Underdog switches Bark 3.0’s current weights to a noncommercial license
A November 5 repository revision replaces the earlier CC BY 4.0 declaration with CC BY-NC 4.0. The main 163 MB weight file retains the same recorded hash.
Underdog’s compact Bark 3.0 speech-recognition model now carries a noncommercial license on its current Hugging Face revision. A November 5 commit changes the model card from CC BY 4.0 to CC BY-NC 4.0 and adds a root license file. The updated notice directs commercial-use inquiries to license@conway.tech.
The change is concrete enough to separate from the usual stream of model-card updates. AITrending compared the pinned October 15 and November 5 revisions: the earlier card explicitly said “Licence CC-BY-4.0, same as the original,” while the new card names CC BY-NC 4.0. Hugging Face’s file records give the main model.bark download the same SHA-256 and 163,398,645-byte size in both revisions. This is a change to the current distribution’s stated terms, rather than a newly trained checkpoint.
The small download is still the product hook
Bark 3.0 is an English-only, 0.6-billion-parameter speech model derived from NVIDIA’s Parakeet through Moondream’s parakeet-ultra. Its card reports a 4.94% average word error rate across seven English test sets and describes local MLX and PyTorch routes. Those are existing author-reported results, not a new evaluation accompanying the license commit or an independently reproduced AITrending score. The card says the Bark rows have not yet been submitted to the cited leaderboard.
The 163 MB figure measures the packed download. The Windows loader expands weights to FP32 in memory, so it does not establish a 163 MB runtime memory requirement. The documented Windows CUDA route requires NVIDIA hardware; Apple Silicon has separate MLX and Core ML options, with their own limits.
What the notice says about upstream material
The updated attribution notice keeps NVIDIA and Moondream’s upstream components under CC BY 4.0 and describes Conway’s repository weights as CC BY-NC 4.0. It distinguishes the derived weights from the inherited architecture, tokenizer and feature-extractor configuration.
The reviewed revision does not explain a business rationale or settle the treatment of copies obtained under the earlier declaration. This report does not establish that earlier permissions have been retroactively revoked. For developers evaluating the current download, the immediate change is the explicitly noncommercial terms and the separate commercial-license contact.
