Can someone explain Meta's strategy with the open source models here? Genuine question, I don't fully undestand.
(Please don't say "commoditize your complement" without explaining what exactly they're commoditizing...)
(Please don't say "commoditize your complement" without explaining what exactly they're commoditizing...)
If Meta can help prevent there from being an AI monopoly company, but rather an ecosystem of comparable products, then they avoid having another threatening tech giant competitor, as well as preventing their own AI work and products from being devalued.
Think of it like Google releasing a web browser.
It's akin to a Great Filter, if such an analogy helps. If Meta's open models make a company's closed models uneconomical for others to consume, then the business case for those models is compromised and the odds of them growing to a size where they can compete with Meta in other ways is mitigated a bit.
On the advertiser side, they're commoditizing the ability for companies to write more persuasively-targeted ads. Higher click-through rates = more money.
[edit]: For models that generate code instead of content (TFA), it's obviously a different story. I don't have a good grip on that story, beyond "they're using their otherwise-idle GPU farms to buy goodwill and innovate on training methods".
They've gained an incredible amount of influence and mindshare.
They get free R&D and suppress competition, while looking like they have principles. Yann is clueless about open source principles, or the models would have been Apache or some other comparably open license. It's all ruthless corporate strategy, regardless of the mouth noises coming out of various meta employees.
Just because certain entities can't profitably use a product or obtain a license doesn't make it not-open. AGPL is open, for an extreme example.
This argument is also subjective, and not new - "Which is more open BSD-style licenses or GPL?" has ben a guaranteed flameware starter for decades.
It's shitty when other companies do it. It's shitty when Broadcom does it. It's shitty when Meta does it.
It's never a not shitty thing to do.
But sure, sounds more reasonable
For shareholders, this subpar performance has destroyed value. Disney stock has underperformed the stocks
of Disney’s self-selected proxy peers and the broader market over every relevant period during the last
decade and during the tenure of each non-management director. Furthermore, it has underperformed since
Bob Iger was first appointed CEO in 2005 – a period during which he has served as CEO or Executive
Chairman (directing the Company’s creative endeavors in this role) for all but 11 months. Disney shareholders
were once over $200 billion wealthier than they are now
https://trianpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Trian-N...
Disney has steamrolled Hollywood for the last decade, bringing in by far the biggest global box office revenue in 7 consecutive years out of 8. They have more billion dollar box office movies than every other studio co mbined. This kind of dominance was unheard of in the history of Hollywood.
Setting box office aside, Disney revenue has tripled since Iger took over and is twice as much as it should be adjusted for inflation.
The idea that the company has underperformed for the last 10 years or that they spend millions "on a whim" is a joke. And using share price as some justification is even more absurd, share price was double what it was today just in 2021.
Did you even read the Triad Partners quote from their letter? It's their words, not mine.
"Earnings per share (“EPS”) in the most recent fiscal year were lower than the EPS generated by Disney a decade ago"
is not the same as "underpeforming for a decade".
all that says is that EPS is currently low, not that it has been low and reducing/stagnant for a decade.
> Disney shareholders were once over $200 billion wealthier than they are now
Is that an exaggeration?
https://filmthreat.com/news/male-and-pale-is-stale-responses...
As a result, the money generated by the industry has seen a
remarkably noticeable drop. The rise of the term “flop buster”
(in response to so many films like Indiana Jones and the
Dial of Destiny underperforming at the box office) seems to
be directly related to mainstream audiences’ wholesale rejection
of the over-messaging they see hijacking entertainment.
Alone, it was unlikely they would become a major player in a field that might be massively important. With a large community building upon their base they have a chance to influence the direction of development and possibly prevent a proprietary monopoly in the hands of another company.
Maybe now their leadership wants to push for practicality so they don't end up like Google (also a research powerhouse but failing to convert to popular advances) so they are publicly pushing strong LLMs.
1. They become an attractive place for AI researchers to work, and can bring in better staff. 2. They make it less appealing for startups to enter the space and build large foundation models (Meta would prefer 1,000 startups pop up and play around with other people's models, than 1000 startups popping up and trying to build better foundational models). 3. They put cost pressure on AI as a service providers. When LLAMA exists it's harder for companies to make a profit just selling access to models. Along with 2 this further limits the possibility of startups entering the foundational model space, because the path to monetization/breakeven is more difficult.
Essentially this puts Meta, Google, and OpenAI/Microsoft (Anthropic/Amazon as a number four maybe) as the only real players in the cutting edge foundational model space. Worst case scenario they maintain their place in the current tech hegemony as newcomers are blocked from competing.
Mistral is right up there.
Hopefully they can prove me wrong though!
Then Ai sprung to the front pages and any CEO who stood up and said "Ai" was rewarded with a 10x stock price. The unloved stepchild that was the ML team became the A team and the metaverse team have been sent to the naughty step. Facebook/Meta have no actual customer facing use for Ai unlike Microsoft/Google/GitHub but they like a good stonk price rise and so what we see is their stategy to stay in the ai game and relevant.
It turns out it is pretty good for the rest of us (possibly the first time facebook has given something positive to humanity) as we get shinny toys to play with.
It costs them nothing to open it up, so why not. Kinda like all the rest of their GitHub repos.
Meta releases model. Joe builds a cool app with it, earns some internet points and if lucky a few hundred bucks. Meta copies app, multiply Joes success story with 1 billion users and earn a few million bucks.
Joe is happy, Meta is happy. Everybody is happy.
Meta sees this as the way to improve their AI offerings faster than others and, eventually, better than others.
Instead of a small group of engineers working on this inside Meta, the Open Source community helps improve it.
They have a history of this with React, PyTorch, hhvm, etc. All these have gotten better as OS projects faster than Meta alone would have been able to do.
Essentially, you mitigate IP claims and reduce vendor dependency.
https://eightify.app/summary/technology-and-software/the-imp...
(My theory: if there's an AI pot of gold, what megacorp can risk one of the others getting to it first?)
Most likely, they work for your competitors. They may not be working to improve your system for free.
> No company can replicate innovation from open source internally.
Lot of innovation does come from companies.
Of course, i am not arguing that. But when it comes to software as general as code generation, or text generation, the possible applications are so broad, that a team of A.I. researchers in a company, however talented and productive they are, cannot possibly optimize it for every possible use case.
That's what Yan Le Cunn is referring to, and i agree with him. There are a lot of companies which push deep learning forward, and do not release their code or weights freely.
(I try to train myself to say it right ..)