Comment by noiseinvacuum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noiseinvacuum | Hacker News Reader

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He went into the details of how he thinks about open sourcing weights for Llama responding to a question from an analyst in one of the earnings call last year after Llama release. I had made a post on Reddit with some details.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/s/GK57eB2qiz

Some noteworthy quotes that signal the thought process at Meta FAIR and more broadly

* We’re just playing a different game on the infrastructure than companies like Google or Microsoft or Amazon

* We would aspire to and hope to make even more open than that. So, we’ll need to figure out a way to do that.

* ...lead us to do more work in terms of open sourcing, some of the lower level models and tools

* Open sourcing low level tools make the way we run all this infrastructure more efficient over time.

* On PyTorch: It’s generally been very valuable for us to provide that because now all of the best developers across the industry are using tools that we’re also using internally.

* I would expect us to be pushing and helping to build out an open ecosystem.

"different game"

But what game? What is the AI play that makes giving it away a win for meta?

Weaken the competition (google and ms). Bing doesn’t exist because it’s a big money maker for ms, it exists to put a dent in google’s power. Android vs apple. If you can’t win then you try to make the others lose.

A lot of the other companies are selling AI as a service. Meta hasn't really been in the space of selling a raw service in that way. However, they are at a center point of human interaction that few can match. In this space, it is how they can leverage those models to enhance that and make that experience better that can be where they win. (Think of, for example, giving a summery of what you've missed in your groups, letting you join more and still know what's happening without needing to shift through it all, identifying events and activities happening that you'd be interested in. This will make it easier to join more groups as the cost of being in one is less, driving more engagement).

For facebook, it isn't the technology, but how it is applied, is where their game starts to get interesting.

When you give away the tooling and treat it as first class, you'll get the wider community improving it on top of your own efforts, cycle that back into the application of it internally and you now have a positive feedback loop where other, less open models, lack one.

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