The pace of AI development is moving at breakneck speed. And as Meta showed this week with the commercial release of its second-generation, open-source-ish Llama model, the competitive landscape is being constantly redrawn.

I’ve spent the past few days reading reactions to the news and talking to people in the AI field. Many believe that Llama 2 is the industry’s most important release since ChatGPT last November, though it obviously won’t generate as much press buzz as a developer-facing release. Companies will now be able to more easily and cheaply build bespoke bots with proprietary data that would never be accessible externally, like the internal AI bot that Stripe recently rolled out for its employees. This will make AI chatbots of all kinds more useful and personalized, which is an exciting step in the right direction.

But as always, and especially with the new release by Meta, the devil is in the details. Llama 2 may be the most freely accessible model of its caliber. But its licensing restrictions mean that it’s not technically “open source,” even if Meta wants the world to believe it is.