The Llama models have played a large part in fostering the development of the open source LLM ecosystem, and I expect Llama3 to put in performance > mistral medium and anthropic haiku while being fully open and able to be run on consumer hardware.

The angle is that by releasing cutting edge AI research to the public openly, the relative difference between open source models/tech and closed source tech shrinks.

Whether or not you think the "value" of AI products is proportional to their performance gap vs the next closest thing or not is up to you. Very interesting PG essay I read recently talks about the opposite of this (Superlinear returns) where if you're half as good as the next competitor, you don't get half the customers, you get 0.

Essay: https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html

Mistral makes comparable models to Facebook. Mistral charges money, Facebook does not. This negatively affect’s Mistral’s pricing power because a customer can get 70% of the performance they need for 0% of the cost.

The “0% of the cost” part is unique to software businesses because you can copy software so cheaply

It's called commoditize the compliment.

If they make AI models free to use it makes OpenAI nearly valueless, which means that they can't survive and then sell Meta's competitors a better GenAI product than Meta can make themselves.

So basically since they don't make money directly on GenAI, it makes sense for them to release it for free so no one else can have something better, so they don't have to compete on GenAI abilities with their competitors.

It's a term used for making a certain type of business unviable. In this case, high quality open models will make closed source models less viable, since the closed source model providers won't be able to charge monopoly prices for their models, but will have to approach the price of cloud GPU time or lose customers to equally capable open models.