Comment by badloginagain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badloginagain | Hacker News Reader

So Microsoft's definition of winning is being the host for AI inference products/services. Startups make useful AI products, MSFT collects tax from them and build ever more data centers.

I haven't thought too critically yet about Meta's strategy here, but I'd like to give it a shot now:

* The release/leak of Llama earlier this year shifted the battleground. Open source junkies took it and started optimizing to a point AI researchers thought impossible. (Or were unincentivized to try)

* That optimization push can be seen as an end-run on a Meta competitor being the ultimate tax authority. Just like getting DOOM to run on a calculator, someone will do the same with LLM inference.

Is Meta's hope here that the open source community will fight their FAANG competitors as some kind of proxy?

I can't see the open source community ever trusting Meta, the FOSS crowd knows how to hold a grudge and Meta is antithetical to their core ideals. They'll still use the stuff Meta releases though.

I just don't see a clear path to:

* How Meta AI strategy makes money for Meta

* How Meta AI strategy funnels devs/customers into its Meta-verse

Meta has an amazing FOSS track record. I'm no fan of their consumer products. But their contributions to open source are great and many.

Now that you mention it I have to agree, they've released a ton of stuff.

Actually biggest complaint is they don't continue supporting it half the time, but they OS a lot of things.

Sounds like the classic commoditize your compliment. Meta benefits from AI capabilities but doesn’t need to hold a monopoly on the tech. They just benefit from advances so they can work with open source community to achieve this.

https://gwern.net/complement

Thanks for the link, interesting.

I just don't see Meta's role-- where is their monopoly in the stack?

MSFT seems to have a much clearer compliment. They own the servers OAI run on. They would loooove for OAI competitors to also run in Azure.

Where does Meta make its money re: AI?

Meta makes $ from ads. Targeted ads for consumers. Is the play more better targeting with AI somehow?

> * How Meta AI strategy makes money for Meta

Tech stocks trade at mad p/e ratios compared to other companies because investors are imagining a future where the company's revenue keeps going up and up.

One of the CEO's many jobs is to ensure investors keep fantasising. There doesn't have to be revenue today, you've just got to be at the forefront of the next big thing.

So I assume the strategy here is basically: Release models -> Lots of buzz in tech circles because unlike google's stuff people can actually use the things -> Investors see Facebook is at the forefront of the hottest current trend -> Stock price goes up.

At the same time, maybe they get a model that's good at content moderation. And maybe it helps them hire the top ML experts, and you can put 60% of them onto maximising ad revenue.

And assuming FB was training the model anyway, and isn't planning to become a cloud services provider selling the model - giving it away doesn't really cost them all that much.

> * How Meta AI strategy funnels devs/customers into its Meta-verse

The metaverse has failed to excite investors, it's dead. But in a great bit of luck for Zuck, something much better has shown up at just the right time - cutting edge ML results.

Remember that Meta had launched a chatbot for summarizing academic journals, including medical research, about two weeks before ChatGPT. They strongly indicated it was an experiment but the critics chewed it up so hard that Meta took it down within a few days.

I think they realized that being a direct competitor to ChatGPT has very low chance of traction, but there are many adjacent fields worth pursuing. Think whatever you will about the business, hey my account has been abandoned for years, but there are still many intelligent and motivated people working there.

Does their goal in this specific venture have to be making money or funneling devs directly into the Meta-verse?

Meta makes a lot of money already and seems to be working on multiple moonshot projects as well.

As you mentioned the FOSS crowd knows how to hold a grudge. Could this be an attempt to win back that crowd and shift public opinion on Meta?

There is a non-zero chance that Llama is a brand rehabilitation campaign at the core.

The proxy war element could just be icing on the cake.

Seriously, what is Meta's strategy here?

LLMs will be important for Meta's AR/VR tech.

So perhaps they are using open source crowd to perfect their LLM tech?

They have all the data they need to train the LLM on, and hardware capacity to spare.

So perhaps this is their first foray into selling LLM as a PaaS?

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