Meta has revenue sharing agreements with Llama AI model hosts, filing reveals

In a blog post last July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “selling access” to Meta’s openly available Llama AI models “isn’t [Meta’s] business model.” Yet Meta does make at least some money from Llama through revenue-sharing agreements, according to a newly unredacted court filing. The filing, submitted by attorneys for the plaintiffs in the copyright lawsuit Kadrey v. Meta, in which Meta stands accused of training its Llama models on hundreds of terabytes of pirated ebooks, reveals that Meta “shares a percentage of the revenue” that companies hosting its Llama models generate from users of those models. The filing doesn’t reveal which specific hosts pay Meta. But Meta lists a number of Llama host partners in various blog posts, including AWS, Nvidia, Databricks, Groq, Dell, Azure, Google Cloud, and Snowflake. Developers aren’t required to use a Llama model through a host partner. The models can be downloaded, fine-tuned, and run on a range of different hardware. But many hosts p ... Read full article.