Perhaps for now, but I wouldn't count on there always being a Meta spending $$$ to train enormous models and then giving them away for free. What's the long-term game plan for open-source models when the corporate charity inevitably dries up?
If your product is a social graph w/ ads (Meta), you can.
It's hardly corporate charity:
* Meta releasing these models creates an improvement and tuning ecosystem around it, giving them access to tons of free developer time.
* It's also a strong recruiting tool, for engineers and researchers frustrated by, e.g., Google and OpenAI becoming increasingly closed. They know they can publish at Meta.
* The cost is insignificant. Meta had 30B in revenue just in Q2 2023.
Despite Meta being very similar to Google in terms of incentives, and Google nowadays being decidedly uncool. Doesn't hurt that Mark shipped something worth a damn whereas Google has been floundering for ages.
There's a whole history of recent machine-learning development where both Google and Facebook have worked together and against each other to push things forward. I think it's entirely mistaken to characterize Google as the understudy when in many ways it's the other way around.
At the end of the day though I use Llama and I use GPT4 and I don't use Bard. Google has an amazing legacy around AI but it really hasn't been performing in the last couple of years. I can imagine they'll have a comeback, but one does wonder if Google has lost their mojo.
You can't offer it for free, unless you make money in another way.
Anecdotally it seems like older demographics are the prime target of the current wave of AI engagement farming on Facebook, because they just don't understand that this technology exists now and assume that all of the "photos" they're seeing are real.
Once open models reach and stay at near parity for a while, it’ll make sense for commercial downstream users to support open source community efforts rather than building their own, same as has happened in many other categories of key infrastructure software.
idk
I suppose if there's any consolation for the open-source AI community it's that Meta has demonstrated a willingness to burn a lot of money for unclear benefit, they're still single-handedly keeping the VR industry on life support at the expense of about $4 billion per quarter. A decade on from acquiring Oculus and no closer to making it profitable, if Metas AI efforts get the same treatment then the free models will probably keep coming for a while.
IIRC,
- Having a better model is a competitive advantage in fighting against spam - Better models enables facebook itself to understand their code vulnerabilities, better employee productivity etc. - Being in the frontier of open source, keeps them at an advantage in terms of updates from community
They’re highly incentivized to expand the options for generating content. OpenAI and Anthropic have to make money from the generation, which raises the barrier to creation. Meta can say fuck it, let everyone create and well sell ads against what they create.