- 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. (See commoditize your complements)
- Thirdly it reinforces the investor narrative that the company has a future because AI. That's important, because by now consensus is that ads future is under pressure of market saturation, regulation, competition (Apple's ability to hurt Meta at will, Amazon's increasing ads monetisation, etc.). There's more than one company that needs that narrative to land, but combined with hurting google, this is pretty good for a company that didn't have a generative AI strategy and was betting on the metaverse a year ago.
- Fourth, it captures open source momentum behind your limited internal efforts. Llama, when it was first released, was not competitive - easily a year behind Google's and more behind OpenAI's efforts - but by being first to capture thousands of capable contributors, just a few months later it is one of the most efficient and scalable LLM systems out there and incorporating many innovations days after their paper releases. Open models alone, without their foundational model, would have tugged along for a while before reaching this state.
What's fascinating about this situation is how it shuffles the big tech positioning. Meta and Apple, purely on a personal leadership bases, are hating each other's guts, but both Apple and Meta need Google/OpenAI to fail, for different reasons