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alexeldeib

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/07/18/microsoft-and-me...

I think this is effectively an Apple + Amazon + Google ban?

(MS employee, just noticing interesting intersection of announcements and licensing).

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Probably TikTok too

Interesting, so Meta doesn't want to pay for the hardware and they partner with MS to use Azure. On the other hand, MS provides hardware for free, hoping they consolidate their investment in AI.

Firefox can't ship a AI-browser extension without permission..

Firefox's market share is below 8.75%, so it cannot have 700 million monthly active users as of the Llama 2 release date, so it does not need permission.

(Human population / 700 million ≈ 8.75%. Firefox global market share, I've seen measurements reported from 2.81% to 7.69%).

Wow, that looks so bad from an anti-trust/competitiveness standpoint. M$ is embracing AI just like it embraced the internet 25 years ago.

Yeah and look how they extended and extinguished that!

To be fair on that, both the US and EU governments launched antitrust cases around that with the US case narrowly avoiding having the company split up and the EU ruling resulting in requirements the browser be decoupled, followed by half a billion in fines for not doing so well enough.

Not that the two situations are anything alike, but a "and look what happened with that" argument hardly points away from valid antitrust outcomes.

I think you and parent/GP all agree? A thing can be anti competitive, and a strategic failure.

If that's what the parent and GP are saying then we definitely don't agree. In my mind, it was anticompetitive and a rousing success. Microsoft managed to fully execute the extend and extinguish phases to then hold a stranglehold on the web for roughly a decade at a cost of less than a billion dollars. Anticompetitive measures kept it from being worse, but it was far from a bad outcome for Microsoft either.

I mean, they dominated internet browsers by being the default option until they sucked at it so hard people downloaded alternatives.

I’m not sure you want to invite the comparison.

How? Both Meta and Microsoft basically invented the idea of an AI runtime with PyTorch and later the ONNX framework, both of which are completely open projects that can run open models. If them join-releasing a model rings antitrust bells for you, I think you're focused on the wrong gatekeepers.

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