Supply-chain attacks in LLMs

So far, we assumed the use of SaaS-hosted proprietary pre-trained models accessed via their API. This was the main setting at the beginning of the LLM explosion in 2023, and vendors such as Anthropic, Google, and especially OpenAI have dominated the scene.

However, this has changed, and there has been an explosive growth of open-access models.

Note

Open access refers to the ability to download and use or redistribute a model. In many articles and discussions, the term open source models is used. However, since no source code has been released, the term open access is more appropriate.

A variant of open-access models is open-weight models, where the models’ weights are publicly available for research, development, and application purposes. These models are open because the community can access, use, modify, and distribute the model weights without restrictive licenses.

In addition to Meta’s Llama, the first open-access LLM, new...