Why is FB doing this. I am so perplexed. Like, I am still waiting for the "gotcha!". Purely to mess with MS?
That alone is worth gold because tech is not a blue ocean anymore - neither from a market opportunity nor from an investor perspective. Your enemies loss is your benefit. They can’t use money they don’t make to mount attacks to dislodge customers, investors, mindshare from you.
Secondly it commoditizes AI. Zuck believes that his platforms ultimately will benefit if there is more content. Because his platforms sell the ability to show YOUR content over the rest, for coin. Just as with news/mobile games, driving the value of your content lower and lower by fostering the creation/supply of more of it is good for FB and bad for you. You have to advertise to rise above the noise. (And no it doesn’t really “affect users”) because they see the same amount of content (attention is finite), it’s entirely FBs discretion across all their surfaces what you see.
Disclosure: Ex FB but not specific insights into current developments.
(context: I work for Google DeepMind, opinions are my own)
There's definitely some convergence. It's good. It still stands for a fact that most people do/think about PyTorch nowadays, not JAX (speaking as someone who likes JAX).
This is actually an excellent demonstration of a good reason to open source something. Another company immediately made a dramatic improvement.
Now anyone from Facebook or any companies they have invested in can benefit from that improvement and information about how they did it. Facebook could even take this exact model and add a coding assistant into Messenger if they wanted (not that they are interested in that). Or apply it to other things.
OpenAI has a big lead. The most effective counter to that is actually to team up.
So in the future we're probably not going to see any single centralized player, but rather a wide decentralization with many options. It seems in this future, providing a 'decentralization ready' to go package that people can use and deploy for all sorts of things is far smarter than blowing through billions of dollars (and goodwill) desperately trying to become a centralized behemoth when you have no moat, no network effect, and perhaps a temporary technical advantage at best.
And while OpenAI has blown through a bunch of good will going from Open-ForSociety-AI to Closed-ForProfit-AI, Facebook has simultaneously gained a bunch of good will. What this translates to is really difficult to even imagine, but it's certainly desirable. And really I think this intangible of good will is something many modern corporations don't give enough value to, and it's hurting them - catching more flies with honey than vinegar, and all that.
Unlikely as Microsoft is the preferred partner for Llama 2 [2]. It's not clear what Meta's end goal is, but large companies can loss lead investments to grab mind share then worry about Business models later, an approach which seems to be working well [2] where Meta went from not being in the leading AI companies conversation to being the company behind the models that most OSS innovation is happening around.
At the very least they've already created a strong brand around Llama whose eyes are watching their every release - which is invaluable reach that other companies could ever hope to dream of, making it easy to promote and gain instant traction for new Llama based products (like this).
They release of ton of AI stuff themselves and partner on things like this. They're also big backers/investors in OpenAI and their own proprietary products, of course.
I think they're taking that lesson and hedging their bets this time. It's like how a lot of corporations will donate to both political candidates (in the US) to guarantee they'll have access/influence regardless of how things shake out.
We should expect more FAANG-sized companied to do this, frankly. It's surprising to see people antipate a 'gotcha' considering how influental and transparent Pytorch was.
Not just for the engineer-hours, but for the endless VP/PM political meetings arguing over this approach or that.
Way cheaper to let the market decide, and then reincorporate the winner into their products. A winner which happens to already be based on a semi-compatible tech stack.
I didn't like them that much before, now I do.
Apt choice of word