What's the monetization model here? Is this a closed-source version of their open-source model? (That's suggested by the phrase in the article, "a commercial version of LLaMA, its open-source large language model".)
It seems like the existing large platforms of today—Microsoft’s enterprise moat, Google’s ads and internet services, Meta’s social networks, Apple’s consumer and mobile products—will remain the primary platforms of the future. So having models that can operate exclusively on those platforms via integration to their key products and date will only continue this trend. If you’re an outsider with an AI model, you’ll have a harder time getting access to critical data and your standalone AI product (e.g., ChatGPT) won’t be as useful.
More broadly speaking, I believe the days where the top X largest companies in the stock company would be displaced by newer companies every decade or so is over. The FAANGs just control so many major platforms in so many aspects of our lives.
It also helps that they buy or otherwise cooperate to destroy their competition in questionable ways while heavily lobbying the gov to favor them over others in a quid-pro-quo that benefits politicians and not their constituents.
I disagree: I think big tech is hard to disrupt ATM because the companies are still young and nimble. In the last cycle, the companies being displaced were ancient (by tech standards). When Google and Facebook are 30 years old, their DNA will get in the way of adopting to a new paradigm that will change the world. A paradigm that may be to the Metaverse what the smartphone was to the Apple Newton
Maybe that's Meta's play here? Maybe the idea is that the ecosystem around a model could be as valuable or more valuable than the model itself too, so an OSS model could benefit Meta a lot more by gaining more of the ecosystem mind share?
Or Maybe Yann LeCun is just a hippie that dreams of free love, hard drugs and open-source models?
They might have done well to make gg an offer he couldn't refuse and take on ggml and llama.cpp as an open source project.
Facebook benefits heavily from the open source development done on LLaMA. There was a report I saw that facebook has started using llama.cpp internally for inference. Updates to the licensing will cement facebook as the go to choice for open source language models.
My hypothesis based on the context of Mark discussing the release is that it's going to be completely open source and can licensed to be used commercially. Not that Meta is going to add a whole new revenue side of business to compete with OpenAI. i.e. "Here is model, with commercially permissive licensing" not "Here is model that you can use commercially but must pay me"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4fRgnuFgQ&ab_channel=LexFr...
They can even write it as 'good will' on their financial statements.
It kind of is working.
It might feel like "brand rehab" or "good will" as a consumer, but a lot of this work was put in motion a while ago.
This seems they will release the weights under some license that allows commercial usage.
How they monetise it (which I assume they will try and do?) is an interesting question.
Maybe some variant of paying a licencing fee?
There doesn't necessarily have to be one. Facebook's goal may be to help commoditize its complements. https://gwern.net/complement