add unspecified functionality to the assistant.
Updated 3/21 at 1:54pm: Meta spokesman has directed TechCrunch into additional context for this revenue call transcript. I added a quote from Zuckerberg from there. In particular, it is a quote about meta’s intentions for revenue share with large hosts in the Llama model.
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