Don't have a dog in this fight, haven't done enough research to proclaim any LLM provider as ethical but I pretty much know the reason Meta has an open source model isn't because they're good guys.
That's probably why you don't get it, then. Facebook was the primary contributor behind Pytorch, which basically set the stage for early GPT implementations.
For all the issues you might have with Meta's social media, Facebook AI Research Labs have an excellent reputation in the industry and contributed greatly to where we are now. Same goes for Google Brain/DeepMind despite their Google's advertisement monopoly; things aren't ethically black-and-white.
Say I'm your neighbor and I make a move on your wife, your wife tells you this. Now I'm hosting a BBQ which is free for all to come, everyone in the neighborhood cheers for me. A neighbor praises me for helping him fix his car.
Someone asks you if you're coming to the BBQ, you say to him nah.. you don't like me. They go, 'WHAT? jack_pp? He rescues dogs and helped fix my roof! How can you not like him?'
As far as these model releases, I believe the term is “open weights”.
We may not have the full logic introspection capabilities, the ease of modification (though you can still do some, like fine-tuning), and reproducibility that full source code offers, but open weight models bear more than a passing resemblance to the spirit of open source, even though they're not completely true to form.
With fully open source software (say under GPL3), you can theoretically change anything & you are also quite sure about the provenience of the thing.
With an open weights model you can run it, that is good - but the amount of stuff you can change is limited. It is also a big black box that could possibly hide some surprises from who ever created it that could be possibly triggered later by input.
And lastly, you don't really know what the open weight model was trained on, which can again reflect on its output, not to mention potential liabilities later on if the authors were really care free about their training set.
I would only use it for certain things, and I guess others are finding that useful too.
