The explosion of SLMs and license confusion

The rapid growth in Small Language Models (SLMs) has led to an increase in confusion around model licensing. While open-weight models allow access to the weights of neural networks, they often come with restrictions on modification, distribution, and commercial use. This is different from truly open-source models that permit free usage, modification, and distribution for any purpose. The Hugging Face platform hosts 784,000 open-weight models, but only 25% of them are open-source due to license confusion. Companies must pay attention to licensing when generating synthetic data with these models to ensure data ownership is respected.