This Falcon-40B royalty free license may force Meta ... that LLama-7B/13B may soon be fully open sourced as Meta wants open source LLM advancements and contributions on its own LLM architecture.
There's no advantage here. Meta just spent $10 million on releasing fun chaos into the world and increasing their recruiting power.
ChatGPT was the fastest growing app in history, leaders at Meta (The ones who do M&A, strategy, etc) probably raised an eyebrow. They don't really give a crap about some stupid talking chatbot, but OpenAI getting smart and building a Social Network around millions of brand new users could be an existential problem for them. When Lecun wanted to OSS it they were probably like, sure, we can kill a few birds with one stone. If LLMs are a commodity that stops OpenAI and Google before they even get off the ground.
I believe it's more to make sure that others also continue to share their research.
Or also a general genuine good mindset of people involved in those groups.
They aren't looking to create a technological edge themselves, they want to remove the edge that OpenAI has so that they can win using their user count/brand recognition/etc.
Maybe I am cynical, but I dont see the incentive for Meta to contribute an open model.